The Beginning of the End 

The reason we hope for a Mayan apocalypse—or any pre-ordained disaster—is that it gives us an excuse to believe in a sensical order, gleaned, if not by us, at least by our betters. It is an excuse to believe in our betters.

Homesteading 

There was a psych study: people were asked if they would be interested in receiving a surgical procedure that would guarantee to make them happy—but would require removal of whole sections of the frontal lobe of their brain, the exact parts of the brain that made them them. So, they would wake up from the procedure blissful and worry-free, but with no memories or sense of who they once were. 

Not a single person agreed to participate.

To a person, everyone preferred to stay their same miserable unique self to being a happy person without an identity. 

There is a maxim in law known as the "Homestead Principle," adopted from Locke, which says that we fairly begin to own a thing as soon as we have "mixed our labour" with it, and I figure it applies to our identity as well, because identity isn't found or discovered so much as it's earned, appropriated through laborious collecting, staking, branding, herding, tilling, and maintaining. And wherever we choose to put our work, this becomes a part of our identity, because underneath every endeavor is this question: "Who am I?" (and underneath writing most of all).

Outage 

The power's been out on my block for about an hour now. I knew immediately when it happened, even though it's daytime and there weren't any lights turned on in the house, because of an ominous pop from somewhere down the road, followed by an uncanny quiet, as all of the house's little motors and fans came to a sudden stop. These things are like a kind of heartbeat, a kind of breathing, and when they stopped, it was as if the air in the house hung suddenly still where it was: no pulse.

It hasn't occurred to me to call the electric company, because I assume someone else on the block will have done it by now—but then I wonder, how long would we all sit here in the quiet, in the dark, waiting for the others to call? How much direct inconvenience would I need before I reported the situation to the someone who might be able to resolve it? And, is this what it was like in Nazi Germany—a community of otherwise good people, sitting in the dark, lighting candles, writing in their journals about what's wrong with the world, and doing nothing?

The Subway 

After I died, I went to a bardo that looked like a subway car, filled with many of the people I'd known and loved during my life. Whenever the subway came to a stop, one or two people stood up, shuffled to the door, and exited the train.

I noticed my dog was underneath my seat. He got excited to see me, wagging his tail and nuzzling me with his nose. But as the train slowed to its next stop, the man sitting next to me, a stranger, got up to leave, and he was holding the leash of my dog in his hand.

I understood now, my dog would be going with this other man.

When the doors opened, the two of them made their way off the train. My dog looked back at me, and I said, "I'll see you around," though I knew I wouldn't, because once we get off the train, we begin our new lives, and leave the old ones behind.

This So-Called Universe 

Every now and then, I read an article about how our lives, the world we live in, the sum total of our experiences and feelings and thoughts, everything we consider real, are actually a complicated computer simulation, and it's not just likely that this is so, but it's actually likely that it must be so.

This sounds about right to me.

There are several arguments advanced in favor of this view of things, though I don't remember any of them too well. One is statistical. As soon as it's possible for a computer to simulate a universe (and, according to Moore's law, it will be possible, very soon), then there can be a lot of simulated universes. Before long, even the simulated universes will develop the computing power to simulate a universe, and over time, the number of possible simulated universes approaches infinity; whereas no matter how much time passes, there will still be only one real universe — so the odds that you are in a simulated one are almost infinitely higher than the odds that you are in a real one.

Another argument I remember is that when you zoom in very closely to an object, say, using an electron microscope, the object pixelates, the same way an image would on a computer screen. It's as if reality doesn't have enough memory to be able to render the object any more exactly: reality runs out of RAM. I don't have an electron microscope to verify this, but I suppose the difference between the word "pixel" and the word "atom" is really semantic.

A third argument relies on quantum mechanics, so I understand it even less than the other two. In quantum mechanics, a particle that might exist in this place or in that place actually exists in all of those places, as a probability, and doesn't exist in any of those places until you actually go looking for it. 

[The way I've described it here, it sounds a bit like the process of looking for my keys, which have an equal chance of existing in the kitchen, the bedroom, the pocket of my satchel, the lock of the back door, inside the pantry, inside the fridge, inside the mailbox, the bottom of the laundry machine: maybe the whole of quantum theory can be understood by the platitude, "Where were they when you saw them last?"]

Generally, human experience doesn't behave like quantum mechanics: objects exist in a single, persistent location, not simultaneously as a probability in many locations. The behaviors that are measured by quantum physicists don't match with our perception of reality. But they do match with the "reality" of videogames, where the hero approaches the door to a dungeon and might find any number of things on the other side, and even the computer doesn't know what's really there (because nothing is really there) till the hero throws open the door.

These arguments, and others like them, assert that we are currently living inside a computer simulation — and there is nothing about this premise that troubles me in the slightest. If it's true, it doesn't actually change anything. We've always gone about our lives under the assumption they're governed by certain rules, and we have generations of scientists and theologians working to better understand those rules. If we learn that these rules are part of a computer model and therefore are arbitrary, or if we learn that our universe is one of many and not unique, well, these aren't particularly surprising or disappointing revelations.

On the contrary. If we all live at the heart of a simulation, and we can prove it, then finally we have an unambiguous and non-arbitrary reason to believe in those rules, to rally around our shared function and shared governance. In discovering our world isn't true, we will finally have found a reason to believe in God, our Creator. 

That's the real assertion of this premise: that if we live inside a simulation, then the theists have been right all along.

The Sacred Book of Salmon 

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Eternal Recurrence 

The other day we were hiking at Eaton Canyon, where the desert trees have hunkered down for a long dry season, and I was thinking about eternal recurrence. I know that's a ridiculous thing to say, except I also think all of us probably think about eternal recurrence to some degree or another when we go hiking in nature, and that's why we go hiking in nature, partly—to escape for a little bit from the measly perspective offered by our once-only lifespan and to help us feel connected to the bigger things.

We walked over a streambed of parched rocks where, a month ago, there'd been water almost up to our knee; and this was enough to get me thinking: where does the water go? And where does it go, after that? And then again where? (My line of questions is as sophisticated as any two-year-old's, though only on my best days.)

If every drop of water on this earth stays on this earth, then it's like we live inside a fishbowl, and this water is the same water my parents drank as children, and their parents; it's the same water that swallowed the Titanic, that flooded Johnstown; the same water walked by Jesus, parted by Moses; the same water carried into the caves of Lascaux and mixed with pigments to make the oldest art we know; the same water where dinosaurs swam, where the heat from the Sun sparked the very first life on Earth, during the fiery heat before Earth had earth.

Later, the dog bounds up ahead to run with another dog, instant happy friends; and then we pass through a small clearing where a burned-out stump of tree tells the quiet history of a years-ago fire. There's a monarch butterfly, which we're told come, every last one of them, all the way from that single spot in Mexico—but this one arrives at us today tireless with cheerful flickering wings, flapping and unflappable.

The trail is footprints on top of footprints on top of footprints. One set leaves a pattern in the dirt shaped like a heart, and we follow this trail of hearts, one after the other. We look at every person on the trail: are you the heart-maker? And would you know it if you were? Because who among us knows the shape of their own footprints?

At the end of the trail, there's a waterfall, spilling from some overhead rocks, and before that, from who-knows-where. The water hits the ground and patters in a dance, and the people who collect underneath do the same. Then the water roils downstream and disappears, we don't know where.

But it will be back, this water. It always is.

When we return to the parking lot, a policeman stops us to ask if we've seen anything, and we're not sure how to answer: we've seen so many things. But while we were hiking, a man parked his car and then used it as the place from which to leave this earth. He shot himself in it and he died.

No, Officer. We didn't see a thing.

When the water spills away, where does it go? And will we recognize it again, when it comes back to us? Will it recognize itself? 

Sleeper, Awake 

Last night, I dreamt that I lay in bed, disappointed that I wasn't asleep, dreaming.

The Wide Wide River of Regret 

You wake to find yourself adrift in a boat, floating on a river, heading out to sea, and then you realize the boat is a coffin, and it's yours, because you're dead.

Funny things happen in your brain while you drift out to sea in your own coffin.

"Did I leave the stove on?" "What was I wearing?" "Did I tell her that I loved her, enough?"

"Did I love the right ones?"

It's a wide wide river of regret, and you are floating in it, for a while. Your self-pity is warmly comforting: "Why me? Why now? Why so soon?" Second-guessing helps you pass the time: "I should have worn more sunscreen." "I should have driven slower." "I should have enjoyed that German chocolate cake."

Very few of these regrets are actually yours. You've inherited the idea of them, residue from some life you believed you were supposed to have lived, learned from TV and movies and from not knowing yourself well enough. You sail through this clutter, this Sargasso Sea of fabricated desires, bumping up against them with hollow thuds, till finally your boat hits something softer:

"I wish I'd been braver."

"I wish I understood that people cared about me, and let them."

"I wish I'd found something to care about more than myself."

The boat floats on toward the sea. There's no steering it. There's no stopping it.

One morning, you wake. You've rounded a bend, and the sun hits you right in your dead face. Everything is bright and clear, and you can't remember anything. You can't remember who you are. You don't recall where you came from. You watch the birds flying low over the river with great clarity, but you no longer remember yourself as the one who lived in that house, the one who went to that job, the one who loved that woman, the one who hoped for … whatever you hoped for.

Now you're just the man floating in the coffin on the river, on the way out to sea. You've finally arrived, in death, at yourself; and it's wonderful. 

All Souls 

I'm already frightened, at 8AM, of how the day is over and spent and squandered: I can see all the tasks I'm hoping to complete and whether I complete them or not, the day is over, and I haven't really gotten any closer to anything.

They say time is, in some ways, totally subjective: it's just a rule by which the human mind must apprehend the world. (Without a beholder to count it off, does time have any meaning at all?) Maybe we hear seconds ticking from the moment we first hear our heartbeat. Or maybe we don't hear the seconds till we understand that our allotted heartbeats are finite?

Maybe you need a soul in order to perceive time. Maybe the ability to perceive time is the definition of a soul—what sets us apart from the the beasts, etc. And the afterlife is full of spirits, not souls: they can spend forever in the afterlife, because only a creature without time can spend a forever.

Do you need a soul to remember? Do you need time? Ghost have trouble remembering: they haunt a place but can't remember why. Even the elderly, as they get closer to becoming ghosts, have trouble remembering. The events of their lives still have significance, but they fall off the timeline, without order. It's like our lives are necklaces, and each event is a pearl, and time is the string that holds them together: when we die, it's a cascade of pearls, but no order, no sequence of this following from this following from this; and without causality there's no will, and without will, we're just a pile of pearls, and no necklace.

Swastikas in the Window 

While walking the dog today, I found a house decorated with swastikas. I saw them from half a block away, painted onto the window fixtures.

"That's brave," I said to my dog, who wagged his tail in agreement.

Big black angular spiders: four legs spinning webs of connotation across each window.

A few steps closer and I saw, in addition to the swastikas, a few Buddha sculptures and paintings on the wall. This wasn't a bad taste Nazi shrine; it was a bad taste Buddhist shrine, and its designers had either been ignorant of how people would react or had decided to fly their swastikas in the face of it.

The dog and I wanted to know more.

As we approached the house, the dog and I started imagining secret KKK gatherings at buildings disguised as Buddhist temples, decorated with iconography of peace and love on the outside, and on the inside spreading poison and hate and fear.

Then the dog and I started to imagine that these angry men from the KKK (in our minds, they were always men, married to submissive women)—these men, after weeks of sitting inside their counterfeit Buddhist temple but staring into the genuine countenance of the very real Buddha statues—some of these men start to feel a stirring within themselves, a growing awareness that there might be another way, other than hate. The dog and I imagine that for some of these angry fearful men, the facade of Buddhism is cracking their foundation of hate.

These men meet in secret one night, after their hate meeting. They want to try meditation. They don't know what to do, but they sit in quiet and in the loudness of their own thoughts, till without warning, one of them exhales and starts to sob. It shakes his body, an almost-seizure of so much trapped feeling finally breaking free. Another man reaches a hand to his shoulder to console him, and the sob spreads to this man, too, like contagion, so within a minute, every one of them is either crying or choking it back.

"This is what meditation is?" they laugh, later.

Before long, the KKK chapter disbands, like the way a family drifts apart after the death of a patriarch: its patriarch was hate, and it got sick with the cancer of compassion, and it never recovered. The men who'd tried to learn meditation stayed at it, some of them: having felt a sprout of goodness, they wanted it to grow. But they were still afraid, still convinced they didn't know enough, and eventually that group split up, too, each going his own way.

As the dog and I approached the house, we wondered how long before a co-opted image could be washed clean and reclaimed by its original meaning, and we think how meaning is a palimpsest, layer upon layer, growing thicker, burying its own histories, but there's never any going back, to more innocent times, or any other kind either.

Work 

Sometimes when I think about how I'm drifting apart from all my friends, I realize that I was never really that close to my friends. We had time together, spent at bars or baseball games or movies or work—mostly work, because work allowed us to feel like we had a common purpose. It was good to rally around more than just ourselves.

I like these people, my friends, with or without work. But without work, what is there to talk about? We pass the time talking about whatever else we have in common, which it turns out is mostly our mutual admiration, and yesterday.

When I'm feeling lonely, sometimes I think the solution is to do more work.

Fundamental Particle 

These were the same scientists who spent their days looking at invisible things—neutrinos and quarks and electrical charge—the same people who were searching for what they'd agreed to call the "God particle"—yet somehow it slipped their minds that they spent their days trafficking in miracles, because they'd grown to take for granted, first of all, that math is a miracle.

So they were confused and speechless when the first set of images came back from their atom-smashing: they thought it was a mistake. One even laughed out loud: "That looks exactly like Markarian's Chain." She'd done graduate work in astrophysics. "It's a set of galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster."

As they compared the other images, the feeling in the room grew from uncanny to worse. Everything looked like something else. The scientists had been seeking the smallest particles in existence, and it turned out each of them was a scale replica of the largest. Zooming in to look at the atom, they'd found a literal complete universe inside, made up of stars and galaxies and nebulae and quasars, all drifting apart; ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny; and a photon was no different from a supernova. These were measured people, forced to conclude that everything they knew was but one layer tucked inside many: zoom in or zoom out, there was no difference, only collisions and explosions and beginnings and ends, and people looking outward and people looking in; and this was the God Particle, after all.

Kill Switch 

or, Computer Head, Pt. 2

I feel inside-out tired and I'm not clear why, but I want to blame it on "Internet fatigue." I want to blame "Internet fatigue" for why I haven't been writing, or even really interested in writing, though I'm not entirely clear how the one is related to the other, and I won't be clear till I actually manage to write about it, to learn what I'm thinking.

Let's say this: the Internet—by which I mean the incessant clicking and refreshing of 2-5 social media websites and 10-20 news sites—has me so completely saturated (over-saturated) in information. In text. In stories.

Every news headline, every status update, is a story: it implies a deeper narrative, ensembles of characters, A and B and C plots, rising action, conflict. It's exhausting. When I'm so gluttonously full on these "stories," there's precious little room left—in my brain, in the universe—for more stories, let alone creating them.

But it's worse than that: it's not just a problem of quantity. I realize now what's probably been obvious to everyone else: these "stories" with which I'm constantly feeding my brain, from the streaming cascade of news feeds—these are shallow stories. My experience of them is not at all deep: it's mostly trivial—as befits the time I give to them. Any real depth of understanding that's to be gleaned from these stories will come from the devotion of substantial, thoughtful time—the one thing I don't (can't?) give, because the endless supply of new stories are always pushing out the old ones. ("Old" equals one hour ago, ten emails ago, three tweets ago, etc.)

In the Skinner Box of data, you can pull the virtual lever as often as you want, and fatten yourself on information. But is it nourishing? Why am I getting hungrier instead of more filled?

So I find myself dreaming a dream that I hear is common to more and more people today, a Luddite's dream of old-fashioned, hard-working quiet. I dream of unplugging. I dream of kill switches and EMP explosions, and replacing the social graph with spider webs and constellations, dream of deep forests inside inaccessible fracted canyons, shielded from radio waves, miles from advertising. I long for a quiet so thick that the only "news" to break its silence will come from the people I know, from my own perceptions of the world, and from whatever revelations are offered up in my dreams—a savage silence.

[Religion is acquaintance with deep longing.]

But this quiet is so far away, and getting there seems so effortful, and it's so much easier just to hop online, to hit refresh, to feel connected, and to consume, and consume.

Mixed-Media Autobiography 

or, Little Yellow Envelope, pt. 2

In the top left drawer of the things I keep, there's a little yellow envelope, and it moves with me from city to city to city. It's full of old photos and notes, relics of questionably overrated sentimental value.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, its contents1: maybe forty photos of maybe twenty people, and maybe ten of those photos are of me2. Maybe ten postcards, of which five or six are inscribed (sent to me) and the others unused (purchased by me). A few scraps of paper—scribbled notes, a page from a tear-off calendar, a Simpsons horoscope. A black feather. A gray rock.

Each of these objects is the surviving symbol of some story from my past, such that I've assumed that this envelope is my mixed-media autobiography.

I don't look in the envelope much: I've come to take its value for granted. But recently, I had reason to spill its contents out onto my bed and flip through it all, looking for something (a clue, probably—always a clue: some indication from the past as to why the present is the way it is, etc.). I was surprised by what I found inside.

This wasn't my autobiography.

("This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.")

("You are not your fucking khakis.")

This was a photo collection of people—of, let's face it, kids—from a long time ago, mostly playing at being grown-ups, testing it out; looking beautiful and fresh-skinned and so milk-fed on optimism that their own character—their own unique signs of hardness and how they would overcome their own unique difficulties—hadn't yet shown through the baby fat.

And by "they," mostly I mean "me."

Then, sorting through this splay of pictures—beautiful young women and the notes they'd written to me, notes which said or at least implied that they loved me, once—and I realize with terrible disappointment that maybe this is why I keep this envelope: hard evidence of having been loved—kept as proof of one thing that can't be proven by objects, can't be proven by them any more than it can be fixed in time—love, frozen like in a photo and then stuffed into a dingy envelope—love, which can't live inside an envelope any more than a plant or a child or my own self could live in there—love, which we might sometimes seek out there, or, after a moment of wisdom or wounding, in there, but almost never looking for it where it might actually be found, which is: right here.

And I see now: I don't need this little yellow envelope anymore. It's not even mine.

---

1. Also detailed, with different intent, here.

2. There are actually surprisingly few surviving photos of me, in no small part because, when I was a teenager, I exacted a purge on my parents' photo collections, destroying every unflattering- (and fat!-) looking photo of myself. It was an almost totalitarian act of image control, such that my mother actually stowed the surviving photos into hiding till a more temperate time.

We which are alive 

“Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord.

My guess is, the Rapture really will come on Saturday. We'll all of us be deemed unworthy, and life on Earth will go on as if nothing had happened.

A Steady Hand 

(Reprinted from Printer's Devils / Writer's Church)

I recently watched Werner Herzog's documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about Paleolithic art discovered inside Chauvet Cave in Southern France. The paintings offer plenty of mysteries and no sure answers, most of all, Why? Why would Ice Age hunter-gatherers take time out of their short, violent lives to crawl into a dark, uninhabited cave, in order to cover the walls with graceful, colorful line drawings of horses, lions, and bulls over a period spanning roughly five thousand years?

One thing that strikes me unforgettably about these paintings is how assured the brushstrokes are. These aren't idle doodles; they show no signs of doubt; and whether we ever learn why the artists made these paintings, it seems certain the answer was clear at least to the painters themselves.

In the film, an archeologist talks about meeting an aboriginal man in Australia who is touching up a set of cave paintings. "Why do you paint?" the archeologist asks.

"I am not painting," the man answers. "The hand of the spirit is painting."

Quitting 

Every day lately, I wonder if I need to quit caffeine. Every day, I feel one cup shy of a nervous breakdown, like the tiniest overpour might overwhelm my fragments of peace of mind. I'm not even clear why: the normal pressures that make up my life—the job worries and the art angst, the money shortages, the girl troubles, the social anxieties—these are so common to me by now that it'd be wrong to call them stressors upon my life: more accurately, they are my life. 

In fact, I've come to realize: the things that I sometimes think of as "stressors" are exactly the things that I choose for myself, to keep my life from becoming mind-numbingly boring. If I really had the peaceful life that I sometimes pretend to want, then I'd almost certainly have to hang myself. Or, more accurately, I'd commit the smaller suicides that have become the recurring themes of my life's history: I'd change my city, quit my job, end my relationship, neglect my bills, drive out of town, write poems, kin with nature, and then come back—tanned and kissed by freedom, and safely now distant from the stability I, in equal parts, crave and dread.

Is life this complicated for other people?, I sometimes wonder: the consternations, perplexations, machinations, the planning and replanning, so much systematic constructing and deconstructing and destructing. Maybe it is.

[Is life this complicated for ants? Maybe it is.]

And while my pot of coffee is brewing, I realize, too: the only way that I've learned to get by in the world is not to live in it, but rather to live parallel, beside it, at arm's length, able to pluck and reach from its passing conveyer belt like it's a cafeteria, but being sure not to getting caught up in it, tangled and dragged, and certainly being sure to avoid stepping on.

Zeno's Other Paradox 

The more that the philosopher Zeno pondered how to get close to people, the farther he moved from his target.

Tzniut  

I don't really like getting my hair cut, but that's okay, because the man who cuts my hair doesn't really cut hair, and by the measure of some people and by the measure of God, he's not even a man. He's a wigmaker. He makes wigs for married Orthodox Jewish women, who, according to dat Moshe, are not allowed to show their hair. He makes sheitel, hair meant for covering hair, hair for women whose hair is not allowed to be seen. Only their husbands may see their hair—their husbands, and God, and the man who cuts my hair, who is not a man because he himself has a husband. The man who cuts my hair and has a husband makes hair for the women that looks like their own hair. He makes their hair to look like the hair that only the husband can see, and he makes it perfectly, so that they can be modest, and so they may walk humbly with God.

Peanut Butter and Fizzy Water 

More thoughts on the Apocalypse

The weird, sad fact is, I want nothing more than I want the Apocalypse. The end of all things means the end of obligations, failures, and future disappointments. No further payments will be remitted. I won't need to match my socks, and I can eat peanut butter and chocolate for as many consecutive meals as I want.

After people, there's no one left to dislike you.

I can see now that I've been gradually transforming my apartment into an austere bomb shelter (with thin walls and lots of windows, useless against actual bombs): a stockpile of canned beans, fizzy water, wine, and still-unread books just waiting till I have some free time. And what is the Apocalypse, if not a sudden excess of free time? "Finally, some peace and quiet!"

It's only now it occurs to me that I've been making a few probably-erronious assumptions:

1. That I will continue to exist after the Apocalypse (thereby to enjoy my stockpile of beans, books, and time); and
2. My obligations will not. I've been assuming that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse will round up the creditors first and the debtors later

—but since the extant literature gives us plenty of reason to believe the Apocalypse is more bad than good, I suppose it's better to assume that when the end comes, there won't be a whole lot of free reading time (nor light in which to do it); and now it seems completely possible that the bills will continue to arrive in the mail long after the sun has flared out. Death and taxes, they say, and student loans, too.

So, this revelation: the Apocalypse won't be the spa vacation I'd imagined.

Apocalypse Now 

MP3 audio track

After a while we started to wonder if the apocalypse wasn't going to happen all at once, like we'd always imagined, but rather gradually—so slowly that we'd barely even notice. And then of course we started to wonder if it was already happening: sometimes it sure seemed like it was.

Then this idea: what if it had already happened and was over?

Since we'd always laughed at those religious doomsday theories like "the Rapture," we also assumed that if the Rapture actually happened, then of course we'd be among those left behind—but till now, we'd never considered that maybe all of us were left behind.

Maybe the world had ended already, and every single last person on earth was deemed unfit to enter Heaven.

Maybe the world had ended already, and no one had particularly noticed.

We started trying to guess when it might have happened. "Hitler!" "The A-bomb!" "Martin Luther!" "The Crucifixion!"

But the fact was, it was impossible to guess. Maybe apocalypse is all we've ever known—so how could we possibly recognize it? Maybe apocalypse came and went before we ever had a chance to see it, or record its signs—maybe back when people first learned to write, or learned to speak, or learned to dream. Maybe it happened as soon as Adam and Eve ate that fruit. Maybe God tossed us out of Eden the same way we toss out a baking sheet of burnt cookies: a failed batch, easy to replace, quickly forgotten. The smoke clears and you start over and you move on. And maybe that's all we ever were.

Private Conversation 

I think I need to go shopping but I don't need to go shopping.

There's a part of my brain that says, "You're out of cereal! You need to get breakfast cereal."

It's true that I did finish a bag of cereal this morning. (My cereal comes in bags. Don't get hung up on this.) But there's also still other cereal in there—a different kind, but plenty to get me through tomorrow, and probably the next day, too. So my brain needs to chill the fuck out.

"You need to chill the fuck out," I tell my brain.

My brain says, "You were going to buy white pepper today and you didn't. You need white pepper!"

"Nobody needs white pepper."

Earlier today there was a part of my brain that said I needed garden soil, so I stopped what I was doing, drove to Home Depot, and I bought six cubic yards of garden soil. While I stood in line, my brain chirped, "Perlite!", so I bought a bag of perlite.

I spend more time and money buying dirt than I ever imagined I would.

When I got back home, my brain said, "You need a hoe."

Another part of my brain is fixated on a smell in my apartment. "Does it smell like garbage in here?" Maybe it does smell a little like garbage. I can't tell. "You should take the trash out!", this part of my brain screams. But the trash bag is empty, and anyway, I'm not really sure it even smells. "Let's say it does smell a tiny bit like garbage—and I'm not saying it does—but if it does, that's not the worst thing in the world."

"Oh yeah? What is the worst thing in the world?"

I consider this for a moment, then realize it's even more distracting than taking out the trash.

"That woman is coming over!" I'm not sure which part of my brain screams this at me—quite possibly more than one of them. "You should straighten up!" "You should make the bed!" "You should floss!" "You should definitely take out the garbage!"

"I should floss?"

"Well, the ones you want to keep..." my brain mumbles back, a sheepish aphorism.

There's another part of my brain, thinks it would be a good idea to go for a walk. "You know, work off some of that tension."

"What tension?" I ask. But we all know the answer to that question: my brain and its screaming is beginning to stress me out. Maybe I will go for a walk. While I'm out, I can even pick up some breakfast cereal. Maybe some dirt.

White Noise 

Last night, I fell asleep with the white noise machine set to play "Gentle Rain," even though outside there really was gentle rain. The real rain noise was almost indistinguishable from the artificial one, but in the end, I decided the real sound would be too unpredictable, so I turned the volume up on the machine, till the sound of the gentle rain was completely drowned in the sound of gentle rain.

At breakfast, I had to pick between a rough-looking organic apple and a shiny symmetrical one, glistening with wax—and that's when I realized: reality is too real. We can't handle reality; or if we can, we prefer not to. Reality is uneven: it's juicy but it's bruised. What we want, or seem to want more and more, is something other than real—a little more than, and a little less. Something maybe 80% real, to protect us from the unpleasant 20%.

[Reality can be "augmented" as much by what's taken away as what's added.]

A shiny plump apple that looks exactly like we think an apple should, and has no taste whatsoever. The looped sounds of a dry rainstorm, and your feet never get wet. An airbrushed magazine model, never has a grumpy day. Boneless chicken breasts, resemble tofu more than poultry. A fast food hamburger, soy-enriched, salt-soaked, pre-digested, and its relation to an actual hamburger distant and probably illegitimate.

One reason we prefer familiar brands is their consistent uniformity: they take a kind of stress out of decision-making. Starbucks might not make the best coffee, but you know exactly what you'll get—and it'll be better than the liquid dirt that you might get served at the Mom and Pop cafe. Brands help people manage their personal risk (even when that "risk" is no greater than a bad cup of coffee).

And mass production in general has required the removal of unevenness and unpredictability from its results. Now, so many generations deep into industrialism—so long that we've lost the cultural wisdom of other modes of production—we've become averse to anomalies, differences, unpredictability, randomness.

[White noise machines, by design, exist to protect us from anomalous sound.]

We've wrapped ourselves in a kind of idealism: we want "perfect" apples, perfect women, perfect rain. And for that, we sacrifice a kind of romanticism, because by "perfect," we don't mean the best, but only the most unflawed—the least unique. We drown out life with the sound of life.

Kafka's Luggage 

Kafka's luggage covered with stickers and stamps of where it's been, "This End Up" on every end, instructions to send it to contradictory destinations; locks he didn't put there; clothes removed, repacked, folded better; a love letter inserted, not to him, with redacted text; no handles; no straps; no clasp; no zipper; packed full of essentials that will always be inaccessible to him; too big for an overhead compartment; too heavy to lift.

The Santoku 

There's a knife I want.

For some reason, I've got it in my head that I "need" this knife. I don't know where these compulsive "needs" come from, exactly, but I'm sure you know the kind: the compulsion fixates on an object that you hadn't even thought of a week ago, and now you can't imagine how you'll live another week if you don't acquire the thing.

This knife is a "santoku," a Japanese-style kitchen knife, smaller and thinner than a chef's knife. The steel is fantastically hard and fantastically sharp. I want this knife so badly I had an actual literal dream about buying it.

[Again: I want this knife so badly, I had a dream about shopping. When I fall asleep and my subconscious runs wild, I dream about buying kitchen supplies.]

Santoku knives have become popular over recent years, so it's worth pointing out that I don't want just any santoku knife. I want a very particular santoku knife, hollow ground with powdered steel that looks like marbled paper, no doubt one of the strongest, sharpest, best constructed knives on the market today—but the real reason that I "need" this particular knife is because it's absolutely breathtakingly beautiful.

So the dilemma here, as almost always, is, "How should we assign value to things?"—because on the one hand, the value of a knife is nothing but its ability to cut; and on the other hand, I've been looking at various santoku knives for the past two weeks, trying to distract myself from the perfect (and expensive) knife of my dreams. The other santoku knives are wholly adequate—they certainly can cut—but I won't buy them, because if I do, then every time I use the knife, I'll be disappointed, thinking of the more perfect knife that I don't have. If I cut myself with some lesser substitute knife, then I'll fault the knife; and if I cut myself with my beautiful, perfect knife, it'll confirm to me that I made the right decision, because I'll have cut myself with the sharpest, strongest, most beautiful work of art I could find.

What is "art", and what is its value? And how much is reasonable to pay for something I perceive as "perfect"?

Given a choice (this knife or that knife), really I choose the one and also I choose not  the other: I will carry around an image of the thing I didn't pick, just as long as I will carry around the thing I actually did pick. Every time we are faced with a choice, we wind up choosing both: we live with the one, in this place we call reality, and we live with the other, still, in our imagination....

Faux Logic 

A Syllogism

Major premise:
All men are mortal.

Minor premise: 
All of the attackers on September 11 were men.

Conclusion:
No men should be allowed to build community centers or churches near the World Trade Center site.

---

Though this is no longer a "hot" news item, it's apparently hot enough that Bill O'Reilly managed to offend his hosts on The View earlier today, stating "Muslims killed us on 9/11!" A slightly less tongue-in-cheek version of the above syllogism is of course the one employed by Fox News: since the attackers were Muslim, no Muslim should be allowed to build a community center or church, etc.

The Fox version of the syllogism doesn't offer a "major premise," though, so in addition to being fallacious, it's also badly constructed.

My Own Private Inferno 

In the 20th century, we each got 15 minutes of fame. In the 21st century, we each get our own private level of Hell, filled only with the things that we like.

Bermuda Triangles of the Home 

Two days ago, walking through my kitchen barefoot, I just barely missed stepping into a safety pin on the floor, needle open, aimed right at me (like a jungle booby trap) (like a hungry one-toothed shark). I saw it in time, picked it up, and thought, "Whew. That was a close one."

Yesterday, walking through my kitchen barefoot, I stepped on something hard and stopped down to look. It was a thick shard of glass, and if I'd come at it from a different angle, it would have cut me for sure. "Whew," I thought. "That was a close one."

The glass was in the same spot the safety pin had been.

You might think I should stop walking through my kitchen barefoot; but rather, I'm going to stop walking through my kitchen barefoot on that spot. It's a locus of danger and I need to be careful.

*     *     *

Last week I lost my keys. "Where were they when you lost them?" people always ask, even though those same people get upset if you ask them the exact same question when they lose their things. "If I knew the answer to that, then I'd know where they were!"

But this time, I knew where they were when I lost them, and they just weren't there. Weird. I couldn't go out without my keys, so I took a shower, made lunch, stayed at home, and later that afternoon, found the keys exactly where I thought they'd been, exactly where I'd been when I lost them.

*     *     *

There's a dent in my pillow where your head used to lay. I fluff the pillow so it's round and plump, a perfect egg shape. But I return later and the dent is there again.

Maybe I shouldn't have bought "memory foam."

*     *     *

I wonder now if time and space aren't exactly the way we imagine them to be. Sometimes causes seem to succeed effects. Sometimes time seems stuck in a loop, or I mean that I'm stuck in a loop and time seems to disappear altogether. Sometimes I wonder if I'll make the same mistakes over and over and over, and if that's what Purgatory is, and if so, then how is it different from anything else?

The rooms of my apartment have more than four corners, and in some of them, things disappear, reappear, behave unexpectedly, according to a set of rules I can't seem to and never will understand. But I see now, that's just the way the world is. It makes sense, just not in the ways we were led to believe.

Beachbum Metaphysics, pt. 3 

Existence, with Pool Toys

Briefly, two inflatable pool rings and a long straight foam raft come together to form a pattern that looks like a face. The three pieces hold together like this and I begin to feel some fondness for them. Kinship, even. So when they break up and drift apart, I'm sad, and even now I'm looking at the pool wondering when this new and departed friend might reappear.

The pool teaches us the ease of fellowship; and then it teaches us the temporariness of all things.

There is wisdom in the pool.

Beachbum Metaphysics, pt. 2 

Existence, with Butterfly

A butterfly flits through the yard. Because of the way it flies—in excited jerks and zigzags—I assume the butterfly is directionless. Meandering. Unfocused. But more likely, its erratic flight has nothing to do with its will or psychology. Rather, it's a matter of physics: it flies in crooked lines because it's made that way. Its behavior looks non-linear, undirected—because that's the way it's built.

I too have meandered toward this yard, in zigzags, in fits and starts—the only way I could have. The way nature allowed.

So have you.

Beachbum Metaphysics, pt. 1 

Existence, Poolside

The pool is mostly quiet except for gentle gurgles and drizzles; but then, every couple minutes, for reasons unseen, it erupts suddenly like a hot spring, like it's alive.

The pool is a complicated system of fluids and chemical balances and filters and pumps; and I realize—so am I.

I don't know enough about things to explain to you why we believe that people are alive and the pool isn't. While it breathes and bubbles and gushes, I sit here in the knowledge that we are the same.

Blog of the Future 

There's a blog that sometimes links to my blog, so people who read that blog sometimes read this blog too. Whenever this other blog links to my blog, I'm flattered: I sometimes doubt that anyone reads my blog. I sometimes doubt that anyone reads anyone's blog, except their own. So it's reassuring to see that someone has in fact read something on my blog, and even gone so far as to recommend that others read it, too.

In fact, whenever this other blog links to my blog, I read this other blog. It's as if their affirmation of my blog confirms my opinion of their good taste, and then I want to see what else they're thinking. I read it diligently, I'll find things I think are interesting, and often I'll add a link somewhere on my blog back to this other blog, so that presumably, the people who are reading my blog (if there are any) are now also reading this other blog, because of my recommendation. I assume this other blog sees that I've linked to them, and this causes them to read my blog more closely, and maybe find something they like enough to recommend to their readers.

It all reminds me of the closed-off glass globe they have at the Natural History Museum which has been sealed for years and contains an entire self-contained ecosystem, but would probably smell really bad if you open it up.

But it seems to work.

The closed-off glass globe and the cross-linking between blogs, that is.

However... a distressing thing has started to happen, because now this other blog is no longer linking to stories I've written. Instead, it links to stories I haven't written yet. It quotes these unwritten stories, and it points its readers to my blog seeking these stories which don't yet exist. It must be very confusing and disappointing for these readers.

The stories which the other blog says I've written, even though I haven't—I don't know if these are stories I would have written sometime in the future; but they seem interesting to me; so I write them.

I worry that the story I wind up writing is not be as good as the story that I was supposed to have written but didn't write.

These recommendations come, and I write for them, trying to catch up with their expectations, always a step behind, hoping not to fall two or three steps back, hoping not to stumble, hoping not to fall, trying to anticipate their next want, trying to fill it, to keep them happy, all of them, the readers and the future readers I don't yet have but apparently someday will. What do you want, stranger? And what will you want after that?

Voir Dire 

After Kant, can anyone ever swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"? Can anything be "beyond reasonable doubt"?

Our oaths and standards of proof really need to be brought into the epistemic 21st century....

Koan of the Jigsaw Puzzle 

The Zen master scatters the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle across the table. He does not attempt to assemble the puzzle. Instead, he picks up a single piece at random and contemplates it for the rest of the day.

The solution to the puzzle is the puzzle. The puzzle is the solution to the puzzle.

The Introspective Superhero 

or, Fortress of Solitude, pt. 2

The Introspective Superhero would happily rescue people, if only he knew with certainty that's what they wanted. But it's hard to know what's best.

Take Anna, for instance. Her tabby cat Bartholomew is currently stuck up a tree, beyond Anna's reach. Bartholomew is getting more and more frightened at his situation, and he keeps pushing himself farther up the tree, as if sensing that the ground is an enemy from which he must retreat. Anna, too, is beginning to panic, though she's normally quite level-headed: she thought the cat would have good enough sense to come down by now, and since he hasn't, she's becoming unsure of how to resolve the situation.

Nothing would be easier for the Introspective Superhero than to swoop in, fetch the cat off its branch, and return it safely to Anna's worried arms. But how much better would it be, he wonders, if Anna were to arrive at her own solution—remembering, say, the old stepladder in her apartment building's shared garage; setting up the ladder; confronting her own modest fear of heights; and, from a rung halfway up, luring the cat Bartholomew back down to safety? How much more confident and empowered would she feel? How much more fond of her cat, and herself, at the opportunity, years from now, to look back nostalgically at her afternoon's heroics, and how her actions had brought her and her cat closer together? The intervention of the Introspective Superhero would not help her. It would diminish her.

Even in matters of life and death, the path of the Introspective Superhero isn't always clear. He remembers painfully a time when, during a bank robbery at United First Federal, one of the thieves pointed a gun at the chest of a police officer and fired. The Introspective Superhero used his lightning speed to interject himself between the officer and the speeding bullet. But the policeman was furious. "I was wearing my vest!" he yelled, pointing at his Kevlar. The gunshot wound would likely have been trivial, but would have afforded the middle-aged beat cop a medal, promotion, and a path to an easy retirement. The District Attorney, too, was put out by the hero's actions. Till he'd arrived on the scene, it had been a clear open-and-close case of armed robbery; but against the Introspective Superhero, all weapons were useless, and the bank robber's lawyer convincingly argued the judge down to a misdemeanor.

Superpowers, it seems, don't make the world less complicated. Rather, because they afford the hero with near-infinite options, they make the world incredibly more difficult to manage. Each choice presents so many possible outcomes that it's impossible to guess which one is best. That's why most nights, though the hero could be saving innocent lives, instead he elects to stay at home and do very little. The best way to make the world better, he reasons, is to avoid it altogether.

In Between Days 

Time travel necessarily evokes a kind of identity crisis, and this trip is no different.

From the moment I stepped off the Virgin America flight to Los Angeles (a flight consciously decorated in blue neon so as to resemble a space ship), this visit has been less like arriving at a different place and more like arriving at a different time: I drive the streets I knew ten years ago, toward places I knew ten years ago, to see people I knew ten years ago; and I am then. I am transported so I am from that time. The sun is shining. Everything is perfect.

In fact, it's better than perfect. This little moment, an air bubble in time, has none of the relentless march of my normal, linear life: this is a discrete event, misplaced into some other timeline—a transcendent resplendent reprieve from everything.

Who am I, here, now? People introduce me to their friends with titles I'd never have thought to pick for myself. But they'll do: they fit as well as any. Transplanted from my own personal collection of tasks and troubles, it doesn't actually matter much what I'm called.

I soak in the desert sun; it bleaches away everything.

My stay in L.A. is in between things—in between states and definitions and worries, in between heartaches and misgivings and hopes—a Bardo. I'm here till I'm next reborn (and as what, I don't know...).

Secret of the Universe, pt. 2 

There is no secret of the universe.

By which I mean, the universe is a miraculous but fairly transparent place; and if you spend your time seeking the meaning that you can't see, then you risk missing the meaning that is right in front of your eyes.

... and dreamt of becoming infinite 

“ Los Angeles is a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua tree and the May pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite.

- Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Pilgrimage to the Future Catastrophe

I lived in Los Angeles for seven years—long enough, no doubt, to have formed deep personal associations and memories of the place; yet, anymore, when I visit, it feels less like a reunion and more like a pilgrimage to pay homage to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (who once called the city "the finished form of the future catastrophe").

There are many things to love about Los Angeles, and many things to hate. Too few people understand that they are the same things. The garish excess, the social stratification, the semi-disposability of everything: this is American capitalist culture at its apex. From my home in New York City, I can see the high-rise towers of the great financial investment banks in downtown Manhattan, but the view from these steel pinnacles is reserved for a privileged few: New York may be the brain of American capitalism, but its body is surely in the archipelago of shopping malls that run from the Sherman Oaks Galleria all the way down to Rodeo Drive.

To live in Los Angeles is to consume, literally and metaphorically: every time I leave my home, I'll consume gasoline, to consume the miles between me and my destination; and once I've arrived at that destination, I've probably gone there to shop for something. This is not unique to Los Angeles. "All America," said Baudrillard, "is Disneyland." But Los Angeles was first: the first freeways, the first fast food chains, the first suburbs, the first exurbs, the first malls.

"As goes California, so goes the nation."

California is also home to the contemporary incarnation of the American Dream. Hard work is no longer required! Just a telegenic attitude, and the right hair. "Style" and "fashion" are always meant to describe a subculture of people who are in style and in fashion; and therefore imply the far-larger set of people who are excluded and left behind. And every part of the culture industry is founded on the idea that what you have now is inadequate, compared to what you might have tomorrow. Each new thing exists only long enough to be consumed by its children—next year's line of clothes, or cars, or smartphones, or pre-fab houses; next year's films, television pilots, and rising stars.

That's the dialectic of Los Angeles: its ephemera is its vitality. Everything is precipitous—at the edge of the continent, at the edge of fashion, at the edge of technology—and all of it is premised on an underlying implied destruction: some day an earthquake (again, literal and metaphoric) will carry all this into the sea.

The Secret of the Universe 

There is no secret of the universe.

The Waitress 

There's what you are, on the one hand; and on the other, there's what you think you can be.

No, let me put that another way: there is what you are, essentially, in your heart—the sum of all your capabilities; and on the other hand, there's the smaller set of what you've realized to date. There is You the Greater and You the Lesser. You whole, and you fractured.

Some people believe that you, the "real" you, is the lesser one—the tally of what you've achieved. "What do you do?," we ask each other at parties. "I'm a salesman," we answer, deftly swapping a verb of action with a verb of being.

Other people believe that you, the "real" you, is that farther-away idea: "I'm a waitress and an actress, but I also want to direct."

You snigger when she tells you this. "She's a dreamer," you think. "She's a cliché." (And these things, too, might be a part of who she "really" is.) But clichés are lazy shortcuts, a rubber-stamp version of the truth: the outline is correct and familiar, but the details are missing. The details are the essence. The details are the differentiators. In the mind of this waitress, what she wants to do is more significant than what she is doing. To know her is to know that she wants to direct. To know her is to know that she is a bundle of potentialities, and to know which potentialities.

[When robots can bring us coffee at restaurants, then we'll all be free to act and direct.]

[When we fall in love, is it not with a person's wants and with their potentialities?]

It is our dream that distinguishes us—the dream, and the degree to which we are willing to chase it: the degree to which we believe we are not the man sitting in the desk chair at the office, day after day after day. No. Rather, we are the brilliant burst of light, looming just on the other side of the horizon. We eagerly, lovingly chase ourselves, to find ourselves.

---

"There's What You Are On the One Hand," limited edition print by Jessica Doyle

Metamorphosis 

Or, Destroying the Dream of my Own Translation

"Kafka's sentences often deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of sentences in German that require that the participle be positioned at the end of the sentence; in the above sentence, the equivalent of 'changed' is the final word, 'verwandelt'. Such constructions are not replicable in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text." - from Wikipedia

First, start with a phrase:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

Use a computer to translate it into Japanese, and then back again:

One morning, one Gregor Samsa suffered from a dream, woke up in bed converted to their destructive himself.

Do it again:

One morning, one suffering from a dream Gregor Samsa, destruction of the bed, woke up in the translation itself.

And again:

Gregor Samsa dream, from the destruction of the bed one morning, suffering a single one, I woke up in the translation itself.

You've come here, to language, to literature, looking for meaning. It's why anyone comes to anything: to make sense and order of otherwise meaningless circumstance.

1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa one dream of one suffering from the destruction of one, I woke up in the translation itself.

Trying to pin things down with words, you've discovered that meaning moves. It evolves. It flies. it flits. It flutters.

1 bed one morning, Gregor Samsa in my own translation from the burden of 1111111 I woke up one single dream was destroyed.

Instead of meaning, you've stumbled upon the destruction of meaning; and in that, you begin to find the true meaning of meaning: that it's made by looking for it.

I, 1111111, morning, 1111111, destroying the dream of my own translation from the bed, woke the burden of Gregor Samsa.

Destroying the dream of my own translation.

The Rapid Acceleration of Things 

or, Microblog Killed the Internet Star, pt. 2

I'm thinking about the rapid acceleration of things.

Also, I realize there's a certain set of writers who fixate on the "rapid acceleration of things," by which we mean "culture," by which we mean the things we consume; the values by which we evaluate them; the ground beneath our feet. I realize there's a certain set of writers who aim to write about these things, though these things shift rapidly, so are, by their nature, hard to write about, hard to understand—like trying to write graffiti on the side of a moving bullet train. And I realize that though I have an affinity for these types of writers, I'm not sure I've ever been one of them, nor am I entirely sure I want to be—because at some level, anyone who writes about the "rapid acceleration of things" is writing about shopping, really. Aren't they?

But here I am, caught in the act of noticing my own very thoughts shrinking, shrinking, the way we're told an object will shrink as it approaches the speed of light: the faster my thoughts get, the smaller they get, too. Look even at the short history of this blog, an ongoing exercise in concision, now so successful an exercise that the blog posts are, most days, non-existent.

It used to be I was interested in novellas, feature articles, essays; gradually then short stories, reviews, prose poems; then further devolution—dictionary definitions, haiku, one-liners. Pithyisms. And now this. Now, nothing, or nearly nothing. Now an ever-growing amalgam of single sentences, 140 characters posted here and there, the accumulation of which adds up to ... what? Like the accumulation of the day's acts adds up to what? Yet at the end of the year, or the decade, or the lifetime, it has added up to an accumulation, at least—as if we ourselves are the sum total of the habitual thoughts that we hiccup day after day; and maybe that is all we are...

They say that media alters the way we think: the printing press caused us to begin to apprehend the world as if it were a book, taught us to "read" the world. Film affected our understanding of space and time, to the point that now, when we dream (the deepest recesses of our subconscious), we edit scenes together as if it were a movie, with montages and jump cuts and fades and soundtracks and action/adventure.

And now, this vast headless beast, the Internet—what does it do to our brain? The lines that once connected one idea to another (like turning the page in a book, like wiping from one scene to the next) now explode and link off in a hundred different directions. There is no one path, but a hundred paths, each one halfway followed, each one holding our interest only till the next explosion carries us off in another direction; and we, the voyager, are barely contiguous, but rather a string of breadcrumbs, a traceroute, an audit trail: we become simply a log of what we have seen. We are the storyteller, chronicling link after link after link, feeling after feeling after feeling; but we are no longer the story. We are the narrator but no longer the protagonist. We are the current flowing through the grid; but—What do we light up?, and Why?, are questions that we no longer ask, questions we cannot answer in 140 characters. And maybe not at all...

Truth 

“The truth: what is oblique.

A monk once asked Kao Tsu: "What is the unique and final word of truth. That master replied: "Yes."

I take this answer not as a vague prejudice in favor of general acquiescence as the philosophical secret of truth. I understand that the master, bizarrely opposing an adverb to a pronoun, yes, to what, replies obliquely: he makes a deaf man's answer, of the same kind as he made to another monk who asked him:

"All things are said to be reducible to the One; but to what is the One reducible?" And Kao Tsu replied: "When I was in the Ching district, I had a robe made for myself which weighed seven kin."

- from Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

The Margarine Manifesto 

Part One: Counting My Blessings

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Two: Setting the Scene

I considered making toast for breakfast. Instead I ate half a chocolate bar and had four cups of coffee. I'm still in pajamas.

Part Three: Panic / First Response

In order:

• Sleep in
• Take a long shower
• Go for a walk
• Indulge long email threads with old friends
• Take the subway somewhere you've never been
• Read job listings in other career fields
• Flip through the dictionary, learn new words like feasance and outre
• Write a manifesto

Part Four: The Woods

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promissory notes to keep
And I have promissory notes to keep.

Part Five: Panic / Second Response

In no particular order:

• Take a class
• Get a dog
• Leave the city
• Leave the country
• Move to the country
• Enroll in grad school
• Get a houseboat
• Get an Airstream
• Get a horse
• Hike the back country
• Join the army
• Join the Peace Corp
• Join anything
• Start a magazine
• Start a novel
• Start a memoir
• Start a religion
• Finish something
• etc.

Part Six: Things That Sometimes Hold Me Back

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Seven: Capitalism

Capitalism is the system by which we (the capitalists) take whatever amount of initial wealth we are dealt (the capital), and then, by hook or crook, make our best effort to multiply this wealth through the opportunities afforded to us.

If one's wealth is zero, then no amount of opportunity will lead to more wealth: zero times anything is zero.

If one's opportunity is low, then no amount of initial wealth will lead to more wealth. Pursuing a poor opportunity (i.e., a multiplier < 1) may in fact lead to less wealth—even if it is the best opportunity available at the time.

The model is complicated by the fact that greater wealth leads to greater opportunity, and lesser wealth to lesser opportunity.

Part Eight: On Margarine

I considered making toast for breakfast. The making of toast presents a choice. One may:

1. apply butter to one's toast
2. apply margarine
3. leave one's toast as is

Butter is a bad choice, because it contains saturated animal fat, which leads to heart disease; and because it contains lactose, which is hard to digest.

Margarine is a bad choice, because it contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is high in cholesterol and is associated with cancer; and anyway, it tastes a little funny.

Dry toast is a bad choice, because it is not very satisfying, and one only eats breakfast once a day, so it should be satisfying.

Sometimes all of the choices are bad. Hence, I had half a chocolate bar.

Part Nine: Global Free Trade

The premise of global free trade is that, unfettered by local restrictions, we are free to choose from a wider set of capitalistic opportunities: if Country Y offer more opportunities to multiply one's wealth than Country X, logically one should pursue those opportunities with Country Y. One is "free" to "trade" loyalties and obligations, when presented with a better chance at greater wealth.

Thus, if one has the opportunity to flee a country, and leave the jurisdiction of one's massive debt, thereby breaking the promise to repay, for the sake of a fresh start, then this is simply holding with the premise of global free trade:

An outre solution: not submissive feasance; not irresponsible malfeasance; but legitimized non-feasance.

Part Ten: The Woods

In the deepest parts of the woods, there are no forking paths, because there are no paths. The eye looks at the spaces between the trees and, connecting them, imagines a path where there is none. We walk these imaginary paths, marching forward into the woods, unafraid, till something causes our faith to waiver; and then we wonder: Am I lost? Is this a path I'm on now? Or am I merely in the unconnected spaces between trees? Am I on a walk, or have I gone for a hike in the back country? This thing that I started, this thing that I am doing—is it something I can finish? Can I finish anything? When a path seems to fork, are any of the choices good ones? Or is there no path at all?

Ravel / Unravel 

Somewhat unique in the English language, the word "ravel" has the same definition as the word "unravel":

ravel: 1. to disentangle or unravel the threads or fibers of (a woven or knitted fabric, rope, etc.).
unravel: 1. to separate or disentangle the threads of (a woven or knitted fabric, a rope, etc.).

Additionally, each word also means its own opposite:

ravel: 2. to tangle or entangle. 3. to involve, confuse, perplex. 4. to make clear; unravel.
unravel: 2. to free from complication or difficulty; make plain or clear; solve. 3. to take apart; undo; destroy.

If there is (as some scientists suggest) a single unified theory that is capable of expressing all of the complexity of the universe in one simple formula, then this is it:

ravel = unravel

Koan of the Colander 

I have a blue sponge in one hand and a bright yellow colander in the other, and hot water pours from the faucet. I'm trying to rinse the colander free of soap bubbles. I try and try, but I can't rinse the colander, because the colander is designed to let the water pour through. The soap bubbles persist.

Then I realize: life is like that.

I pause for a moment to contemplate this, but the water keeps pouring out of the faucet, so eventually I return to scrubbing.

Eskimo Kiss 

I spent a few years in a relationship with a woman who, when she would call on the phone, I would address as "Lover." "Hello, lover," we'd say to each other. Now that we're no longer lovers, we don't quite know what to call each other. It's amazing how rarely people who are close actually refer to one another by name. It sounds unnatural.

Whether it's true or not, we all know that the Inuit have many words for snow: when a thing is important to one's culture, we find words to express its varieties of nuance.^*

Yet, we have only one word for "love."

I remember a couple years ago, I was out with a friend, and ran into the mother of an ex-girlfriend. We talked for a while, and when she left, my friend asked, "Who was that?" I remember struggling for the right phrase. "My ex-girlfriend's mom" would have been adequate, but it was so clinical, so geometric. What I really wanted to say was, "That was my former future mother-in-law."

In the end, I described her simply as "a friend."

---

* Whether it's true or not apparently comes down to some Bill Clintonesque logic: "In reality, the number of words depends on the definitions of Eskimo (there are a number of languages) and snow, and on the method of counting numbers of words in languages that have quite different grammatical structures from English."

Slow Leak from Parade Balloon 

On Thanksgiving (and most other days too), I'm aware and grateful that I am both lovable and loved—and that these things are, it turns out, no cure for the human condition...

Seeing Through Superman's Glasses 

The glasses make the man. Consider Superman: his eyesight is keen enough to see through walls and to make out details while flying faster than a speeding bullet—yet he chooses to spend much of his waking life¹ wearing glasses that he obviously doesn't need.

Why would Superman—why would anyone²—wear glasses that he doesn't need?

Will the Real Superman Please Stand Up

Does Superman put on his glasses to pretend to become Clark Kent? Or does Clark Kent take off the glasses to pretend to become Superman?

One argument, popularized by Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill:

A staple of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic that Superman stands alone.

Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S"—that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears—the glasses, the business suit—that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.

Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak… He's unsure of himself… He's a coward.

Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.

A counter-argument, provided by Superman himself, after revealing his identity to Lois Lane: "I'm Clark, the man you love. Superman is the creation. You named me, Lois."³

Superman Home Alone

One tries to imagine Superman after a hard day's work. His days are long: he averts plane crashes, bank robberies, warehouse fires, in a world with no shortage of violence or accident; and all the while, he maintains a separate, full-time career as a journalist for a major newspaper, working on intense deadlines—an occupation which, unto itself, is a sufficient workload to tire a mortal man.

How does Superman spend his free time? He'd get little joy from our pastimes. What fun would it be for him to play golf, say, if his every shot were an effortless hole-in-one? What point in going out drinking with friends, if he were immune to alcohol's delightful toxicity? (And anyway, does he have friends?) Vacations would hold little pleasure: why sit on a cramped airplane to Paris when he might have flown there himself in shorter time and with the wind in his hair? Then, on arriving, trying to enjoy a relaxing café on the boulevard, his super-hearing is sure to detect some robbery in progress, some accident waiting to happen, someone calling out in distress ("Sauvez-moi!").

No rest for the unwicked.⁴

How does Superman relax? And in these rare moments, is he Superman, or is he Clark Kent? Is he wearing the blue suit and the cape? Or is he wearing the glasses?

It isn't hard to imagine, really. The blue suit and the cape are for us, for our benefit, to reassure us that we are protected and served: Superman dons his uniform and plays his role, just like any cop, just like any doctor wearing scrubs, just like a short order cook, or a Wall Street banker, or a baseball player, or anyone who wears a uniform. But when Superman relaxes, he wears glasses: he wants to hide his alien features and blend in. He wants to be normal. He wants to disappear. When Superman relaxes, he wants to be one of us.⁵

---

1. Does Superman sleep?

2. Cf. Sarah Palin.

3. The best explanation I've heard for why no one ever recognized Clark Kent as Superman has nothing to do with the "disguise" of the glasses. Superman wore no mask; therefore, no one ever had any reason to believe he had an alter ego or secret identity. As Clark Kent, he could hide in plain sight, because no one was actually looking.

4. Cf. Fortress of Solitude.

5. Superman visits his adopted mother, Martha Kent, at her farmhouse in Smallville, Kansas. Here, sitting in the kitchen, with nothing to hide and no secrets to keep, he does not wear the blue suit or the cape. He wears the glasses. She calls him "Clark," and he is truly at home—as much at home as Superman could ever be.

Black Holes And Revelations 

Well, it's been great knowing you.¹ By the time you read this, we'll all be dead: while we sleep, the nuclear scientists at CERN will have flipped the switch at their shiny new super-collider, the "Large Hadron Collider," and—as I'm sure you've all heard—they will accidentally create a black hole that will destroy the Earth and life as we know it.

Not a moment too soon, if you ask me: we are stuck in the slowest of news cycles! Hurricane Gustav, expected to destroy New Orleans all over again, turned out to be a complete bust. And we're tired of talking about our other infamous national disaster: the one in the White House. Things are so slow on the news front that the press is actually entertaining the notion of Sarah Palin's qualifications for that job.²

We all like a good disaster, but come on.

That's the lesson here: whatever mysteries of the universe will be unlocked by the LHC, they will likely shed no further light on this simple fact of human psychology: we do like a good disaster. People are hungry for something terrible to happen, some gut-wrenching catharsis to break up the monotony—because it's the pity and fear that make us most human. Everyone writing about the "improbable" odds of a disaster at CERN is secretly excited by the prospect of one, just as the people who read those stories would be flattered to be so important as to live at the end of days.

It is inevitable, and we know it. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the tiny acorn contains the whole of the oak, then so too our own human nature must contain in it the seed of its destruction.

Tomorrow, scientists will flip the switch hoping for a glimpse of the "God particle," while the rest of us hope, more simply, for some terrible accident that will show us God.

---

1. Most of you.

2. The stories usually mention "moose hunting," and question whether or not her glasses are prescription. I personally don't believe they are. How good does your vision have to be to shoot something the size of a moose?

Romantic Idealism, pt. 4 

I've been considering Schopenhauer's somewhat despairing ideas about love—namely, that the "love" we feel is a pre-conscious, uncontrollable urge whose goal is to find us a partner who is biologically the most complementary—the partner who will best assure the genetic strength of our offspring. We intuitively understand our own weaknesses, and therefore we fall in love with the person most likely to correct these weaknesses in future generations.

So attraction, according to Schopenhauer, isn't based on any criteria we might rationally apply—smart, charming, kind, etc.—but rather based on incompatibilities. The ideal partner does not necessary complete us. The ideal partner might not even enjoy our company. The ideal partner is ideal because he or she completes our children.

Opposites attract.

It is, ironically, comforting to cede all of one's romantic decision making back to Nature, because it excuses behaviors that would otherwise be hard to explain—not least of which: why would we devote five years of our life to someone who is most of the time neglectful and isn't even particularly nice? For example.

Romantic Idealism, pt. 3 

Though he predates mobile telephony by a few decades, Barthes also writes something that accounts for the phantom ringing of the cellphone in my pocket: I want her to call so badly that my thigh periodically spasms in the exact spot where the phone sits, to mimic the feeling of its vibrating.

"Waiting is a delirium...." Barthes suggests. "I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg."

"Am I in love?," he asks himself. "Yes, since I am waiting."

The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

So much waiting.¹ I begin to wonder if I am in a relationship with the absence of her, rather than her presence. It is her absence with whom I have shared so much of my time. Maybe, then, it is her absence that I love...? And, so accustomed am I to this imaginary-her, this phantom limb, that the actual one becomes a kind of interloper, intruding upon our terrible privacy....

---

1. "A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. 'I shall be yours,' she told him, 'when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.' But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away."

Romantic Idealism, pt. 2 

There's an idea I remember (or, more likely, mis-remember) from Barthes, regarding the anxiety that comes at the end of a relationship: by the time you feel a fear of loss, you have already lost the thing that you are scared to lose.

(The thing that you are scared to lose—love—is sanctuary from fear.)

Anxiety is the panicky fear of an impending breakdown—but if you suffer from anxiety, then the breakdown has already occurred: your mind, scrambling for ways to avert the disaster (in this case, the loss of love), is already scrambled. Your joy and your peace of mind are already shattered.

So, in a way, there is no longer anything to fear.

Romantic Idealism, pt. 1 

Do I miss you, or just memories of you?

Philosophy teaches us that nothing is real: all sight and sound and smell and everything we experience is apprehended through the mind, and therefore, they are ideas. All our sensations must become ideas in order for us to feel them.

If that's the case, then what I miss right now is the idea of the sweet smell of your breath, and not the smell itself...

In Extremis 

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sometimes I wish that I had a terminal disease. I wish that I were sick and dying. I wish this because if I were sick and dying, people would like me more. They'd have to like me. They'd visit. They'd bring me flowers, and books to read, and prepared food, like potato salad, and I wouldn't be able to eat the food they brought, on account of my terminal illness; but I would say, "Thank you. It's the thought that counts." And I'd mean it, because the thought really is more valuable than the potato salad.

I wish that I were sick and dying because it would be the ultimate excuse for everything—for sleeping late, for going to bed early, for daydreaming, for doing so little with my time. I wish I had a terminal illness because it would forgive all my shortcomings, excuse all my failings. If I handled my illness with grace, then people would say, "He is so brave. He is so heroic," and if I handled it badly or selfishly, then people would understand: "Oh —he's in a lot of pain."

If I'm not dying, then what excuse do I have?

At the end, people would come to my bedside. They would say things about how I had affected their lives. They would forget any wrong I'd ever done them, and would remember me clearly as being someone better than I ever was. People don't speak ill of the dead:

Once I'm dead, I'm perfect.

Command Line Existential Crisis 

$ whatis whoami

Fortress of Solitude 

(This story appears in the February 2013 issue of Apocrypha and Abstractions.)

Chutes and Ladders 

PATIENT:      I just hope to God that death is the fucking end. I feel like I'm 80 years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.
DOCTOR:      That's a metaphor, not reality.
PATIENT:      It's a simile.
- Excerpt from Psychosis 4:48 by Sarah Kane

"Sometimes," he begins, "it's like I'm trying to build a ladder while I'm climbing on it. I have two long poles and a lot of short ones, for the rungs, and I have a hammer; and the first thing I have to do is hold these two poles upright, hold them parallel, and then join them together with the first rung. This is a very difficult job to accomplish by one's self—holding up the two poles, then situating the rung and hammering it into place. This is very hard. The poles keep slipping out of place. Assembling it takes strength, coordination and luck.

"I have none of these things.

"It would be an simple job if I had a lot of space, if I could lay the poles on the ground, if I weren't so crowded, if I could put it all together without having to fight against gravity, against physics. It would be an simple job if I had a friend or two to lend a hand.

"But I have none of these things.

"Once the first rung is in place, the two long poles are much easier to handle. The second rung will be hard but not as hard. Each new rung will make the ladder stronger but also put the tools, the hammer and pegs, more and more out of reach. Building a ladder while standing on it isn't easy. But the second rung is sure to be easier to affix than the first; and the third easier than the second; and each one easier after that.

"I know I could climb out of this, if only I could figure out that first rung."

Cloudscape 

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." - from "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sitting in that chair in the corner of my bedroom, and my hand is bleeding. The morning is quiet. The sun shines in through the window and casts the shadow of the pane onto my bed, and I can hear distant traffic, and feel a breeze coming in.

I'm watching the blood run down my hand onto my wrist, onto my arm, a bright red rivulet, so bright, shockingly bright, candy apple red, and I think, "This is so shockingly bright. This is the color of vivid, the color of vitality, and seeing this color, it is a memorable experience. What is happening now is special. It is unique."

The same thing happened yesterday.

I cut my hand two days ago, or maybe it was the day before that, and since then, every morning, when I get out of the shower, I sit in the chair in the corner of my room and I notice again that my hand is bleeding. I see the angle of the sun through the window, I hear far-away cars, feel the gentle breeze, and think that what is happening right now is unique, never having happened before or ever again, though it happened yesterday, and (one might conclude) it will happen tomorrow.

I watch the trickle of blood wind across my wrist and down my arm without fear or concern but only deja vu, as if I am stuck in a single point of time, while the world around me has continued to move and change, almost imperceptibly, like the passing of a cloud.

Right now—is it today or yesterday? And if this has all happened before, why should that make this moment any less unique? If time is truly infinite, then won't this all happen again—not just my bleeding in this chair, but the repetition of the bleeding, and the musing on it? And again and again. If the dimensions of the universe are as boundless as mathematics, then is there not someone else, somewhere else, doing this same thing, even now? And writing about it? Hasn't it all been written before? Even by me.

The bleeding stops, on its own, for now, and I go on about my day.

Long Division 

or, The Remainder

In the sometimes difficult arithmetic that is used to calculate love, perhaps no problem is more difficult to solve than this: at the end of love, where does the love go?

[Conservation of mass and energy would dictate that it must go somewhere: love is nothing if not massive and energetic.]

Two people come together, and then they are made separate again, by a kind of long division. But the equation doesn't balance: the two are divided, but there is a remainder, an amount that belongs to neither the one nor the other. An amount of loss.

What happens to the remainder?

Intro to Philosophy 

or, How Looking for Belief Can Lead to Believing Nothing

My life has been a series of apostasies, and I blame this on Norman Kretzmann.

Against the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I entered college as a philosophy major. My last year of high school had been a strange and spacious one: since I'd completed most of my requirements the year before, I took it upon myself to spend my senior year doing whatever I wanted, despite the diligent efforts of hall monitors and truancy officers. I was delinquent, but in the best possible way: if I skipped class, it was usually to work on a film I was shooting through most of that year, a sort of thesis project that (in my mind) gave me carte blanche to wander the halls, as long as I carried a camera. If I wasn't working on the film, then I was reading a book I'd stolen from an English teacher the year before, by Will Durant, called The Story of Philosophy.

People have romantic notions about philosophy, and the purpose of this book was to shatter all of those notions. People imagine the study of philosophy to be a lot of cloudy, heady and generalized musing about the meaning of life. But Durant's book was dry, dense, and merciless. He didn't care what you thought about the meaning of life. He cared only to explain the rigors of Spinoza and Schopenhauer—this, to high school students who would laugh at the word "monad" because it rhymes with "gonad."

Somehow, I found purchase there, in that book: I was unprepared for the mathematical precision that the discipline of philosophy required, but I did love the questions, and I would skim the dense passages over and over until I could understand them in their cloudy, heady, generalized forms: I loved philosophy in spite of itself.

I wound up at a college with a world-class philosophy department, and quickly discovered it was one of the easiest majors, requiring only thirty-two credits—just one class per semester. Since I'd just spent a year cultivating a love of free time and a disdain for requirements, it seemed a perfect match, and I declared my major immediately.

My first class: Philosophy of Religion, with Norman Kretzmann.

Kretzmann was famous in esoteric circles, but his celebrity (like that of most of my professors) was lost on me. Instead, I was excited by the subject matter. Young philosophers want to know, "How should we live?"—and it seemed to me that any discussion of religion would have to address this cloudy, heady, general question.

Instead, what happened, more of less, was this:

Kretzmann wrote two or three sentences on the blackboard, and amended the wording of them until the class could agree that they were true. Once he'd established these initial statements, he'd add to them, line by line, allowing us to argue at any point until we all agreed with what was written—so that the truth of each statement was airtight. Methodically, for an hour and a half, Kretzmann constructed a logical proof, and at the very end of class, exactly on cue, he'd arrive at the proof's conclusion.

On Tuesdays, he proved that God existed.

On Thursdays, he proved that God did not exist.

And it went back and forth like that for the entire semester.

I can't remember if the class ended on a Tuesday or a Thursday, or if, in the end, Kretzmann ever tipped his hand to reveal what he himself believed to be true. Belief, in the end, had nothing to do with it. Those sixteen weeks shattered all belief, and that must have been his intention: those proofs proved that you could prove anything. We were theists and atheists on alternate days, and after that, nihilists forever.

Structure from motion at equiluminance 

"If I'd known we were gonna cast our feelings into words, I'd've memorized the Song of Solomon." - Miller's Crossing

Memories are painted on acidic paper and in fugitive colors: they fade over time, so that things we once found beautiful might later disappoint us; things we cherished might fail to seem remarkable, till we can't remember what, exactly, we ever liked about them. Or disliked.

[Ask someone who is lonely what they miss: they miss a memory.]

The remembered thing, and the feelings evoked by the thing—once inseparably intertwined (like lovers)—begin to come apart. This is forgetting—because the thing, without the attached feeling, becomes an event only, not a memory. It signifies nothing.

So when we cling to a memory, we're clinging to a feeling, a feeling which we've tethered to an otherwise-insignificant event.

Sometimes we become so attached to that feeling—to the memory of the thing—that the thing itself, in all its original colors, is unrecognizable to us. We have assembled a set of points, put it in motion—and imagined a structure where there is none. We've created an optical illusion. And cling to it like a lover.

(Happy Valentine's Day.)

---

Fitter, Happier 

To help channel the anger that I've been piling up against the universe, this week I joined a gym—something I've avoided for most of my adult life (because it's "unnatural", "hamster-like", "depressing", "boring", and "smells like disinfectant").

There's a tautology in recounting the absurdity of the gym, so I'll make it quick, with just this one anecdote:

The "fitness consultant" whose job it was to sell me a membership I both wanted and also certainly did not want (I hate gyms) confided in me his preference for this particular location over another, larger club nearby. "Over there, they put the cardio machines on the fourth floor."

He didn't like walking up four flights of stairs en route to jogging in place for ten miles.

And I know what he means.

Every activity we do at the gym is merely a metaphor for an activity we might have done in the world outside the gym: biking, running, rowing, etc. These post-modern substitutes distinguish themselves from their real-world equivalents because they are designed specifically to accomplish nothing, to leave you exactly where you started. The absolute last thing that you would want, after running ten miles on a treadmill, would be to find yourself ten miles from the locker room.

When we "work out," we are doing "work," but only in the purely mechanical, physics sense of the word ("energy transferred by force"), and in no other sense.

And the only thing that allows us to do this with any regularity, without going crazy, is if we're able to put aside the ridiculousness of our situation.

In a perfect universe, I'd be getting all of my exercise from wholesome, natural, non-post-modern activities—from real work. But the universe isn't perfect; that's why I was getting so angry at it to begin with. That's what got me into this mess...

Reaching the Pegbox 

The thing is: you are not the primary agent of your life.

You think you are. After all, it's you who decides when to set the alarm, whether to add cream and sugar to your coffee, whether to take the scenic route to work.

But now and then, something happens. You stumble. The world that seemed so clear suddenly wavers in front of your eyes: a veil lifts, and you get a glimpse that things are in fact quite different than you like to assume. Your petty acts of will exert very little influence on the course of your life.

Maybe you had a near-car-accident and tasted your own mortality. Maybe your wife left you. Or maybe your sudden belief crisis was cued by something more subtle or invisible: maybe it was a song on the radio. Maybe you looked up at a flock of migratory birds, wondered where they were going, and suddenly lost faith in everything.

One thing is for sure: you are not the primary agent of your life. Other, stronger forces are at work. Some of them have names—gravity, economics, love. Some you can never and will never know. What you do know is that suddenly, everything that seemed so good is now spiraling out of control. You don't know what's what, what's important, what to believe. "If nothing holds fast," you ask yourself, "then what has value?"

You have discovered, quite organically, metaphysics.

You get the sense that your life is a tightly-strung violin, and your every act is intended to bring it into tune. But you can't reach the pegbox, and all you have at your disposal are the tiny screws on the tailpiece that allow you to make fine adjustments. Not very much control at all.

* * *

Ten years ago, I spent a week walking through the desert, thinking that I was dead—not that I was going to die (though that too was a distinct possibility), but that I already had. I became more and more convinced that I'd passed from this world, and wasn't even sure exactly when I'd crossed from one state into the other.

Death Valley is weird like that.

My brief walkabout into psychosis wasn't totally unplanned: after all, who goes into the desert except for some sort of spiritual revelation? Being dead explained many things, not least of all why, after so much effort spent, I still felt I had so little influence on the world around me:

Spirit can't touch body.

Eventually, I came back to the conclusion that I was alive—which meant there were whole other, still misunderstood reasons for my inability to affect change.

* * *

The Buddhists say that much of what we think of as reality is, in fact, illusion, and our confusing the one for the other causes us great suffering. They say that one can find happiness, but only when one stops wanting it, or wanting anything. The cessation of craving is the cessation of self: you must admit that you are not the primary agent of your life.

The cessation of craving, the cessation of self, is a kind of death.

To help remind themselves of this, they chant mantras, over and over, in Sanskrit.

Some say that God speaks Sanskrit, and that a chant spoken in Sanskrit offers truth in itself, without translation: one is already speaking the sound of truth, directly. But truth can't, won't, come in words (words being tied to particulars, to things, so the diametric opposite of omni-anything); truth, when it speaks, must speak in larger rhythms, in dialectics, in waves; and if one wishes somehow to speak truth, then one can't do it through understanding, but only un-understanding; through tearing down what we think we know; and through the mindful repetition of ... anything—a chant, perhaps, or the gravelly sound of footfalls in the desert, or the long drone of a single note from a violin. Focus on a single note, only, in relation to nothing but itself, and that note will never be out of tune. And you will disappear completely.

Incontrovertible Proof of the Existence of God  

God exists and I can prove it.

My proof is simple, elegant and easy to verify. It shows God is benevolent, and has engineered our world with intelligent design.

Spaghetti squash. You cook it, run a fork through it, and it turns into pasta—but healthy!

(Thank God.)

Smudge Stick 

You're feeling a bit out of place for some reason, but not in a bad way. Now is a good time to sit back and think about what the future holds—and how you can shift the odds in your favor. (Pisces horoscope, week of November 26)

"Christopher is wondering what comes next."

So reads the status line of my new Facebook profile, which I'm staring at from the computer in what was, until a week ago, the home office I used to telecommute for a Boston-based Internet shop. But I worked my last day a week ago, and now I don't know what to call this room, or how to use it.

I came into this room to smudge it clean, figuratively if not literally. But after clearing my desk, I feel leaden, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Instead, I stare at the computer screen, looking for inspiration, and when it doesn't come, I switch back to Facebook to play a game of Scrabble. Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

O brave new world.

* * *

Over the course of the week, I watch the flow of my email inbox trickle almost to nothing. It's typical: after applying some significant effort toward removing myself from the world, then I feel disappointment to be so quickly and easily forgotten. When I'm surrounded by people and their expectations, I want to retreat to a hermitage; and once I've achieved it, once I'm safely inside a hermetic seal, then I miss being at the center of things, and wonder why I'm so alone.

* * *

Hermetic. 1. Pertaining to the Greek god, Hermes. 2. Relating to or dealing with occult science, esp. alchemy; magical; alchemical. hermetic art, philosophy, science: names for alchemy or chemistry. Also, unaffected by external influences, recondite.

Alchemy, the science of transformation, dedicated to turning lead to gold.

Another week has gone by. I feel leaden, and I'm not sure how to proceed. Instead, I stare at the computer screen, looking for inspiration, and when it doesn't come, I switch back to Facebook, and read another horoscope. Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

"Christopher is wondering what comes next."

---

On the Veranda 

Part of her thought if she'd been able to just let go, the sheaves of renderings would have built themselves, harvest come home. Another delusion, no doubt. She knew she'd been grandiose, and didn't have much to show for it. She had committed that most American of sins: failed to move laterally.

- from Bruce Wagner's Memorial

It's going to be another one of those days, by which I mean frustrating. I'm staring at the computer screen, hitting "Refresh" every thirty seconds or so—as if inspiration of any sort ever comes via the Internet.

Sure. If I hit "Refresh" just this one more time, all my problems will be solved. My Inbox will suddenly overflow with love, affection, opportunity, wealth, challenges, self-confidence, and the answers to all my still-unarticulated questions. That's going to happen. (I mean, how big would that attachment have to be, exactly?)

I hit "Refresh." And when I'm not "Refreshing," I'm typing, using similar (if slightly better-founded) logic: that if only I keep typing—spewing words as fast as they pop into my head—then eventually, like the monkey at the keyboard, eventually, I'll have to stumble on to some wisdom.

And eventually, maybe I will.

But I'm not sure it's going to happen today.

* * *

My Zen archery teacher (yes, I had a Zen archery teacher) would talk about the importance, in Japanese architecture, of the veranda. Because of his pronunciation, vee-lan-da, it took me ridiculously long to realize what he meant. Actually, it took me ridiculously long to realize what he meant, because teaching Zen archery (kyudo) to a Westerner is a somewhat futile exercise. We harbor B-movie samurai fantasies about shooting things—but kyudo has almost nothing to do with shooting, or even bows, arrows, or targets. Rather, the study of kyudo is a kind of brain-washing through storytelling—and the bow is nothing but a set of stories, which, if used properly, might break some entrenched habits, and replace them with new ones.

In kyudo, you don't pull the bow string. You open the bow.

In kyudo, you don't shoot the arrow. While opening the bow, the arrow will release.

In kyudo, there is no target. (The word we used for "target" means "that fuzzy faraway thing.") An arrow might hit the ceiling and still have been the result of an excellent shot, depending on how it was released. In self-help parlance: you are the target.

All you have to do is let go.

* * *

A veranda is a space in between—neither inside not outside, neither here nor there. When you have left a place and have not yet arrived at the new place, you are on the veranda.

In my culture, in Western culture, we are encouraged to move quickly from one place to another, always to be on our way ... somewhere. We are encouraged to aim for a target, and to hit it, and if we do this, we have made a "good shot."

But in kyudo, the ceilings of the verandas are littered with arrows that strayed very far from that fuzzy faraway place called the "target". In kyudo, one is encouraged to take off one's shoes, kneel down on the veranda, and contemplate the path of these arrows, each of which might have been a "good shot."

Sometimes it's a good shot, even if it fails to move laterally. Sometimes you have to stay on the veranda, and be patient, so that you can know where to go next. Sometimes you have to let go.

Phenomena / Noumena 

Through a murky fog I can almost make out the shape of two worlds where I'd thought there was a single one.

The first, the clearer, more concrete of the two, is verdant with gratifying things: simple good things like good coffee, good music, good conversation with good people. Life in this world is easy, as if there's little gravity. This is the world we see and hear, the world we live in.

The second, concurrent world is harder to make out through the haze, heavier, full of things that are impossibly hard to hold—unattainable things—happiness, contentment, love. This is the world we know but can't see, the world where longing lives. ¹

The two worlds seem almost to overlap, but in fact never touch; and no quantity of the simple things can add up to even a single one of the unattainable ones. We collect our things, but in the end it's as if we have nothing at all...

(How antimonious.)

1. Kant would probably not have considered "love" in his proof of transcendental idealism -- but shouldn't he have? This is knowledge we have, a priori, more than any morality or mathematics: "How do you know if you're in love?" "You just know." Etc.

The Internet is Evil 

or, the Tragic Pleasure of Pity and Fear 2.0

I've said it before and I'll say it again: in a world as big as ours, I'm amazed people are even as nice to each other as they are. That's why I find Web 2.0 and all of its resultant buzzwords so encouraging: all of this "social networking" is making us "collectively intelligent," and helping us find our "affiliations" on the "long tail."

So why is it, every time I surf the Internet, I find people socially networking at one another's expense? I found this clip the other day, from a British radio show—something I'd never have found before Web 2.0.

I've played it over and over and I can't stop: it offers too many kinds of awful, all in one place, to turn away.

This is high drama of the Internet Age, with all the formal structures of classic tragedy—her squeaky expectant hope ("What sort of ring?") shows a kind of innocent nobility, but is followed immediately by the reveal of her tragic flaw ("How much is it worth?"); then, the drawn-out anticipation of the episode ("I'm so in love with him... I can't wait to get married and have babies."), and finally the terrible reversal and recognition: she's knocked speechless by the radio host ("Wha-?"), and stays on the line while pilloried across Yorkshire and the World Wide Web—"Everyone knows you're a dirty little tart."

But for all the spectacle of this poor girl's tragedy, don't forget to save some pathos for the boyfriend (who chose to end a four-year "perfect" relationship not with a conversation, but instead via a radio show proxy), and for the radio DJ, too, who has made this his life's work.

If the power of catharsis comes in part from fear that these events could befall us, as well as the protagonist, then I am afraid of playing any of these roles, and this is cathartic times three.

Bardo 

or, Brush Up on Your Buddhism, pt. 1

For no reason, I've been waking around dawn, so that without any planning, I've managed to see the sun rise every day of this new year – the anticipation of the day ready to begin, but not quite. If the day is when things happen, then I've been witness to the time just before.

And that is how I feel.

Buddhism describes a "bardo" as a temporary, transitory state – a time between things. According to this tradition, our entire lives are a bardo state, the Bardo of Existence, followed by the Bardo of Dying and the Bardo of Rebirth. Because, in each of these states, we are not quite at one with our "true nature", a bardo is essentially a time of confusion, a time we spend learning the rules to a changing game that we grow to think of as "reality."

And that is how I feel.

There are bardos within bardos; I am in the Bardo of Boston, during which I form a set of hopes and dreams that will quickly be made irrelevant as I move into another transient place; since we never know when we will move from one bardo to another, all we can do is prepare, and also learn to accept the transience of things, and confusion.

And that, too, is how I feel…

Happy new year.

---

Solipsist in a Hall of Mirrors 

My Saturday starts in a stunned stupor. I'm so unsettled by the relentless week I've had that my first thought upon waking: "Where am I?" Layers of fatigue and frustration have turned into actual aches and pains, and also the feeling that I've misplaced ... something.

I wake stunned and stupefied and can't quite start my day. It's 7am when I get out of bed but 1pm by the time I manage to leave the apartment.

Where does the time go?

* * *

The thing I've misplaced is knowing what I want—that pocket-sized stone around which to wrap my hand in moments of flagging faith, to verify, There it is!, yes, still there, solid, in my palm. That tangible rock-solid something I believe. That gemstone. That old thing.

I've misplaced it.

* * *

Dissociation, they call it. An almost out-of-body experience. Feelings dis-associated from cause, detached from object or subject, rattling around inside my head, going nowhere. They are the ghosts of feelings, not even feelings themselves. They're too numinous to dispel and too wispy to believe. I'm a solipsist in a hall of mirrors.

* * *

"Try to remember what it felt like," he said, "before you learned to dissociate"—and I laughed out loud at the impossibility of it, and the irony, as if: "Doctor, I've lost my keys.", and he asks, Where were you when you lost them?

* * *

I think of an old friend who sometimes reads this blog, who once said of it, "It's impressive—all those words. How do you write so many?" As if the goal were volume, as if I were paid by word count. Whereas the real trick, as I see it, is how not to write every last mangled, tangled thought that pops into my head (as I'm doing now): how do I write so few?

"How are you?," asks another friend, but I can't answer, now or ever, because beneath that question is another hidden one, a riddle that leaves me stunned and stupefied:

"What do you want?"

Lost (We Are) 

I've watched only the first few episodes of ABC's hit series, Lost—that's the one where forty-seven survivors of a plane crash are stranded on a tropical island—and I'm already seeing it as the moral allegory of our time.

One joy of this show is imagining it's happened to you. If I found myself on a deserted island with nothing but my carry-on bag, I'd be forced to survive with a couple t-shirts, a bottle of Aveda leave-in conditioner, and a set of electronic devices (iPod, BlackBerry, and, on my last flight, even an Xbox) which would probably be out of power because I'd have used up the batteries on the plane. The last square meal I've had would have been those two packets of unsalted pretzels and that half-can of Diet Coke I was given once we'd reached cruising altitude.

The odds would be stacked against, is what I'm saying.

Once I pull myself and my carry-on out of the wreckage, I would bring all of my skills to bear to help us survive—valuable life skills such as the ability to differentiate between various Highland scotches and Kenyan coffees. (I prefer French Kenyan AA for its low acid content, though it's a lighter roast than I usually enjoy.) I consider myself a practical man: I can thread a film projector and run a sound mixing board, replace a computer's video card and logic board, work a hand saw and a power drill, drive stick, drive a motorcycle, drive a Zamboni—skills which will be of absolutely no use to me or the other survivors.

That is where the morality play begins. It matters what is of use to the other survivors. When I got on the plane, I didn't have any reason to care about the person sitting next to me, except insofar as hoping he doesn't have stinky feet. Now my life depends on him.

In the context of a city, where I can shop for Kenya AA coffee at half a dozen places within a few blocks of my apartment, I don't have a single reason to care one iota about anyone (except maybe my barrista). In New York City, there are over five million people. That guy you just bumped into in Times Square? You'll never cross paths again. That old lady looking for a seat on the subway? You could give her yours, but why? You will never see her again.

You might as well keep the seat for yourself.

You might as well spit on her shoe.

You might as well knock her over.

It's amazing we're all as civil as we are.¹

People, I reason, aren't made for cities. We're hard-wired to live in villages, caves, islands—communities small enough that actions have implication. If we have to share a cave, you and I, well, then it's probably worth the effort it takes to work out our differences. I'm probably not going to sleep with your wife, because sometime next week or next year, I'll need you to save me from a polar bear.

Lost reminds us that our actions have implications, and that it's worth it to work out our differences. ²

1. I'm not advocating that you knock the old lady over. In fact, if you do, I imagine you'll find yourself getting knocked over yourself, when the rest of the subway car rises to her defense. Boston is a notoriously unfriendly city; but people are also often surprised to discover how friendly New Yorkers are. They're surprised because they misunderstand what New York is. It's not an enormous metropolis of five million people; it's a vast collection of small towns that butt right up against one another. (I might not see that guy who bumped into my in Times Square, but I'll certainly see the guy who runs the bodega across the street.)

2. I just made it to the episode where they torture one of the people in their "village" with bamboo under the fingernails, so I might wind up back-pedaling on the "moral beacon for our times" thing.

2 

"If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it."

- Jean Cocteau

On the one hand, the need to be special, exemplary, one set apart. A strong tower rising above the landscape.

On the other hand, the need to belong, to have a sense of place, of community, of family. A low, sprawling city. A litter of puppies and me in the middle.

Day and night. East and west. Yin and yang. Uniqueness, and belonging.

* * *

Dialectic: the contradiction between a pair of opposites: an argument and a counter-argument; a thesis and an antithesis. The two valances stand in tension until they resolve into a third thing, a cohesive synthesis: a birth. A collides with B to make C. Dialectic implies resolution.

Dichotomy: the contradiction between a pair of opposites: two discrete parts, one sitting here, the other there. The two valances stand in tension, tugging at each other in a swirl of friction and gravity. A collides with B, B collides with A, to make ... collision. Conflict. Dichotomy implies no resolution.

It is the difference between soluble and insoluble: Add water, watch it melt. Add water, watch it sink.

It's the difference between solvable and unsolvable.

* * *

Funny the way fairy tales get stuck in our heads when we're children, cementing our world view before we have any real tools of reason or judgment: the lonely hero who can never share his secrets, who can never be fully understood, who longs for a "normal" life but would never trade the one he has, the one in which he gets to live in his fortress of solitude, and think he is special, exemplary, set apart.

Work 

n. nautical. to sail against the wind.

A co-worker asked me to lunch, and when I said "No thanks," she replied, "Why? Because there will be people there?"

Which made me like her even more than I already did.

But I still didn't eat lunch with her...

* * *

n. physics. force acting upon an object to cause displacement.

Someone at work just told me I'm "more blunt and less charming" than my usual
self today. When I told her to "Fuck off," three people turned around like there was about to be a fight.

Can't anyone take a joke?

* * *

n. fine arts. a creation, such as a song or a painting.

"Chris, what are you doodling?"

"Oh, it's nothing. It's ... a little duck."

"You mind paying attention to our meeting?"

Well, since you asked...

* * *

n. religion. a moral or righteous act or deed.

"The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery."

Note to Self: when you start quoting Marx in the office, it's probably time to call it a day...

The Aesthetics of Emotional Minimalism 

or, How to Disappear Completely

"Hey!" calls out a co-worker. "You're wearing a blue shirt!"

She's making fun of me. I always wear a blue shirt. Except when I wear a gray sweater.

"It's a good color for you," she goes on. "It brings out your eyes."

Blue does bring out my eyes. But that's not why I wear it. I wear it because it helps me disappear completely, a goal I've been working on for years, and one which I think I've very nearly achieved.

* * *

I just wound up watching Garden State again. I'm a sucker for movies about crazy people. In this one, the main character, Andrew Largeman, has been on a potent blend of Zoloft and lithium for all of his adult life, and it's left him completely numb: in the movie's opening scene, he dreams he's on an airplane that's about to crash. While the passengers sob and cling to each other in desperate fits, Largeman sits impassively sipping his ginger ale, in silent slow motion.

It frightens me how familiar this seems to me. And I'm not even on anything.

* * *

"Good morning! How are you today?"

Why do you always have to start the day with the hard questions?

* * *

I haven't had posters or decorations of any kind for at least five years. If people ask, I explain that it's because I move around a lot: objects—decorations—have gotten lost to nomadic attrition. But that's not why. Really, it's the same reason I stare at my closet for ten minutes each morning, trying to decide, "Blue shirt, or gray sweater?" It's the same reason I can't pick a restaurant, the same reason I go into near panic when it's time to get my hair cut. It's probably the same reason I move around so much.

I don't know who I am.

* * *

In philosophy, the study of aesthetics is considered a sort of kissing-cousin to the study of ethics, because both should follow logically from whatever you believe about the world, from your cosmology. This underlying belief dictates why you behave the way you behave, and why you like the things you like. It determines what is good and what is bad.

It's been said that I lack discernable moral focus.

* * *

When you don't know who you are, every outfit is a costume. Every interaction is a role-play. The only way to be yourself is to be generic, to be as friendly and safe and innocuous and evasive as possible, to dress in non-colors like gray. The only way to make the right decisions is to decide nothing.

The only way to be comfortable is to disappear completely...

---

Metaphors in a Nutshell (or, The Philosophy of C#)  

I've tried to maintain, here and elsewhere, that it's possible to have a "humanities" heart trapped in a computer geek's body, and I've recently found a kindred spirit over at O'Reilly & Associates, publishers of such fun reads as XSLT and ColdFusion in a Nutshell, who it turns out have a surprisingly philosophical bent.

I curled up with Learning C#, a primer to Microsoft's programming language, and I came across this section in one of the early paragraphs:

"Of course, all of the objects of your program are just metaphors for the objects in your problem domain."

Then a boxed-out section:

Metaphors

Many of the concepts used throughout this book, and any book on programming, are actually metaphors. We get so used to the metaphors that we forget they are metaphors. You are used to talking about a window on your program, but of course there is no such thing; there is just a rectangle with text and images in it. It looks like a window into your document so we call it a window. Of course, you don't actually have a document either, just bits of memory. No folders, no buttons—these are all just metaphors.

There are many levels to these metaphors. When you see a window on the screen, the window itself is just a metaphor enhanced by an image drawn on your screen. That image is created by lighting tiny dots on the screen, called pixels. These pixels are lit in response to instructions written in your C# program. Each instruction is really a metaphor; the actual instructions that are read by your computer are in Assembly language, low-level instructions that are fed into the underlying computer chip. These Assembly language instructions map to a series of 1s and 0s that the chip understands. Of course, the 1s and 0s are just metaphors for electricity in wires. When two wires meet, we measure the amount of electricity, and if there is a threshold amount we call it 1, otherwise 0. You get the idea.

Good metaphors can be very powerful. The art of object-oriented programming is really the art of conceiving of good metaphors.

Text from Learning C# by Jesse Liberty.

Faultline 

I've spent too much time lately worrying about my upcoming move, the Boston apartment that fell through, the end of a job, the beginning of a job, what all of it means for the relationships I have in New York, worrying about the demise of my cellphone, worrying about a going-on-nine-month sinus infection—in short, worrying about things that aren't particularly worth worrying about.

It took a family emergency—not even my own familiy, or my own emergency—to put all of my more menial worries into a proper perspective.

No matter what I do to remind myself that nothing lasts, I keep trying to plan, keep trying to build, keep trying to predict the future, always forgetting that underneath our lives there's that faultline that makes everything unpredictable, unstable...

Brownout 

New York suffers slowly through its heat wave: the air conditioners sputter and spit, and finally the lights flicker, dim, and go out—a momentary blackout that knocks out the Internet connection and seems to have done some more permanent damage to my computer. (There goes the aggregator, again…) And when the Internet goes, so too my hobbies. What in the world is a fella to do?

What is it about these low-tech nights that feel so monastic, anyway? I've felt monkish ever since that first blackout—when was that, a week ago? Even with the candles, it was too dark to work, too hot to play. I spent the night sitting on my bed, just listening. You could call it "meditating" if that didn't sound so, well, meditative.

The next day I read a magical, soulful book by Naguib Mahfouz, and since then I've been phrasing everything in my head as some kind of pilgrimage, some kind of vision quest. It's how I've started framing my upcoming move to Boston—alternately as a crusade (to conquer the Internet? the future? the debt?), or a monastic retreat—long nights in a city of strangers, nothing to do but look inside myself. (Really, though, I don't doubt I'll be plenty apt at inventing distractions.)

With all this pseudo-religion in the back of my mind, I guess I shouldn't be surprised a friend was able to talk me into a detox/fast. Ten days of nothing but a noxious potion of maple syrup, lemon juice, and laxatives. Whatever. What do I have to lose? It's been months since I felt healthy, and even if it doesn't turn around my constitution, at least I'll fit a little better into my jeans. They've been pinching a little lately around the waist.

In truth, though, I wonder if I'll last a day. I wish the desire to believe were the same as belief itself, but I don't think it is. Like the electricity around here, my piety and passion come in fits and starts—not reliable, doing some harm as well as good. All I want is energy, clarity. Light. (And an Internet connection...)

Dharma.com 

"The world is full of suffering. Birth is suffering, old age is suffering, sickness and death are sufferings. In fact, life that is not free from desire and passion is always involved with distress. This is called the Truth of Suffering."

I got it in my head that I needed a new computer. As if the four I currently own weren't enough. Through some feat of acrobatic logic, I justified this need to myself as "minimalism": only by purchasing a new, more powerful computer could I hope to consolidate my needs into a single machine. If I buy the one, I'd be free of the four. Or so I reasoned.

I moved money from column A to column B; I counted what was in the bank; I shook the piggy bank to its core. But there wasn't enough money, and there wouldn't be any time soon. If I wanted this new computer—and remember, I needed the new computer, for some reason or another—I'd have to sell off my four old computers before buying the new replacement...

"The cause of human sufferings is undoubtedly found in the thirsts of the physical body and in illusions of worldly passion. Desire seeks that which it feels desirable. This is called the Truth of the Cause of Suffering."

The laptop's the only one of these clunkers worth anything; it's also the one that'd be hardest to be without. Still, if I sell the laptop, then the new computer is nearly within reach. And once I have the new computer, all will be well. All of my trouble and dissatisfaction will pass away, so powerful is this new computer.

I found a buyer for my laptop; the stars were coming into alignment; soon, the new computer would be mine.

"If desire, which lies at the root of all human passion, can be removed, then passion will die out and all human suffering will be ended. This is called the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering."

Why oh why, dear laptop, won't you power up today? Wherefore this flashing question mark? Why the raspy thumping noise coming from the vicinity of your hard drive?

Why oh why did I let your warranty expire?

Ah, the best laid plans of trackpads and men.

"In order to enter into a state where there is no desire and no suffering, one must follow a certain Path. This is called the Truth of the Noble Path to the Cessation of the Cause of Suffering."

Maybe I didn't need a new computer, after all....

(Text from The Teachings of Buddha, by Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai)

---

Things They Don't Teach You in Art School (Part One)

Wherein Chris Goes Against the Dharma, Buys and Installs a Replacement Hard Drive, and Restores Hope to His Desperate Greedy Pipedream to Buy a New Computer

This was performed by a trained stuntman. Please do not try this trick at home.

��

Fewer / Farther Between 

I'd like to start with a public "Thank you" to the people who have expressed concern that my blog posts are becoming less frequent. (Yes, there were several people. Okay, two.) How flattering. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but I think what you really meant to ask is, "Why are your good blog posts becoming less frequent?"

Truth is, all of this was anticipated years ago:

The sheer variety and volume of completed projects indicates a restless and determined spirit. Chris's tendency to take on multiple commitments is commendable insofar as it has enabled him to develop expertise in a range of genres. However, it may also been symptomatic of an as-yet underdeveloped sense of inner direction and/or conviction—a larger sense of what he's writing for.... There seems to be a knot of still only partially resolved or half-articulated issues and conflicts at the core of his writing that may still be inhibiting Chris's full-blooded exploration of his manifest talent for arranging words artfully on the page....

To resort to an older, no longer fashionable critical vocabulary, the absence of a discernable moral focus may prevent Chris—at least for now—from generating work with a strong, recognizable signature, or from realizing his considerable potential as an artist of note. (Hebdige, 1997)

Well, there you have it. I couldn't have said it better myself. Rest easy, gentle reader, that I am indeed looking for my moral focus. If only I could remember where I was when I used it last....

Narcissus 

Birthdays. Everybody has 'em, but everybody has 'em different. Seems like the world sorts into two kinds of folk: the people who smile big when the waitress comes along with the cupcake singing the birthday song, and the people who want to crawl under the table. I wonder if a person's reaction to the birthday song is a kind of "tell" that reveals something about their inner nature (just like it's a kind of "tell" to watch someone in the moment after they trip).

I wonder if it's a kind of tell that I was not at all excited about my thirty-fourth birthday, or that, when the "big day" came, I didn't leave my apartment, didn't answer the phone, in fact actively avoided everyone. I wonder if it's a tell if I admit that, at some point in the early afternoon, I peeled down, stood in front of mirror, and stared at myself, to see what I've become.

It's different than I expected.

I had a teacher once who used an exercise she called "going to the mirror," which involved nothing more and nothing less than, well, going to a mirror. A dozen of us spent ten minutes or more staring at our own faces in a giant dance studio mirror, and we did this maybe once a week for four months. When we "went to the mirror," no tasks were given and no explanation was ever offered. So we'd stare...

The eye gravitates to imperfections: "My lips are chapped. My tooth is crooked. My eyebrows are so long." But eventually it gets tired, tired of skipping around, flitting from freckle to frown, and it just stares—the eye stares at itself, and it stares back. Perfection, it turns out, isn't real; it's the imperfections, the asymmetries, that separate one face from another. I am my imperfections.

"Who am I?" I'm looking into my mirror and I'm imagining other me's, younger me's, past me's, thinner and fatter, full of so many different kinds of hope. There are a thousand me's in my memory, but I don't know how we're connected, or if at all. They're strangers, and they wouldn't know me if they saw me. We have so little in common, me and them. They're each so perfect, in their own way. But me, I am older; I am asymmetrical; I am dispassionate and naked in front of a mirror, staring at old images of who I think I was, and wondering, Are they the echo, or am I?

Identity Theft 

Here are a few biographical lines about Chris DeWan:

After some important years spent in Pennsylvania, Chris graduated from a well-reputed school on the East Coast and then found his way to California. He spent some time dabbling in the arts and in theatre, before committing to a career as a computer programmer and web developer, working for Apple Computer. An avid cyclist who has competed on occasion, he has also been known to color his hair, and sport various body piercings.

All of these things are true of me, but I'm writing them about the other Chris DeWan, Bizarro Chris DeWan, my doppelganger, whom I have never met. We came dangerously close once, probably as close as ten feet, at a party in Cupertino. I sipped a beer with my left hand, and he, like a mirror, with his right. He knew I was there. There was only a table of shrimp cocktail between us.

What happens when matter and anti-matter collide?

It's unnerving to have a double, worse than the worst Citibank "identity theft" ad—unnerving not because people unwittingly fall for the ruse, but because there is no ruse. Somewhere, out there in the world, there is another Chris DeWan—not simply a namesake (which would be inevitable), but another one of me. Presented with an almost infinite number of life's forking paths, his and mine crossed as soon as our names were etched on our birth certificates, and have continued to do so, often—even yesterday, when a friend of mine visited his blog instead of mine: "Weird how long it took me to realize it wasn't you; he works at Apple and seems sort of crazy in a funny way."

Philip Roth had Operation Shylock; I have Operation Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Of course it's all much ado about nothing. He and I will continue to live in peaceful co-existence, parallel but separate lives. We will act freely, make independent choices, and they will probably be the same. This will continue to muck up search engines until gradually, our identities according to Google have become one. I wish us both the best.

P.S. Kudos to Chris DeWan
According to Google, Chris DeWan is the Belvidere High School Athlete of the Week for golf, plays in a band, and is one of Los Angeles' hottest young indie actors. He has published photography of Glacier National Park, organizes Civil War re-enactments, and writes capsule reviews for Butterfly Books. He is a straight A student who has high expectations of himself and those around him. He is twelve years old, is in the seventh grade, and plays basketball. Congratulations, Chris!

Disaster, Guilt, and Convergence of the Twain 

I liked my life better when I was a regular reader of the LA Weekly, and one reminder why came this week from John Powers, a columnist at the paper. His thoughtful reflection, "A Drop in the Ocean," is introduced by a Susan Sontag quote:

Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt.

before diving, teeth gnashed, for Big Media's jugular:

TV may not have a clue how to cover the death of a famous intellectual, but an epochal tsunami sure makes it feel right at home. Within hours of last week's calamity in Asia, the cable networks had already launched into megadeath overkill. CNN gave its coverage the tag line "Tsunami Disaster" (replacing its initial attempt, "Asia Tsunami," which sounded more like a porn actress than a catastrophe).

and then going after not only the First but also the Third World:

As we wallow in how incomprehensible the tragedy was, it's worth remembering that we can explain why tens of thousands lost their lives. There are the Thai authorities who, having apparently studied DVDs of Jaws to see how to do it wrong, didn't release warnings of possible trouble because it was the height of the tourist season. There are the slipshod Asian governments that, despite the area's famously dangerous fault lines, never spent the $20 million or so it would take to install the kind of tsunami detectors that monitor the Pacific Ocean. And, of course, there are the wealthy elites of South and Southeast Asia who, greedy for all the spoils of modernity, remain content to let most of their fellow citizens live without proper roads, proper shelter, proper communications.

If you like, read the full article. And read the LA Weekly, a pure, beautiful Cinderella compared to its ugly stepsister, The Village Voice.

Automobiles, Bombs, and Movies! 

"Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.... It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop."

As our elections fall more and more into the domain of a "media ritual," how much they are governed by the same (market) forces described in Adorno / Horkheimer's conception of the "Culture Industry"...?

Discuss.