October 21, 2020

The First Part:

Stolen away from the mundane passage of time, 
I was seized by a vision of the world:
Frothing dust, busying itself with itself. 

Cosmos reduced to a gray void.
Time and eternity congealed to flat slate. 

The Second Part: 

From the slate-gray void,
there formed a speck. 
A deeper void within the void. 

The speck was black.
And its name
was desire. 

The Third Part:

Desire was negative,
A selfish locus,
A lonely eddie.

...

There was a fallen sparrow on the side walk on my walk home from the gym this morning.

I think it was a sparrow.

...

I spent my late morning in Bothell, thirty minutes away from home, drinking a small latte at a cafe. I was to meet a man named Ron. I arrived over an hour early and plugged away at pre-algebra lessons online. We first met at a small gas-station-and-diner off of Highway 2 somewhere near Wilbur or Davenport when I rode the bike to Spokane a few weeks back.

I thought we were to meet for coffee. Turns out he owns an office building next to the cafe and he's frugal about his coffee. (You can't get rich and drink a latte on the daily, supposedly.)

We spoke for thirty minutes. I told him my goal: A house in the country, some land, a big vegetable garden, five motorcycles or so, chickens, 2-3 kids, etc. 

And in a long series of words, he told me about his wealth and how he would help me become wealthy. I'm not sure he used the world "wealthy." Rather, he talked about my potential success in vague terms. He says he sees potential in me; and he said something about some wells having more oil than others.

He's quite the salesman. But I'm not sold. 

He gave me a book called Success, written by the editor/publisher of Success Magazine. I skimmed through its platitudes. 

He said two things that I remember and have not been able to successfully purge from my head this late evening before I sleep: 

1. There's a war going on in this country: those who are free individuals and those who want to take that freedom away from us.

2. I never sent my kids to school. I don't believe in what they teach. My son is a successful business owner. 

Point 1: This is a naive American-conservative, or perhaps more accurately, libertarian platitude.

Point 2: If skipping college means becoming infatuated with self-help books with titles like Success, then I am glad I went to school. While I think there's a lot of bullshit in school, I am still convinced that learning the humanities in school can impart a deep sense of value that cannot be found anywhere else. Philosophy, poetry, history, literature, music—these are the deepest foundations of our culture; school is a good place to learn about these.

There are many successful self-made businessmen, but I would bed good money that the best businessmen and the majority of above average businessmen have secondary and post-secondary education. 

I don't see eye to eye with Ron.

...

My voters pamphlet sits beside my computer as I type this. I am looking at it with tired and ambivalent eyes.

...

October 15, 2020

I feel flat today. I have spent the day at the living room table with my computer, a pen, and grid paper for simple math. My brain is going extra slow. Yesterday was busy—heavy lifting at the gym, a hike, followed by a ride and an evening with a few friends that ran far too late. I woke up at 11am today; I don't remember the last time I slept in this late. Khan Academy has gone slowly today, with many trivial mistakes.

...

My vision is scabbed over with a gray film.
Streaks of red break through.

A voice says: Don't stare at the sun. 

...

Went to the barber and got a haircut on Tuesday. Had a long conversation with my barber. Covered much ground on a non-physical plane. Something was said about 3rd eyes being pried too far open.

"Dark night of the soul," he said.

"Black implies white," I said.

"I needed to hear that," he said.

It is a quote by Alan Watts that I now find meaningless and trivial, I thought to myself sitting in the barber's chair with bits of hair caught in my mask tickling my nose.

Deepest metaphors sound like nonsense to reasonable persons: alchemy is nonsense, They say. They are not wrong.

...

Forgot to mention: everything makes music. —Any of it can be beautiful, but not much of it is beautiful; this is proof that the gods are amoral and they have their favorites. 

...

Beauty is a virtue. But any virtue may be paired with vice—that is, paired with the bad. 

Did Socrates ever say anything about The Bad Life? He had a lot of questions about the good life. I wonder if he ever used the phrase, "the bad life."

Good is rare—the exception.

...

I realized that cleaning shares important things in common with resting: When you rest, you repair your body, and when you clean, you repair your environment.

If you rest or clean in the right way, it can be enjoyable. Alternatively, either can be stressful: rest can be stressful suspense, and cleaning can feel harmonious and valuable (still working on learning to enjoy the latter). 

October 11, 2020: Against Voting the way They Tell You To

 I'm not convinced that I should vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate in this upcoming election. Douglas Adams captured this idea here nicely in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: 

“[Ford said] ".. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur. "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going in for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in.”

South Park captured this idea again in 2004.

Now, like most people, I think there is a less-evil primary candidate.

But at this point, I do not intend to vote for that candidate.

Why? —Well, that's not too straight forward. 

First, I would like to address an obvious objection. 

Many people—people on either side of our increasingly growing political divide—will say, "If you vote 3rd party or don't vote at all, then you're responsible for the more-evil candidate to gain power, and you will be just as responsible as a wrong voter for enabling the evil actions of the most-evil-candidate. Whatever the most-evil-candidate does, you will share the blame too. It is wrong not to vote for the lesser of two evils."

Well, I disagree. 

Though, I must admit that I am disagreeing in spite of common sense. Common sense says that I have two options—pick the one that is least-evil-and-most-likely-to-win. 

But the value that I see in my least-evil-and-most-likely-to-win is insufficient. Metaphorically speaking, my candidate is a lizard. Why would I vote for a lizard?

A person on either side might say to me, "But you're just thinking about yourself. You need to look at the bigger picture: innocent people will suffer and our country will go to hell if the least-evil-and-most-likely-to-win candidate loses."

I struggled with my potential moral blame. Surely the least-evil-and-most-likely-to-win candidate will cause less suffering.

But then I realized something. I was facing a moral argument. And like most moral arguments, it is a line of reasoning that has been around for a long time. The way I see it, telling someone to vote for someone that they don't fully support because if they don't they will be morally culpable for the wrongs of the more-evil-and-most-likely-to-win candidate is a form of consequentialism. 

I am not a consequentialist. 

According to google/Oxford Languages (whatever that may be), consequentialism is the doctrine that the morality of an action is to be judged solely by its consequences.

A more thorough definition can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Consequentialism.

My argument against consequentialism is as quick as it is dirty. It is an argument from epistemology, and it goes like this: 

We may know the first and perhaps second order consequences of our actions. But it is more difficult to know the third and fourth order effects, and even more difficult to know the fifth and sixth order effects. This is because every action sends out endlessly interweaving causal chains. So, we do not—we cannot—know wrong from right based on consequence alone. 

Examples are many and frange from obvious to absurd: Give a hungry person bread and they may choke on it; cut somebody off in traffic, and you may prevent them from running over a pedestrian who is on his way to murder a future industrial tycoon who would bring about total environmental destruction.

This is not an argument for moral nihilism or ethical skepticism. I do think we can know right from wrong. But trying to intuit the consequences of our actions alone is not enough. 

And what that means to me is that it is not morally wrong to vote for a good candidate even if he or she will lose. 

But why violate common sense? Well, first off it would be nice to escape our two-party rule, and voting for independents and other parties is an attempt at going in that direction. But I have no intention of making a pragmatic argument. This is must more important than that. Listen closely:

Consider that your vote is not merely a bean in a jar that is to be weighed en mass.

Your vote is a sacred form of self expression. It is a political act. It is an exercise of power—your power. 

There is something metaphysically important about your vote. Do not just give it away. It is neither a token nor commodity. It is your will and power.

But they will tell you otherwise: They will reduce your vote and power to a mere means—the end of which you will not benefit from.

Our mass failure to understand the metaphysical significance of our vote is partially why we're here—voting between lizards.

I warn you though—the realization of your political power is as profound as it is both infuriating and lonely. 

....

It's Sunday afternoon. I could be on my Switch playing Hades or Diablo 3. Instead, I'm here sitting at my dining room table, looking out of a raindrop-dotted window, writing. I am writing for no significant audience. A few friends gratuitously and kindly read my posts.

So why am I here? 

Well, I can't think of anything better, so this will have to do. It orders my mind, gives me a sense of earned peace.

I'm writing for myself.

Moreover, I am frustrated by politics. I have not found a politician that remotely represents my views. So, what else is there to do? If I merely sit around my frustration grows. I must do something. My soul must express itself, (even if it is merely an ineffectual scream into the cluttered void of the back pages of the internet).

October 1st, 2020

There's a Tweet that goes: how are people out here with no therapy not taking any prescribed or illicit drugs just raw dogging reality — giabuchi lastrassi @jaboukie · Jan 23, 2019

 

That Tweet is truer than it is funny. It sets the tone of this month for me. Every October is like this. My experiences are raw, like going for a walk with soft, barefeet. Sensitive and liable to injury, forced to attentiveness, knowing that calluses take time to form and do not always adequately develop.

...

I was in a minor car accident today. It's not clear who is at fault. My front driver-side quarter panel is banged up pretty bad, but everything still functions as it should. 

I benefited; my pride needed pruning. And better a car accident than a motorcycle accident.