July 13, 2020

It's 2:00pm. I'm sitting at my desk in my room. I just posted an ad on craigslist to sell my bed frame for $15 or best offer. I had an almond croissant from Cafe Ladro this morning when I dropped off Caitlin at her place (which is soon to be our place). But now it is time for lunch, and I want to cook a burger when the kitchen is free. 

I've put over 500 miles on the bike in a week. It was a blast. I have confirmed that I have a slow air leak. I'm going to need new tubes. I have no idea how much those run.

Mariah, Daniel, Kris, Caitlin, and I are planning a camping/motorcycle+car trip to San Juan Island. I reserved a ferry for Caitlin and I on the bike.

I'm worried about my lack of writing and overall lack of "real" productivity. I wrote the following in my notebook earlier today:

I can't seem to focus on my writing. maybe fiction writing is a fickle thing that requires a lot of stability. Or maybe it is a jealous hobby that requires all of my attention.

I think I would do best to to partition my time better. I should set aside time. I think my writing requires quiet, reliable, and steady intervals.

My writing needs guaranteed space in order to continually bloom. In order to develop my writing, I must give it the steady care reserved for growing a bonsai tree or cultivating a beautiful garden: one must not leave such a beautiful thing unattended for too long.

[...]

July 9, 2020

It's noon. I've just put on my jacket and boots to go for a motorcycle ride to a grocery store 20 minutes away so that I can pick up a few groceries. I feel guilty for not being particularly productive today. I have a story that I am sitting on. And I have a few stories that (desperately) need editing. I have failed to read Plato this week, and I hardly read anything last week.

This feels like leisure. I worry that this is decadent or too aristocratic.

But it feels good.

I worry that I feels too good. I worry that I will get soft. But I will allow myself this time to ride. I just hope I don't lose sight of my love/need for reading and writing.

Onward we go. (To Fred Meyer for some lean ground beef and hamburger buns.)

[...]

I had an odd realization while finishing up a chapter in Camus' The Rebel as he was talking about Nietzsche. I thought about when I first picked up Nietzsche. I was on my last few months in the army back in 2014 or 2015. I didn't quite know what I was getting myself into. Philosophy and "proper" intellectual thought (not just false prophets on youtube) seemed like a huge magnificent territory. 

Now I feel like I have become familiar with the terrain of Western Philosophy. I rarely read something that is unfamiliar. I have crossed over many of the same places many times. I'm not an expert. I don't know if I can fairly rate my own level of understanding. But I can say that I no longer feel lost.

My idea of philosophy has lost its greatness. Approaching philosophy and intellectual thought used to be feel to me like approaching the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don't feel that anymore. I think I grew out of it; that feels like the right phrasing. 

My relationship to it has changed. I still enjoy philosophy. I still find value in it. Philosophy and other pursuits are endless. 

[...]

The Philosopher's Stone doesn't turn lead into gold. It creates more value from something less valuable.

I think that this applies in something as mundane as a conversation. A boring conversation about the weather can have a positive influence on the world—thereby creating value. I suppose this is also salesmanship and customer service. Alternatively there is also engineering and the sciences that make objects more useful/effective/valuable.

Value is a mystery—intrinsic value even more so.

Like, what the fuck is intrinsic value anyway?

For me, at the moment, something with intrinsic value is riding a motorcycle. When I'm riding I'm there. —Wherever that is, I think it is a good place to be; it is valuable, and its value can increase or decrease.

July 5, 2020: I bought a bike!

It's around 10pm. I'm in bed, still wearing jeans and sweaty socks. 

I bought a bike! It's a 2016 Triumph Bonneville. I had incredible luck. The bike only had 28 miles! twenty-eight! The original owner bought it in 2017 and slid it into a ditch and broke a few ribs (before 28 miles.) It was $5500. The blue book price for this bike with "normal usage" was $6500. I think he could have sold it for 7,000 to $8,000.

Riding season is just starting. I could probably flip this bike in a week or two and make a $1000 after taxes. But that will absolutely not happen.

My goodness. This happened much quicker and much better than I thought it might. All this thing needs is an oil change. I think I'll have to head up to Bellingham soon once the oil is taken care of. 

...

I could see that the previous owner was scared of the bike. It bit him. Hard. He said he was out for six months. His body language was showing Kris and I that he was afraid of the bike. He was hesitant just to get it started. 

It's not a light bike. It's intimidating. 

My quasi-poetic imagination shows me a picture of an eager black horse. I get these kinds of pictures when I deal with something that has been invested with attention/libido/etc. 

Despite the danger, despite the risk, I have a good feeling.

Here's a pic of me. 

...

I'm trying to wind down. It has been quite the day. I picked up Jung's Symbols of Transformation that has been sitting by my bed for a few months now. I've read it intermittently. As I picked up the physical copy of the book, some thoughts that had been developing came to mind. It's rather simple actually. But it's one of those things that is surprisingly profound. 

In this book Jung talks about the Hero Cycle/Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell took this, repackaged it nicely, and made a fortune off of it. Many long stories short: The hero confronts an enemy that defeats him, as if it were fate, but then the hero wins in the end, usually after the darkest moment when he has been swallowed by the beast. Sometimes the hero loses.

Basically the sun sets, and then it comes back again, automagically; unless it doesn't. 

Automagically is the key word here.

Just like how the sun rises, order is made from chaos. How? Well, there might be a satisfying, worry-canceling principle, like how Newton explains how the sun rises using the law of gravity. However, many people (read: definitely me) worry about things without satisfying answers.

By spending time with this worry, I have come closer to something profound. It's a mystery, really: within my life and within my mind, things have fallen apart, but then they have come back together again in meaningful way. (Meaning is the key word.)

I can't say whether this ordering/organizing force is neutral, negative, or positive. But I have experienced it as Good, as in capital G, Greek, Good. Or at least excellent/arete.

My point is that order comes from chaos, maybe not all chaos, but at least it comes from certain types of chaos. And I don't think anyone really understands the deepest principle by which that happens. It's a mystery. But I think we're all capable of coming up with our own theories—our own relationships to reality, we might say. 

June 29, 2020 Teaching Stick Shift and On Love

It's around 2:30 pm. I've only had one cup of coffee, but I feel wired. I went to the barber for the first time since February. And I picked up my pants from Blue Owl in Fremont; they did a nice job of darning my most worn pair of jeans.

Yesterday I made a big deal about teaching Caitlin how to drive manual transmission. We were both frustrated and angry by the end of it. She had promised to practice for one-hour and twenty minutes, and we did it. It was a very long hour and twenty minutes. By the end of it we were totally burned out. I'm disappointed at my own lack of patience because in my fantasies about myself, I am perfectly patient and understanding. 

I also treated the lesson as if it were a metaphor or analog of our relationship, which I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do or not. I think it is like a metaphor or close to a metaphor because at the root of the issue, we were working together doing something stressful, and we both came away angry. But it could also be just a one time occurrence, and it was also one-sided with me playing teacher; we were not problem solving an issue together. 

She's better at driving manual than she realizes, and it's frustrating to see her unwillingness to take to the road because she's scared. Maybe that's the issue I have; I want to force her to overcome her self doubt, but I can't. 

I am forceful. That is one of my issues.

I yell at the garden, telling it to grow faster. 

If I am lucky, my spit will wet the ground and my breath will feed the leaves.

[...]

Reading Plato's Symposium has made me think about love. I'm not finished reading it. But I have some thoughts already.

In the work there are a few different theories on what love is. One says that love is among the oldest primordial gods, having come into existence shortly after Earth (Gaia). Then there is another theory that says that love comes in two forms, the higher form and the lower form.

The higher/heavenly form of love is Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite); this type of love makes the world a better place, and it has integrity.

The lower/vulgar form of love is Pandemos (Common Aphrodite); this type of love is selfish and fleeting.

This is making me realize that I have been placing love on too high of a pedestal, or I've only been using love merely ironically like when I refer to an excellent slice of pizza. 

In hindsight, I have loved more women—and men, pets, places, art, etc—than I have realized.

I am realizing that when I see a beautiful woman walking down the street and her beauty touches me deeply, that is love; and the same is true for many of my fond-friends in the military and college. Much of that love might have been the vulgar form of love, but it was love. And the thing about that is that it takes much time, effort, and risk to determine what love is higher and what is lower.

I feel the need to say the following:

It has taken me far too long to realize how much love I have in my life. There were too many times where I spent time and energy to tell myself that I was not in love, when I really was.

My god, how easy it was easy to let love go unrecognized.

What I have said so far is not related to Socrates' part of the dialogue.... Anyway, this is not where I thought reading Plato would take me... How strange. 

[...]

The above part about there being two loves, one higher and one lower was by someone named Agathon. However, Socrates gives a different account that was told to him by Diotima that's called the Ladder of Love. (My translation says staircase.)

It goes something like this: A man falls in love with a beautiful body. Then he falls in love with another beautiful body. Then he eventually may become a lover of all beautiful bodies. Then he learns that the soul is more beautiful than the body. 

Here is a slightly different take from a few paragraphs later: 

1. To love a body
2. To love two bodies
3. To love all beautiful bodies
4. To love beautiful customs
5. To love beautiful things
6. To know what it is to be beautiful

I think Jung copied Socrates'/Diotima's idea in his idea of Anima Development (Eve > Helen > Mary > Sophia) or (Sex > Power/Money > Morality > Wisdom)

And I also see this develop in my life in regards to intellectual pursuits. I think this description of the soul's growth: it is a movement from the particular towards the universal.

1. I was obsessed with psychedelic mushrooms
2. I became interested in psychedelics in general
3. I became interested in the ideas surrounding psychedelics
4. I became interested in ideas, namely philosophy and political theory.

Now, I am feeling the reverse process. 

1. I was interested in philosophy
2. I became interested in applying philosophy to the everyday world
3. I read All Things Shining, Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
4. I am now going to buy a motorcycle because I have seen how something material (a motorcycle) connects to something higher (philosophy: poeisis, excellence, quality)

Universal to Singular

Singular to Universal

Universal to Singular

Singular to Universal

Universal to Singular

Singular to Universal

Ad Infinitum

June 26, 2020

It's mid afternoon. Today is a good day because I passed my motorcycle endorsement. But that led to me going home and instantly looking up bikes that I could potentially buy. 

I have the mindset of a junkie. When I have my eyes set on something, it's over; I become fixated. And that is where I am right now. The little money I finally have put together is instantly starting to burn a hole in my pocket. I want to keep looking at bikes out on the market right now. God it hurts. It hurts good. 

It's not much different from the burning sensation that would push me to spend everything I had when I worked for AWS.

I'm not sure what to call this impulse or drive. I need a name for it. So far the phrase "burning a hole in my pocket" is surprisingly apt. It is not much different than burning pain.

Something else interesting about this is that while I am in this state where holes are being burned in my pockets, is that I don't experience any existential despair; I'm not worried about existence; I become goal oriented. I have a purpose—one that I am failing to achieve. 

June 24, 2020: Rest in Peace Gusset; and the aesthetic of the athletic

I'm at the kitchen table, sitting on a bench next to my roommate's half-empty 18-pack of Rainier, eating pan fried beets for lunch. This is not a typical lunch for me.

I spent this morning with fragmented attention.

I edited a story I wrote two years ago (Terry). 

I rewrote a general cover letter. 

I applied to three different positions—one of which I am interested in.

I spent a lot of time browsing both Craigslist and the internet at large looking for places hiring in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. This last part was mind-numbingly depressing. It doesn't look like there are a lot of jobs in Santa Fe, and rental prices are seriously bloated.

I think I know what I am doing wrong: I'm trying to fantasize about the future rather than plan for it. I think the smart thing to do is to take opportunities as they come; that's the lesson I need to learn right now. I will adjust as time passes. Every single moment has its virtues and opportunities. I should focus on making the most of what today offers.

Today is going to be no better than I make it, so I'll try to make the most of it.

[...]

I had an idea sitting on the porch listening to Modest Mouse. I was thinking of ways that I could contribute to my local community. Writing seems like it would be a good way to do it. I made a reddit post on /r/seattle seeing if I could volunteer as an English/writing tutor for free. I'm still waiting to hear about that.

But then I had an odd idea.

It might be a little bit dangerous. But it won't be boring. 

I was thinking I could just go to a rough corner and bring a book—the kind with a lot of homeless people. I was thinking something something odd and/or poetic the first two that come to mind are Bukowski and Heraclitus. They're conversation starters to say the least.

It might end horribly, or it might just fizzle out. It's worth a try. 

[...]

I tore my favorite jeans throwing a frisbee a little too excitedly in the park with Dan. The gusset is blown out. The plan is to get the jeans repaired. But before I tore them, I had something come to mind. It started as a line from Bukowski's poem The Laughing Heart but the idea is also mixed in with my having read Plato's Symposium earlier in the day.

your life is your life. 

know it while you have it. 

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight in you.

That last line is the one that stuck: the gods wait to delight in you. I'm going to see if I can unpack my thought here.

Dan and I are not good at throwing a frisbee with consistent accuracy. I'd say we're average at best. So, it's not like anyone is going to enjoy watching us throw a frisbee. On the contrary, if we were any worse then we would be an eyesore. So, I was dragging myself down thinking that we were pretty lame compared to a real athlete. And that right there is one of my biggest personal challenges—comparing myself to others, "better" or "worse" than myself.

But then I took the comparison one step further. I compared a prime athlete with the gods. The best athlete can't beat the gods. And that left me a little bit perplexed.

We take delight in the best athletes because they are the best among us.

But do the gods delight in the best athletes? Or more fundamentally, do the gods delight in the world of the humans? Now the root question, why does it matter if I do something athletic? Where is the value?

I think the answer is found in aesthetics.

Different feats of athleticism each have their own unique aesthetic—feeling, texture, and form; the contemporary word is vibe. Alternatively, a hippy-type might say that each different sport has its own energy. When we're playing sports, our being/consciousness/soul/subjective-experience takes the form/vibe/energy of the sport.

Here are some examples:

A football player is brutish (in a cool way, obviously).

A golfer is cool and focused, precise.

A long distance runner is steady and enduring.

A sprinter explodes.

A surfer skims.

Me, a frisbee thrower, aims and adjusts (and misses).

When we take these forms, we are taking part in the gods' delight.

And when we think about these forms, like I am doing right now, we lose our ability to enjoy them because our heads get cluttered with language instead of the athletic/aesthetic form. 

June 23, 2020: Grimace at the Absurd

It's shortly afternoon, and I'm part way done with eating a mandarin. My room is getting hot because the sun is finally out here in Seattle. It won't take long before I'm begging for fall and hoodie weather to return, but this sun is long overdue. 

I feel ugly inside. This is one of those times where the ugly feeling isn't directed at anything in particular. If I give the feeling a voice it becomes critical of me, or it says ugly feelings about those around me. This is more of a super-ego type of voice. It shows everything wrong with the world. But it is not without purpose. The best thing I can think of doing is digging up an old memory.

The memory is a memory of a picture. I think the picture is gone, or it will be once my facebook is permanently deleted in a matter of days.

The year is 2014. And it's probably early May. I'm a sergeant in the army, and I'm on leave, visiting my hometown of El Paso after spending a year in South Korea. I am with a good friend and fellow soldier having a drink at a chicken-wings-and-drinks franchise that features attractive waitresses in tight shirts. I am wearing a ridiculous shirt: a black T-shirt that I bleach tie-dyed while visiting friends in California the previous week. Moreover, I had translucent yellow wayfarers clipped to my shirt that looked like the conceivably douchiest possible take on Hunter S. Thompson. The amount of cringe I feel makes the thought of seppuku seem a reasonable alternative to bearing the knowledge that I wore that outfit in pride. And the pain is really because it was more than an outfit. That outfit represented who I really was at the time.

The friend sitting beside me was and is successful in the traditional sense; he is now in law school at Georgetown University. In the picture, he is holding a gin and tonic while I have a beer. The look on his face is an irritated, albeit friendly, eye roll. He really liked me. We were good friends before I left Korea. And fortunately for me, he could see past whatever it was I was doing at the time.

At the time I didn't understand the meaning of my face in that picture. I really didn't understand who I was or what I felt. My life had become meaningless in the army, so I took to psychedelics—which explains the bleach tie-dyeing in California the week prior. What I was left with was a world that looked totally absurd. Nothing really made sense. Life in the military seemed nothing more than an arbitrary set of bureaucratic rules and ceremony that I had to tiptoe, limbo, and dance through.

My world had become become covered in and, melted by, acid, stripping everything of its essence and structural integrity—both as a metaphor and literally in that I had taken LSD a week prior which was giving me a new (and dubious) perspective on life. I hadn't yet read any of Camus' work, but I knew at the time that what I was facing the absurd. 

Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Link

I was just beginning to learn to cope with the absurdity of life—the fact that there is no one true meaning to it all. I began by pursuing my conception of "the sublime", which I found in esoteric works like Crowley, CG Jung, and by psychedelic tripping. I'm not really sure what "the sublime" is, but I was chasing it at the time. And when I felt like I was in the presence of the sublime, I had a knowing, shit-eating grin. I might have been chasing ghosts, but I could tell when I was getting closer to something. Perhaps I was searching for a lost paradise—the comforting garden of religious belief that I once held.

But my chase for the sublime lead to to a place where I confronted the absurd. And when I looked at the absurd, I grimaced. In that picture of me with my friend at the bar that I was previously describing, I was grimacing. I only realized this now, over six years later. That grimace portrayed the essence of my character, my persona, my guiding myth. My face was halfway between a wince and a smile, somewhere between laughter and disgust. I thought I looked cool, but now I see the pain in my own eyes, pain that I couldn't feel at the time.

I'm a long way from the man I was then, thankfully. I have an idea of how things could have turned out much worse, so I'm thankful that I made it here from there, because that was a lot of ground to cover. 

I wonder what face I am wearing now. —faces, I wonder what faces I am wearing now. 

[...]

It's shortly after 10pm now. I'm dealing with another bout of I-wish-I-was-rich-and/or-famous. It started when I picked up Camus earlier. I felt an all too familiar untruth: "I would be happy if I were someone else." Unfortunately this is a logical impossibility. I would not be happy if I were someone else, because I cannot be someone else. But I still can't help feeling envious of Camus' wit and his success. 

A quote comes to mind: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing at 10pm on a Tuesday. I guess the answer is, "Living, breathing, experiencing. Listening to my stomach and heart." I could should have spent more time cleaning.

I feel like I am on the verge of seeing and appreciating the beauty of the everydayness of my life. Every grain of sand contains within it a universe—supposedly. But I'm stuck striving for more.

My fear?

Stasis and stagnation.