Looking Toward My Future

We have five weeks left in Queen Anne. It's February 21st. Our lease is up at the end of March. Dani is moving out tomorrow which means Grr will be leaving. I love that cat. 

Big changes are coming. Dani leaving is a real harbinger. Seeing her pack her boxes has made me pause and go, "oh shit, this lease is up real soon." 

Where to next?

Caitlin is headed to Portland.

I'm between moving to Central Oregon and just south of Seattle. Spokane is now lower on the list because the apprentice electrician program isn't as big. I'm ranked 770 in Seattle; still waiting on word from Oregon and Spokane. —Yes ranked 770th of who knows how many. This might be a while.

Whether I stay in Washington or move out, I will probably be "on the books for a bit." I have to sign up for a position as a stockman (picking up and dropping off supplies) or a I-forget-the-name-but-they-pull-wires-and-it-pays-slightly-less-than-stockman-while-being-slightly-more-miserable-supposedly.

I'm walking up to a major crossroads that will determine where I'll be for the next five years. There isn't a right answer.

I have the strong gut feeling that I don't want to stay in Seattle. And, yes, I have reckoned with the fact that I will be leaving good friends behind. I don't want to be 35 and be in Seattle. That being said, PSE stands for Puget Sound Energy, not Seattle Energy. The Puget Sound has a lot to offer. For example, I could—though not likely—end up on the Olympic Peninsula. My experience is not-all-that-typical in that I have lived close to downtown during my entire time in Seattle. I could probably find a place in this region that I would be comfortable in (and maybe even afford.).

Central Oregon is promising, but it is unknown and probably quite different. However, in my experience, wherever I have gone, I have made friends. I have met good and bad people. Everytime I have moved—even just within Seattle—I have learned something new: a new neighborhood teaches you new things. But moving has been growing increasingly painful. 

What incredible lengths we go through to find a sense of home.

I am going to be very lonely soon.

I'm not too sure what I feel right now. There's a few things going on. 

The first is that I feel a sense of surprise. I'm kind of shocked to see myself wishing to hear a part of my self saying, "Oh can we just have some stability and stop moving for once and just live somewhere," and then not have my immediate response be, "Fuck no, we have shit to see; we're not stopping anywhere nearby."

I don't feel like I am merely wandering anymore. It feels like I am looking for a place to settle. That might happen in two years, or it might happen in ten or fifteen. Probably closer to ten.

I'm trying to take care of 40 year old Andy. It's hard to imagine him at 40. (It's shocking to see that number—40—written.) I've been trying to take care of myself ten years out. At 21-22 I wanted 30-35 year old Andy to have a good body, good social skills, and an education that he would find meaningful and that would find him work. (We're almost there with the work part.)

What does 40 year old Andy need?

I think he'll want a wife. He won't want to be dating because that takes a lot of time and energy, and at that age people prefer meaningful, deep, long-term relationships. I think he'll want to have a family started already (at 35 or so). I think he'll still be reading good books. I hope he'll still regularly ride motorcycles (with tempered enthusiasm). Maybe he'll have a small photography business on the side. I hope he'll still keep his body in good shape. He probably won't have as much time to write like he does now, but I think he'll still keep a journal to organize his thoughts. He'll write thoughtful letters to friends, family, and himself. He'll want to own a house because he grew tired of renting well before the age of 28. He will have chickens, or he will have grown tired of raising chickens. He'll have a dog or two. 

It feels weird to write all of this out like just like that. It almost feels like a dubious move—as if I were invoking bad luck—to spell it all out so clearly. Because, tragedy can strike at any moment. And tragedy will eventually strike. Every relationship ends in tragedy. Every star fades, or blows up, or something. We all die. Some live well; many do not. (As I type this there is a deranged man outside our apartment screaming nonsense at the top of his lungs, nonstop for the past ten minutes, at 1am on a cold and exceptionally windy night.)

Anyway, I have a sense of direction. And I have forward momentum. I'm going to keep that momentum.

(A cause of many minor accidents in beginner riders is a lack of throttle. The spinning of the tires, and to a lesser degree of the internal components of the engine, creates a gyroscopic force that keeps the rider upright. If you want to stay upright, keep moving.)

...

A thought mostly unrelated to the above writing: 

I think that dating apps like Tindr, Bumble, etc. are like a mirror. They're a mirror just like dating is in general. You'll find what you're looking for (not what you think you're looking for). Granted, I get that women get a lot of unsolicited dick pics. And granted, ugly dudes don't really stand a chance online. But besides that, the dating scene is a ruthless mirror. If you repeatedly come across a similar type of person, it's because that's what you're looking for. Or, perhaps more often than not, that is what your shadow is looking for.

Most of us don't realize what we're looking for. We just notice what we keep finding. Sometimes this works out fine, and we're happy. But not in my experience. Maybe that's too general to be meaningful.

It's serious work learning what we (authentically) enjoy. And it's more work learning what is both (truly) good and (authentically) enjoyable. And then it's even more work leaning to (truly) enjoy what is (truly) meaningful and (truly) good. (I authentically enjoyed LSD for a while, but that didn't work out so well. —Philosophy, however.)

Ares rests. 

Onward, Hermes. Guide this wayward soul.

...

Photography has been good for me.  It has been a creative exhalation after what felt like a relatively long period of inhalation (reading and thinking). 

I now have a tangible goal to further hone my NYE resolution: I want 1,000 followers on my photography account, and I want to follow no more than 500 people (300 would be more ideal).

Is this mere vanity? —No not quite. But vanity is an element, a motivating force.

If this was shallow vanity I would be aiming for mere-likes, shallow finger taps. And the easiest way to do that is to post pictures of beautiful people, namely women. 

I would rather post beautiful-pictures-of-people rather than pictures-of-beautiful-people. (Maybe someday I will post beautiful-pictures-of-beautiful-people).

Anyway,

I have a few rules in mind for my instagram acct, but nothing official yet—

• No gratuitous sexy bullshit
• No makeup
• No Cleavage
• No abs
• No ass
• No Photoshop (to clean up skin)

I'm searching for a deeper beauty, and I want to bring it to light. Maybe I'll find it. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll merely devolve into a pornographer. —probably not.

...

A ghost says, do not get fat on low hanging fruit; it is not becoming. I do not know what she means, so you will have to interpret that.

...

They say that there is nothing behind the veil. I say that they need a better metaphor. While Life may be a mystery, 

 Ares is on the move again, ready to set fire and cleave apart anything he can. 

...

I’ve been working with despairation. Editing photos all day. Time is ticking. So many seeds scattered by the wayside. So many seeds on rocky ground

so much wasted

all hope and no technique  

...

Tonight isn’t a night for well-articulated thoughts. I’ll just lay here in bed and burn. And in the morning I will reconstitute the ashes into a new man. The new man will be quite the same man as before, but we will have lost some pieces. Maybe we will assemble the remainder in a more harmonious way than before; It is unlikely.

...

Ares is on the move. And he wants to pick a fight with you. 

February 3, 2021: Nostalgia set to max

"We had it so much better than I (inadvertently) chose to remember."

I (inadvertently) spelled Andres to Ares. That was interesting. I hadn't made that connection before.

Feb 2, 2021: Nostalgia // It's Imbolc, apparently

A friend [hi Lauren, nice seeing you here, hope all is well, we don't get so many visitors here] posted videos on her private Instagram story of her family videos, the kind taped on a camcorder where you can hear the autofocus better than the dialogue. It got me feeling nostalgic, and I remembered that I have a hard drive that my father sent me a few years ago. I figured it was time to really sort through it. 

There were so many memories and pictures on that HDD that I had totally forgotten about. The funny thing about really forgetting is that you don't know how much you have forgotten unless you come back to it. —That's where I am right now.

The pictures are a mess, many unlabeled, with many duplicates, but mostly organized by date. 

Organizing these pictures that my father has given me is a metaphor for how I feel about him: thanks, it's meaningful, but it's a mess; it's a pain in the ass, but I'm sure I can make something of this if I put effort into it.

...

It's Imbolc, or it was until the sun set. I'm not sure what that means other than the fact that it's a synchronicity. 

...

There is so, so much to unpack. I'll leave pictures and sort through the ideas later.

This... this isn't how I was remembering the past. I have a lot of anger and resentment towards my past, much more than I deserve, especially my teenage years.

A ghost speaks, now you understand what Socrates meant that the Daimon is the guardian—the guardian shadow, preventing you from speaking or acting when you would rather have done so. 

Yes, he can be quite the tricky fellow.

Jan 29, 2021: On Depth

I'm recording a timelapse video right now of Caitlin and I sitting next to each other in bed. She's working from home. I'm doing my thing—reading and writing this. I'll post it here in a bit. It feels weird to share this part of myself but... well, why not? (Because our room is a disgusting mess; there's a beer can in the shot from the night before last and more hidden out of view.) We're in need of cleaning...

It's 10am. At 1pm I'll go to a friends house in West Seattle. Kris (and Will) will be there. Will has a nice mirrorless digital camera that he's using to take video. Apparently he was involved in film production somehow and he wants to learn how to do more stuff so he can stop paying other people do that stuff. Anyway, he's going to film me, wearing his helmet and jacket, riding his bike. And. Um. His bike is a Ducati Hypermotard, which has 2x as much horsepower as my bike. It's intimidating. And I can't fucking wait. 

...

I've been slowly working my way through The Listening Society. I've said this before, I forget where: This book feels like a capstone to so much of my reading, neatly tying so much of what I've been trying to put into words, and it does it in relatively simple language. 

There are a few chapters dedicated to what the author(s) call Depth. I needed a new understanding of this word. According to Hanzi, depth is the capacity for a person to subjectively experience—to feel—high states of being and low states of being,. to feel really good and really bad, but in a more religious sense—to travel between heaven and hell in one's everyday life. 

Depth isn't a good thing or a bad thing. It's not related to how intelligent a person is. It's not related to how educated a person is. Depth is the intensity of the high and low feeling—and not just low or high, it is the total distance both, the distance between an ocean trench and a mountain peak. 

Hanzi pokes fun at Eckhart Tolle, which made me giggle. I fucking hate Tolle. Tolle is a quasi-religious figure. And I could not figure out why I hated him so much until now. It's because he has great depth, but he's really unsophisticated. He thinks flowers are enlightened plants and that we can stop suffering in this world by "spreading light". But it's like dude, you're forgetting about a lot of things—politics, sociology, economics, epidemiology, natural environmental disaster etc. Providing one single answer—kindness, awareness, "light", healing, or love—doesn't solve anything no matter how hopeful it feels.

Anyway, everyone has a different level of depth, but the problem is that we can't see other people's depth because we can't experience exactly what they experience. We all feel that we're a walking mystery, a special black box. 

This is one of those rare "intellectual books" that handles the nature of religious experiences in a way that really does them justice. There's value in that.

Hanzi also has a good definition of wisdom: a combination of good mental health, depth, and complexity (in my words, intellectual-sophistication). 

Here are relevant quotes:

"Depth is a person’s intimate, embodied acquaintance with subjective states. A person’s inner depth increases through her felt, lived and intuitive knowledge of a new subjective state (lower or higher than previously experienced)—and when the intimate acquaintance of that state becomes an integrated part of her psychological constitution; a part, if you will, of her personality."

"...another way of describing the matter is that depth is a person’s innermost recognition of the greatness and/or seriousness of reality. As with subjective states we don’t have the relevant data, which means that we cannot say very much about how depth is distributed in a population."

"A great-depth response involves yet more universal values which do not necessarily correspond to aspects of everyday life: to manifest divinity in the world, to find radical acceptance, to serve the becoming of the most profound possible unity and multiplicity, to surrender fully and without compromise to God or existence, to “be” wordless emptiness and recognize the pristine meaninglessness of the ultimate truth."

"Beauty, in this sense, is a kind of recognition. We recognize things such as harmony, balance, proportionality, contrast, pattern, variation, rhythm, repetition; aspects of the world that we spontaneously seem to appreciate. We appear to be able to deepen our relationship with reality by expanding this recognition."

"I would like to suggest that there are three specific forms of inner depth that a person can develop. These follow the fundamental philosophical form of Plato’s “big three”: beauty, truth and justice. Although in this context I have found it more appropriate to speak of the three categories beauty, mystery and tragedy."

"But for all its blinding beauty and mysterious elegance, the universe is always broken. We have already discussed that our planet is perpetually screaming into the silence of the surrounding cold, empty cosmos. All systems, all living organisms, are always falling apart. A million things always can, and always will, go horribly wrong. [...] If there is a fundamental divide between the innocence of (healthy) childhood and the maturity of adulthood, it is that children live in blissful unknowing of the utter tragedy of existence, whereas the (spiritually mature) adult lives in full awareness of suffering."

January 27, 2021 (Not a vegetarian)

(I definitely need to come back and edit this later)

I can reasonably say that I don't have COVID. Caitlin and I received negative tests. If we were exposed last sunday, then we are still in the incubation period. However, Mariah, our dear vector, tested positive last week but tested again this week and came back negative; last week was probably a false positive. She has been getting tested twice a week at her work. I suppose a false-positive was bound to happen at her place of work eventually. It's just funny that it happened to her. 

...

I'm doing intermittent fasting with the help of a half-dose of BronkAid (over the counter ephedrine) in the morning paired with black coffee. I'll start going on walks in the morning soon. I've been too sedentary. I'm looking forward to having a gym again.

I feel weird admitting that I'm using ephedrine, but it's the truth. And I'm aiming for honesty here. 

From a phenomenological (subjective) perspective, it doesn't feel like much is going on. My head is a little quieter. I'm not hungry. I can breather more clearly (surprise surprise). I feel more focused, but not by much. 

I had an adderall prescription some years ago, and that significantly altered my state of being—and not in a good way either. The difference between half a dose of BronkAid and a 30mg dose of Adderall is like comparing drinking half a glass of wine to two or three back-to-back tequila shots. Maybe a full dose of Bronk will upgrade the experience to a full glass of wine.

...

Oh, here's a big one: 

I'm in the early stages of limiting my meat consumption for ethical reasons. I finished the book The Feeling of Life Itself by Christof Koch, on a recommendation by The Listening Society. The book made a good argument that animals do have some level of consciousness. 

I wrote an okay paper in an epistemology class that discussed consciousness. I said that the fundamental difference between the human mind and the mind of a chimpanzee (or a bee) is similar to the structural difference between the hand of a chimp and the hand of a human—one slight change to one particular bone in the hand or thumb and a species goes from smashing rocks against things to making machines that can manipulate individual atoms. I called this uniquely human quality universality; universality is a quality of mind and body that we possess and other animals do not—as far as I can tell, anyway.

Language, and the mind, can turn in on itself and transform itself in infinite ways. Given enough time, we have the necessary equipment (brains, hands, and language) to represent any true proposition or really do anything. Meanwhile, the "animal kingdom" seems to be at a steady equilibrium. (This last paragraph is dubious, but you get the idea. We have in us, right now, a quality that animals do not, this quality includes the capacity for ethics Zack made an interesting point yesterday, saying, should we allow animals to eat each other? —sure why not.) 

Anway—yeah—I think humans are fundamentally different from animals in terms of our subjective experience. Humans have meaningful experiences; animals just have mere-experiences. (And we have what Heidegger calls Dasein, and animals do not.) We are unmatched in our ability to represent and transform our environment according to our desires (for better or worse because of how short sighted our desires are). Yes, I think we are, in fact, special. I also think that given enough time and the right conditions, any species could eventually reach our level. But we are more capable in terms of our development of consciousness. (See: Model of Hierarchical Complexity)

All that being said, I think that animals do experience the world, albeit in a less sophisticated way that we do. And I also think that hippies and animal rights activists overestimate the capacity that animals have for consciousness/subjective experience. But I don't think animals are mere clockwork. 

So here's the grand conclusion:

I want to eat less factory farmed meat. Life is tragic and full of suffering. We're all just struggling to get by on Earth. We all meet death, and that encounter often involves great pain. But a factory farm is hell, not Earth. Every being deserves a reasonable chance at living at least an okay life.

Not all animals are created equal; so here's my first shot at a hierarchical list of what not to eat:

• Dolphins and friends
• Apes/Monkeys
• Pigs
• Octopuses (unsure about squid)
• Corvids/Parrots
• Rats/Racoons/Squirresl
• Cows
• Chickens
• Most fish

Fair Game: Generally speaking the idea is to avoid factory farmed meat. 

• If it's hunted or wild caught, it's probably fair game. 
• Happy, pasture raised cows/chickens are okay 

...

I am reminded of being seventeen, wandering the desert that one night, tripping my balls off, and standing by a yucca plant and feeling a white glow of being. In its own way it said, "Hi, don't mind me here; I'm just here growing."—Now, that's some hippy, pantheist bullshit. But that's what I felt. And it was meaningful, even if it was just a projection (my mind simulating what a plant might feel). 

Anyway, if carrots scream, then, sorry carrots; this is necessary: life feeds on life.