It is all so meaningless and pointless today that I am writing this in bad faith. I shouldn't be writing anything at all. What a waste.

September 12, 2020: Camus' Rebel

 It's 10:30am. The light outside is the brown-yellow of a cigarette stained wall because of this season's wildfires. Denis Villeneuve released a trailer for his movie Dune yesterday and there's a joke circulating around the internet asking, "How big is Dune's marketing budget?" because the West Coast looks like a balmy morning on Mars (or in this case, Arrakis). 

...

Yesterday I met up with a fellow redditor from /r/PNWriders. We rode for over seven hours: down I-90 to Ellensburg, then Yakima, 410, down 123,  and most importantly through Stevens Canyon. The views weren't as good because of the smoke. But it was still the most beautiful ride I have been on. 

Kris was going to come with us but he was afraid that it was going to get too smoky. But irony won in our favor, and our trip was less smoky than Seattle.  

I also finally bought a in-helmet mic/speaker system. —Total game changer. 

 When I went to sleep, I spent what felt like an hour laying in bed, restless, thinking of all the different ways I could have crashed yesterday. —Visions of The Sausage Creature. 

...

This morning I finally finished The Rebel. Here is my GoodReads review: 

For me, The Rebel was life changing and exceedingly relevant, a cornerstone to build my future on. A warning to those who would worship a virtue (see: justice) or sacrifice the present for the future. A call to respect the dignity and suffering of every person.

Camus makes an important distinction between a Rebel and a Revolutionary. The Revolutionary is a nihilist willing to use any means at their disposal. The Revolutionary thinks they will, once and for all, bring an end to suffering—to end injustice, oppression, disparity, inequality, scarcity. But the revolution does not stop because, how can it? For the perfect future has not arrived. So, the revolution must use any means at its disposal (namely violence and oppression) to achieve its vision.

It is as if the Revolutionary Leader says, "It is our turn to oppress."

The Rebel knows that the world will always be imperfect, but he does not become complacent. He bears the tension and suffering that this knowledge brings. He looks at both the oppressor and oppressed in the eye and thereby fights for all humanity, humanizing both master and slave. The Rebel changes the world in the ways that he can. He brings light and then suffers like Prometheus. And, like Sisyphus, he knows that his work is never done.

This was written in response to 20th Century Communism and Marxism, but it is much more than that. Camus touches on a philosophical problem in our collective human heart: our desire to unify our fragmented world into a totalizing unity and our tendency to sacrifice human life in the name of a perfect future.

The Rebel is saturated with brilliant paragraphs and one-liners. This is one of my most underlined and annotated books.

Quotes:

"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is." p.11

"...the rebel's aim is to defend what he is. He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived." p.17 (Here, C compares Rebellion to Resentment, which he thinks is a motivating factor of Revolution.)

"The metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe." p.23

"From the moment that man submits God to moral judgement, he kills Him in his own heart." p.62

"There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity. This belief is a deception." p.64 (Camus says this in reference to both religion and the aims of Marxist revolution.)

"For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be obeyed in order to subjugate history." p.79

"Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas." p.106

"The insurgent rejects slavery and affirms his equality with his master. he wants to be master in his turn." p.109

"To kills men leads to nothing but killing more men." p.109

"...the terrorists were born, disillusioned with love, united against the crimes of their master, but alone in their despair, and face to face with their contradictions, which they could resolve only in their double sacrifice of their innocence and their life." p.164

"The future is the only transcendental value for men without God." p.166 (Not an argument for belief in God, rather an argument against building a life based on transcendental principles.)

"All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State." p.177 (Of slightly dubious veracity but meaningful and relevant.)

"...the negation of everything is in itself a form of servitude and that real freedom is an inner submission to a value which defies history and its successes." p.186

On Marxism: "Prophecy functions on a very long-term basis and has as one of its properties a characteristic that is the very source of strength of all religions: the impossibility of proof. When [Marx's] predictions failed to come true, the prophecies remained the only hope..." p.189

"That is the mission of the proletariat: to bring from supreme dignity from supreme humiliation. Through its suffering and its struggles, it is Christ in human form redeeming the collective sin of [the Marxist concept of] alienation." p.206

"Power cannot be looked forward to or else it is looked forward to indefinitely." p.206

On the good in Marx: "...[Marx] reminded the privileged that their privileges were not divine and that property was not an eternal right. He gave a bad conscience to those who had no right to a clear conscience. ... To him we owe the idea which is the despair of our times—but here despair is worth more than any hope—that when work is a degradation, it is not lif, even though it occupies every moment of a life." p.2019

"[Marx's] desire to systematize made him oversimplify everything." p. 213

"Poverty and degeneration have never ceased to be what they were before Marx's time, and what he did not want to admit they were despite all his observations: factors contributing to servitite not to revolution." p.214

"The authoritarian socialists deemed that history was going too slowly and that it was necessary, in order to hurry it on, to entrust the mission of the proletariat to a handful of doctrinaires." p.217

"...Capitalism becomes oppressive through the phenomenon of accumulation. [Capitalism] is oppressive through being what it is, it accumulates in order to increase what it is, to exploit it all the more, and accordingly to accumulate still more. [...] ...the revolution, in its turn, becomes industrialized and realizes that, when accumulation is an attribute of technology itself, and not of capitalism, the machine finally conjures up the machine. Every form of collectivity, fighting for survival, is forced to accumulate instead of distributing its revenues. It accumulates in order to increase in size and so to increase in power." p.219

"The end of history is not an exemplary or perfectionist value; it is an arbitrary and terroristic principle." p.224

"Lenin believes only in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency." p.226

"Pseudo-regulutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality." p.233

"The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude." p.234

"Those who reject the agony of living and dying wish to dominate." p.248

"Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms." p.250

"Rebellion's demand is unity; historical revolution's demand is totality." p.251

"To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects. Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it." p.258

"...perhaps there is a living transcendence of which beauty carries the promise, which can make this mortal and limited world preferable to and more appealing than any other. Art thus leads us back to the origins of rebellion." p.258

"In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary." p.272

"A creative period in art is determined by the order of a particular style applied to the disorder of a particular time." p.274

"And for those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, through the centuries, to the greatness of humanity." p.276

***"Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead."*** p.276

***"The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion."*** p.276

"The mutual understanding and communication discovered by rebellion can survive only in the free exchange of conversation. Every ambiguity, every misunderstanding, leads to death; clear language and simple words are the only salvation from this death. Plato is right and not Moses and Nietzsche. Dialogue on the level of mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of a monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain." p. 283-284

"...the rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value that supports him is never given to him once and for all; he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly. [...] His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good." p.285-286

"Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom." p.288

"...it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. " p.306

September 9, 2020: LA? More like Hell-A (you lizard scum)

It has been quite the week. 

It's nearly 8:00 am as I being to write this. I'm listening to XTC. I have had the song Complicated Game stuck in my head all day; the lyrics are almost too relevant. 

I dropped Caitlin off at the airport at 6am; I missed an exit, which led me to drive the most agressively I have ever driven. Weaving through traffic with my pedal on the floor in my slow car is, in comparison, about as scary as moderate traffic on I-5 on a motorcycle. 

Right now I'm in the mood to fight. I told-off a college friend who I was once close with but disagreed with. (We were close enough so that I joined her for Thanksgiving in Eastern Washington a few years ago.) I sent her an agressive-passive-agressive message, waited for a response and blocked her. —Petty but not wrong. Despite our history, it was time to cut the baggage.

This past week I have been looking for for excuses to delete people off of my Instagram friends list. It feels relieving despite how petty it is. As much as I would like to think that social media doesn't matter, it is actually a big part of my life. It wouldn't be right to throw my phone in the blender, so I best make due with what I have.

I realized that I have been hanging too tightly onto internet friends/connections. I also didn't realize how many acquaintances that I regularly checked up on don't follow me back, which makes me feel like a fucking idiot; I don't like giving my attention away for free like that. I've maintained a falsely inflated sense of social connection for too long.

...

I broke up with my therapist over email. She sent me this email:

Dear Andy,
 
Of course, you can end your therapy with me at any time and for any reason. However, I wonder if you would agree to one more session to bring our work to a thoughtful end. The abruptness we both experienced last week can leave you feeling that what you’ve accomplished over the past months amounted to little rather than giving dignity to your accumulated efforts.
 
You may also help me to understand where I disappointed you so that you needed to cut the work short.
 
Warmly,

L 

She wanted to know where things went wrong, and the evidence is right there in the email she sent. She used the word disappointed. Why the fuck does a therapist need my approval? I'm not disappointed. But the fact that that is how she worded it is a red flag; yes, maybe she meant something else, but the phrasing is a real red flag. Plus, therapy is literally never over. There is never a good time to stop going into analysis; the drama of human life is infinite—always an open end left to tie off. Stories and art offer a sense of completion, and many of the most excellent works are left open.

I'm curious what this will look like in hindsight. Was my therapist getting too close to the root of a problem when my defenses kicked in? Or was our rapport problematic? No one knows—not even the shadow because he's too involved. I hope time will make things clearer. 

I would leave therapy very angry and in a bad mood more often than not over the past month or so. That too is enough. My decision to cut ties was correct.

...

I met up with Billy last week. We had a beer and caught up. We were both with the 3-2 General Support Aviation Battalion at Camp Humphreys. We only hung out once or twice maybe. But that one time we hung out I gave him an excessively large Mexican hat while I wore a poncho and a sharpie mustache, and we went around the barracks and the 'Ville just outside the base. I played guitar, and he played percussion (a trashcan). He says that while we were out in the 'Ville there was a general coming through and some officers were scouting areas beforehand and they needed us to leave. Supposedly we ran into that general that night; that's how he tells the story, and he tells it well. I don't remember details of that night. I might have been drinking too much that night. Those were strange times.

So, Billy and I caught up after six years, and he invited me to join him on a roadtrip to LA four days later. Caitlin asked me if I was prepared to spend a long time in the car with someone I don't know well. But I told her that we were both in the army, and he deployed. Military people know how to deal with each other in confined spaces for long periods of time. We have a certain kind of stoic social-awareness that says, "we're both suffering, so let's do whatever it takes to make this suck less." If someone left the military under honorable conditions, chances are they know how to behave reasonably enough.

This weekend was the worst weekend to go. The area experienced record breaking heat, and there were massive forest fires along the way that made a 9am trip down I-5 look like a 9pm trip through a reasonable-sinner's rural neighborhood in hell: the sky was totally dark, gray, thick blanket of smoke, but there was an orange glow on the horizon which gave a sense of dubious hope.

Billy didn't say where exactly where we were going. I just assumed we were going to be visiting friends that he had met in the army. —Nope. We met his VRChat friends. Before we arrived I had never heard of VRChat. VRChat is...interesting, worth a google. So it turns out that the people we were staying with are also interesting.

We stayed with B and Ela. B is an entrepreneurial mid-twenty-something. Ela—Ela Darling—is a pornstar (probably one of the better educated porn stars by a significant margin)—a legit porn star whose level of success and fame I only began to realize when Billy and I left their house and I saw that she had 30k Instagram followers. And then seeing this Rolling Stone article after a quick google really made the gravity of her reach sink in. —Not that she's particularly famous, but still, it's more than I had expected on this trip. I mean, I don't know anyone else who gets invited to the AVN Awards.

Ela and I had a multi-hour long conversation on Saturday. I took a few notes on my phone. Here they are:

"First learn how to direct your own focus. But then a big part of conversations is learning to direct others' focus."

"My default mode is dialogue."

"Mask Maker"

The majority of our conversation revolved around the topic of persona, which was a particularly apt conversation because actresses, especially those in porn need serious persona management. They need to create distinct boundaries within their lives, dividing between fans and friends, nearly-never letting their fans slip too close.

I won't be able to recreate our conversation. But I'm going to write what I got out of it. 

Persona is the mask we put on whenever we're in a social setting; (I could argue that we always use a persona to interface with our environment). It's our interface. It's our filter. It is our face. It directs our focus. Our self is too complex, too multifaceted, too nebulous, too paradoxical, and too liable to injury to rawdog the things of this world.

Learn to Direct Your Focus
The persona is a lens that focuses on what matters—that is, on what it presumes matters. When you're driving, you're focusing the road. When you're talking to someone you're looking at body language, or if you're like me, you direct your spotlight-of-consciousness on yourself (creating a feedback loop of anxiety) even though it would be better to focus on common interest.

Learn to Direct Their Focus
There is a wrong way of approaching this idea that goes something like "manipulate people into focusing on what matters to you." Rather, we ought to comport ourselves in a way that reflects what we are trying to do. This is why people wear suits at work and sexy clothes in clubs. And there are more subtle ways of managing this, both positive and negative. Every conversation involves a dance of illumination and censorship, for we all are Legion. 

When two people are talking, it's like their both trying to reference a similar point a space—a shared subject or a goal. An effective persona drives forward the conversation by highlighting certain things and dimming others. Sometimes deep emotions need the spotlight, and other times they don't.

We are all responsible for comporting ourselves. 

The Mask Maker
This came as a vivid fantasy. I saw my nebulous self—an unknowable mass from which my consciousness was arising, and I saw from the mass, many arms growing in various directions and at the end of each was a mask. And I heard a soft voice ask, "where is the mask maker?" After this I saw three things: The Self, the Mask Maker, and the Masks. 

Personas arise without effort—just like trees and weeds. Also like trees and weeds, they can be cultivated. Most people allow nature to do all of the work; sometimes this works perfectly, for there are many great trees in the forest. 

I think that acting is the highest form of persona management. It is the deliberate formation of a persona according to the needs of the situation—whether on a stage or not. My intuition says that actors know how to manage a social situation effectively using their persona. They are mask makers. 

Lastly, I realized that I was really really really bad at persona management in the army, at school, and at AWS. The professional world that I had entered was extremely impersonal and collective, while I acted like a lost child with a bleeding heart in my shirt pocket, in search of praise, desperately promising to do my very best.

My Default Mode is Dialogue
While Ela and I were talking I noticed that we were talking in a very different way than Billy and B. Ela and I were going back and forth discussing ideas while Billy and B were very laughing while providing commentary. This is when I realized that there are different styles of conversation, and I default to dialogue (and monologue). I try to get people to speak with me in a Socratic way where we discuss topics to arrive at true (truer) conclusions.

• Debate
• Dialogue
• Monologue
• Flirtation
• Storytelling
• Lecture
• Bullshitting 
• misc.
• etc.

Each mode requires its own persona. When in a conversation, both peoples' personas have to match up. (Not everyone wants to or is capable of engaging in socratic dialogue.)

...

If you can help it, don't be star struck—especially pornstar star struck. It is a fetter to good conversation.

...

I just bought an app that is going to help me unfollow my non-followers. I need my daily greyhounds-and-memes fix, but I have reddit for that sort of thing.

...

Guess I'll have to unfollow Ela on Instagram since she doesn't follow me back. Oh well.

...

Paraphrasing a bit from The Art Spirit: 

"The class of free men is small: so many of them are ground to dust by the wheel of poverty while many others are in prison. They have an idea that they live by, and they are true to it, for it is the only way they know."

A voice spoke this morning:
Would you rather follow your soul into hell, or would you die an unwitting slave?

...

Dune trailer just dropped. I am hyped.

"The hype must flow," said a redditor. 

...

Current earworm: 

A little girl asked me should she part her hair upon the left
A little girl asked me should she part her hair upon the right, no
I said it really doesn't matter where you part your hair
For someone else will come along and move it
And it's always been the same
It's just a complicated game
It's just a complicated game

—Complicated Game by XTC 

...

Ambivalence—ambiguous valence.

...

Two enemies and a third thing—star on the horizon, transcending our petty lives.

...

I just realized that becoming a published in a philosophy journal isn't as cool as writing a good reddit post and communicating with peers in a democratic fashion. More people will read a reddit post, as will younger people. Writing on reddit isn't as sexy (i.e. formally respected) as getting published in a real journal. But I'll be damned if it isn't quite meaningful. 

September 3, 2020

 I feel like shit today.

...

I spoke with my therapist, and I felt like shit. 

In that creative part of my mind I saw an oozing, slimy, black substance, slipping out of a vagina or a massive womb-cave. Mind says that's not good.

I don't think I will see my therapist again. Either she does not understand me, or I don't understand myself. When she repeats back what she thinks I mean it seems way off, and it is immensely frustrating.

...

I have sent an email cancelling my future appointments, ending our relationship.

...

I've reached a tipping point. I don't want to waste any energy on anyone who uses the slogan ACAB (All Cops are Bastards) or Blue Lives Matter. My life is too short and to waste my energy on those things. I wish I didn't care. But I do care. So I have to fight to get my resources back from these warring ideologies.

ACAB is stupid and short sighted.

Blue Lives Matter is closer to being reasonable, but it's just another slogan. It is the seemingly inevitable counter-counter-movement to the counter-movement.

BLM (Black Lives Matter) has lost its way. It has become meaningless. It has run its course. But the problems remain.

If there is a revolution, I will likely die a coward and a traitor by the hands of whichever side pulls me out of the gutter first. 

...

So much heat and no light in my world.

Better to find a new way.

...

I finished At the Existentialist Cafe. I've been meaning to read it for a few years now. I couldn't get around to actually reading my physical copy, so I listened to it as an audiobook, mostly during my semi-regular morning walks. I learned a lot. I cured me of my fascination with existentialism. I like Sartre and Heidegger much much less. I like de Beauvoir a little less on a personal level, but my respect for her work remains the same. Meanwhile my love and respect for Camus has grown. (I'm working on his book The Rebel, and it is life affirming.)

I may need to look further into the less known existentialists like Merleau Ponty. It's hard to keep track of all of the other less famous names because I'm using an audiobook. (This little clip of Hubert Dreyfus discussing Ponty is promising.)

...

Studying philosophy and misc. intellectual ideas has been a long and unfolding drama. Sometimes it feels like nothing more than words—woven air. Other times it's brilliant. Today it feels like one or the other from hour to hour. At the moment, intellectual pursuits feel like bullshit. 

I know I can't quit reading. I sort of wish I could. But that would be death. 

I used to think that reading would make me great. It made me greater. But I am not great. I'm starting to get diminishing returns. I'm not an intellectual like Camus or any of my other heros. I am unusual but in an unremarkable way. 

...

I miss the gym. I miss lifting weights. I hope I can return to it someday. I feel weak without it. I would be sad to see my body continue to go in the direction that it is going at its current rate. —Feels like death.

August 31, 2020

 It's after five pm as I begin to write this. I think I hear Caitlin making her way up the stairs. Grr is sitting on my lap as I am laid down on the bed slouching way too far to be comfortable, but the cat is comfortable, so the law says I have no choice but to endure this position. —Caitlin is not making her way up the stairs; she texted me that she has picked up the torts (tortillas) from Safeway. I'm supposed to cook dinner tonight. I bought some pre-seasoned chicken from Trader Joe's earlier. But I ate a sriracha burger from Jack in the Box only two hours ago. This isn't good.

We spent the weekend in Corvalis and Portland with Caitlin's friends which was absolutely lovely. But the main thing I'm thinking most about right now is the four-hour long way-too-late motorcycle ride home through the night. It was cold. We averaged about 80 mph for the majority of the way, often hitting 90 mph for long stretches. Caitlin says she fell asleep behind me from shortly after Olympia until the first exit to Renton, however long that is. It was miserable, but only hours later it's a fun memory.

...

I had a good conversation with Madeline Owen this morning. I have a commission for her. She asked if she could record our conversation, but I was too nervous. We might rehash that conversation again and record it. I'm excited about this. But I don't want to write anything else about it for fear of disturbing whatever is at work.

...

I had a brief job interview today. We met in a QFC parking lot. I spoke with the owner of Salmon Bay Windows. I had told him my story over the phone, namely that I plan on leaving Seattle in January. He vaguely recalled that and used it as a bargaining chip saying that he's trying to put a long term crew together and that if the other guys didn't work out he would call me, and I would have to accept his lowest wage offer.  I'm not particularly interested in cleaning gutters, windows, and moss. But a part of me thinks that "real" work would be good. When I left I realized that I had never even asked him about commute times and other practical questions. It looks to me like I didn't really care. I felt sleepy and lethargic on the way there.

He drove a Dodge Ram and wore a black tshirt with an American flag made of gray arrows—modern hunting arrows with various deadly-looking tips. We spoke across the bed of his truck. He had a tool box with a few low-key bow hunting, archery, and marksman-optics stickers, and a SIG sticker, as in the gun manufacturer Sig Sauer. Funny enough, I remember passing a Sig Sauer building south of Portland yesterday which is burned into my mind. (I was more of a Glock guy, but I never owned a rifle.)

As he was talking, I was looking at his toolbox. And I realized that if I would work for him, then I would be funding his hobbies. I would be working for him. My labor would fund his hobbies. My labor would—albeit somewhat removed—allow him to live his dreams to a greater degree than I would mine. He is an entrepreneur—taking on the dual burden of financial risk and organization. I'm not saying that working for him would be an unjust arrangement. But I am, at best, ambivalent, so I am not right for the job. 

I'm not sure what is causing this disagreement in me. I'm not sure if it's because I want to be an owner or if I find "using" other people's labor to be disagreeable for other reasons. This is something that I need to figure out because I will need to work eventually. 

August 25, 2020

Can I just be done with intellectual bullshit? I'm not sure how it's contributing to my life anymore. 

August 18, 2020

 Too much bourbon tonight, but I'm not drunk.

This question has been bugging me for the past few days: What is the value of reality over fantasy?

I've desperately clung to "reality" over the past few years. But now the line between fantasy and reality is beginning to blur, and the rightful value of one over the other is beginning to change.

...as if we were capable of relating to reality (without burning up) ... 

What does a fantasy have that reality does not?

...all fantasies have a grain of reality/truth just like a pearl has a speck.

...

Unrelated to the above thoughts:

Neon Genesis Evangelion is some real existential shit. It's legit. Papers can and should be written. Background knowledge of Christian Gnosticism, Kierkegaard, and misc weeb-shit would be required. It's a unique intersection.

Spoiler: The protagonist finds existential salvation in the fact that his self may exist in multiple possible worlds—the one which is being attacked by monsters as well as one where he is a normal student

...

Camus Quoting Nietzsche in The Rebel: 

"No artist tolerates reality."

What is this reality that Nietzsche is referring to? —Our most accurate perception of the current-state-of-affairs-and-our-environment without room for imagination: the past and the present moment devoid of imagination, creativity, and possibility.