November 16, 2020

 Rant:

I am in a bad mood because of the new COVID restrictions, namely the fact that the gym is closing again tomorrow for at least one month.

I understand the reason why. I am fully, rationally aware of why it's happening.

But, right now, the rational reason—the facts—do not make me feel any better. I don't care how fucking reasonable these restrictions are or how many lives are going to be saved, I am pissed. That's human nature. That's my nature.

I don't think the restrictions are objectively ethical. However, they were put into place by people who were voted into power, so they're, as far as I'm concerned, an extension of the collective public will; I'll respect that. But it's hard to respect Inslee's smug face. He's not suffering. He, among others, is gaining power through this. I can feel it in my churning gut.

November 5, 2020

It's nearly midnight. I'm sitting at the living room table, which is messy, typing on a cold keyboard that is starting to warm up. I just finished playing Diablo III for nearly six hours straight. Caitlin is asleep. Dani is in her room watching something. Grr is wandering the house; she slept all day curled up in our bed. Carolyn is texting me. Across the street, in a lit the third floor window, there's a skinny guy in his 20's wearing a maroon tank top looking like he's washing dishes.

I feel too-awake. I finished an energy drink at noon. That might still be in my system. 

The gym has been going well. My bench is relatively weak. And I still suck at wide-grip pullups. But I've been making steady progress. I'm up nearly ten pounds. And I comfortably squatted 215 lbs for 5-reps over 8-sets. I'm hoping to be repping 315 in two months. And I would be really proud of myself if I could one-rep-max 405.

I'm going to need to find work soon.  COVID unemployment ends in a little over a month.

On a related note, my neurotic persistence paid off; alternatively, I was lucky in the sense that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I've submitted multiple applications to become an apprentice electrician: one in Seattle, one near Salem/Covalis, and one in Spokane. The way it goes is that I am going to take a test, then I will attend an interview. If I am accepted, I will become an apprentice. 

Well, I called the Seattle branch and the person on the phone said that I was tentatively scheduled to test in February. However, I managed to snag the last open spot only two weeks; the catch is that it's 300 miles away in Redmond, Oregon. —Worth it. And the funny part is that I don't need to pass. I get a free pass to interview because I am a veteran. To quote the lady on the phone, "the test is for tutoring purposes; we need to know where you're at." So, once I test, I'll be on the list to interview. 

This is good news.

...

Grr is sitting on the corner of the bed in our room facing the door. She has her feet tucked in, and it's the cutest thing. That cat has really stolen our heart. I would take a photo, but the lighting doesn't allow for it. 

...

Caitlin and I rearranged our bedroom. It completely transformed the way our room feels. I mean that in a practical way but also in a more metaphysical way. The vibe, or maybe the texture, is different somehow. 

She has a box of her old dog's stuff that she needs to go through. She tears up when she mentions it. But it's time for her to move on. She has been hanging onto it for two years and hasn't opened it.

...

I have a classic case of insomnia on my hands. Let's see if I can write in a flow until I get tired. No. I doubt I have the ability to sustain focus like that. 

...

I briefly spoke with my uncle Pawel before he received a letter I sent him. I told him that I was going to pursue an inside wireman apprenticeship. He said, "The work is hard, and it can be very tedious, but it pays well—six figures, easily." I could almost swear he sounded proud of me. Almost. —At the least we'll be able to relate to each other better. Common ground.

...

I wonder what I'm getting myself into.

When I started at Amazon, I had high hopes. I was overflowing with energy and enthusiasm. It was excessive, and, apparently, it was unstable. I didn't have a goal. I just wanted to be successful. But I never defined what success meant; and that was a big mistake. I had money that I didn't know what to do with. 

I still remember how excruciatingly painful it felt to even begin thinking about saving for a house. I didn't even have the fortitude to even think about it. So, instead I spent all my money on misc. I wanted the-ill-defined-everything, so I ended up with nothing. Well, I did get some good clothes out of my excess spending and camping gear.

Things are much different now. I'll be starting at a much lower wage. If I'm in the Puget Sound region, I'll be starting at ~$20 an hour plus benefits, which is fantastic, actually. I was technically earning over $35 an hour at AWS. But that came at a price: risk of stagnation and immobility.

The work will be physically demanding. I am physically equipped for that.

I will have a lot to learn. I'm looking forward to that. I want a skill that will make me valuable. And then I want to use that skill to make money. And I want to use that money to buy a house. And I want a small farm.

I didn't realize that I wanted a farm. It took me a while to realize that what I had been describing to multiple people was in fact a farm—dogs, chickens, a large vegetable garden, etc—a farm.

Holy shit, this could be beautiful. 

A motorcycle farm, perhaps? 

Hmm. 

Anyway, going into this apprenticeship, I'm a good candidate. But I'm going to need to stay humble.

My god, I've been unemployed for over seven months now. I am looking forward to getting back on track with a career. 

It's important to make the most of this time, of course (i.e. not playing Diablo III for six hours straight too often.) There is a very real trap of potentially getting too involved with work. But really, why even work? Money is good. But money isn't an end. Money is a means. And it's important for me to stay grounded in my ends, my goals and values. 

Reminder: when you have a really important dream, it's important not to blab too much about it. It must be, to some degree, a secret. You can't go bragging to everyone everyday that you're going to buy a yacht or whatever; the process devolves into mere spectacle. 

...

You know, the funny thing I've learned about writing is that sitting around, gritting your teeth and puckering your butt doesn't do any good. (Unless you're editing.) Writing has to flow. 

It's almost as if you gotta keep looking at the thing that you're writing about. You can't focus on the keyboard or the pen or your grammar or your fans. You need to keep your eyes on the thing itself, the idea that's there, latent in your mind, behind a thin veil, just under that quicksilver glimmer on the surface of a pond; you can't quite see it, but it's there, and it calls to you; and you know it's full of life, so you sit and you stare because it's important. It's magic. That's the magic I find in my dreams. And that's the magic of "writing as an act of revelation and creation." 

You can't force it. It comes from who you are. And, for the self aware and the initiated, such a reflection is absolutely terrifying.

...

I'm becoming increasingly tired of social media, namely people sharing political posts. I just want to shake everyone by their shirts and say, "YOU'RE NOT SPREADING AWARENESS; YOU'RE BRINGING IN AD REVENUE." 

Is that too cynical? Calling out that behavior is ironic because I would be doing the same thing by posting more noise on the same platform.

November 3, 2020

 I realized that I fell in love with Seattle last year. And it really was just that—love. It was the kind of love that comes with a lot of blindness. 

I had a lot of hope for this city. 

When I would visit from Bellingham during my college days, I would read deep into every storefront and every interestingly-dressed person. I tried to read too deeply into every single detail They felt to me as if they were full [trächtig] with stories and potential, like dark cloud promising a long-needed rain. But those clouds grayed out. And not much came out of it. It was a flat gray sky with a steady mist. 

It's hard for me to love Seattle right now. I feel like I got spit out. It's mostly my fault, and COVID has complicated everything. 

Wherever I am, I need to make the most of it. And I'm in Seattle right now. It isn't the promised land. It's home just like Horizon City was home.

...

I tired to draw, but the lines never really came together on the page well enough. I never learned to feel the depth of objects. I never even attempted to learn to manage color and value. 

Writing never brought me much in the real world; it only shaped my internal world. It has always been too fragmented. Separate characters never fully developed any sort of meaningful depth.

My academics were always weak. I never learned how to juggle my individual thoughts with telling professors what they needed to hear. I never felt the need to strive for perfect scores. 

I had my hands in too many baskets. It hurt too much to stay stuck with one thing. It always felt like too much of a sacrifice.

A ghost (and I'm not sure which one) says, "Blow its fucking brains out." 

It means for me to kill my stillborn dreams of being a writer/philosophy/artist-type.

My half-desire (my day dream) to be a writer was probably never a true desire. I think it was founded on the wrong ground—to egotistical or rooted in emotional infantilism, needing to feel special.

...

—Not Navel Gazing. Not Solipsism.—Not Working for Them. Not Doing it for Them—

Suppose a man is put into solitary confinement. Then suppose that he has a wonderful time in his cell because he sees a tremendous inner cosmos: dramas unfold before his eyes, great beauty visits him, and the sweetest music plays.

When he leaves his cell, he is totally unable to describe the pleasurable and profound experience. Moreover, he wishes to go back to his lonely cell. 

That is sad solipsism. It is madness. It is not good; I take this last fact gratis.

Next, imagine a movie star that is known across the world and has brought joy to many people. Wherever they go, their charisma brightens people's days. They create value in others. But now suppose the movie star is sad and broken inside. 

It is not good; it is alienation and lacking in integrity.

Profoundness-in-obscurity and Hollowness-in-prominence.

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.