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.

June 22, 2020

I have finally finished typing up a story, Post Divergence. I had finished writing it a few weeks ago now. But typing it up took a few more weeks. My intention is to put it on the Kindle Marketplace. But it is still far from ready. I printed out a copy to edit by hand and then a copy of the first draft for posterity. 

Writing this story became a chore towards the end, which is unfortunate. It started out as fun. I was whimsical at first. I had a loose idea of what I wanted to happen, which is good for creativity. It wasn't until I was over halfway done that I had an outline. The problem with writing this story in this way is that there are a lot of plotholes and incongruities between the beginning of the story and the end of the story. So much of it changed as I went along. And now there's a lot I have to fix. But the important part is that I finished something.

I did it. I wrote a story. It's not quite a full novel. It's sitting at 27,000 words. But it exists. And it's important to me that it exists, even if it isn't polished.

If there is one thing that I can take away from writing this story it is this:

If I'm going to work on a creative project, I should pick a project that I love because creative projects require my undivided attention, and my heart-soul-and-brain. It is crucial that I do not rush.

(I certainly rushed during this project...) 

We can also substitute the word love for care. Care is more relevant than love. Love strikes me as insufficient; it's tainted by its association with mere-infatuation. But care is deeper than love. Care implies that the relationship is meaningful, that the relationship itself is important, that the object of care is not merely a means to an end but rather an end in itself.

If I would have cared more for this story, Post Divergence, I would have spent more time with the characters. I would have listened better. But I was too wrapped up in finishing the story so that I could move on, which meant I cut corners. I should have been more patient. And I wish I could have enjoyed the process of writing.

Deadlines and goals are fine, if not necessary. But I was treating an imaginary deadline as if it were a finish line. A deadline is not a finish line; do not race towards it. A deadline is more like a frame; fit as much as you need and can.

"Frame"

That's another important idea. It came up during psych-therapy a few months ago. My therapist said that it was important that we limit our sessions to a certain time. She didn't explain exactly why, but it's something that I have thought a lot about.

A time frame forces us to prioritize, to sort, to first bring forth what is most pressing. Suppose that your house in on fire and you have two minutes to escape with what you can. What do you grab? —what you care about most.

My life is short and fleeting. And my time to write is even shorter. If I am going to spend my time writing, I should write about what I care about most.

Now how do I figure out what I care about most?

[...]

I want to be a published writer. Or, at least I think I do. 

I know that I would like to say, "Yes I am very smart and a good writer. And I can prove this to you because my work was published in Asimov's."

I worry that my desire to publish is ego driven. The problem I see with being ego driven is that that would mean that I didn't really care for my work; I was merely writing to be published which would make me feel better about my insecurities. Another problem with doing a project motivated by ego is that it is shallow. I don't want to write something shallow. I want to put my whole self into it. I don't want to merely craft something that will pass.

But the problem is that the more you put yourself into your work, the more rejection hurts. Maybe that is part of my reluctance to work on something that could be published. 

Why do I have a desire to be published? —Maybe I don't need to answer that question. Maybe it's sufficient to have the desire and approach it in the right way. 

[...]

I took a class to get my motorcycle endorsement on my license last Friday. I'm part of the way there. I only have my permit. I need to retest for my full endorsement.

I keep thinking about something that the instructor said: 

"Ride your own ride." 

He said this on a few occasions, namely when someone would ask a really specific or overly general question that didn't have an obvious answer.

Me: A friend told me that when I'm on the freeway I should go somewhat faster than the flow of traffic. Is that right?

In John Oliver's voice: Ride your own ride.

The instructor was English, so I kept pretending his voice was John Oliver's. It helped pass the time during classroom sessions.

But there's a lesson in this. The rider/writer has to assess their circumstances. Platitudes and "expert advice" won't make you a good rider/writer. Every situation is different. You must respond accordingly. But by all means, practice turning, swerving, speeding up, and braking. And keep a buffer between yourself and the other cars. But the real lessons are learned en route. 

I guess another way you can put it is this: Write your own story.

June 16, 2020

Yesterday I found a lawn mower 

by some trash bins in an alley

with a tender green vine 

wrapped around the pull-cord.

New spark plugs

And a clean carb

Were enough to get her going.

She smoked heavily at first, 

but she quit.

Then today in an Beacon Hill alley

There was a chicken

That had escaped from its coop.

I gently picked her up

And lifted her over the fence. 

She gave me a gentle cluck.

She was a nice girl.

A young hipster couple watched.

I like to think they were

Tripping on something pleasant.

I'll drink beer with Dan now.

I have a bottle.

Barley wine—

barely beer,

hardly wine.

June 15, 2020

It's just after 10am, and I have just finished eating a gold nugget sumo orange. Now I'm going to open up a Reign sugar free Razzle Berry energy drink while I quietly think to myself about why the ridiculously expensive oranges are so much better than the normal priced ones.

This morning it took me 1.5 hours to write about 660 words. Actually, I wasn't even writing I was editing and transcribing at the same time, which I would rather just transcribe, but my mind won't just let me be. That is waaay too long. But my gods, I don't know how to make this go any quicker.

I am just now flashing back to yesterday when I was writing about being stuck in a low gear. I'm there again, stuck in low gear. That means I can sit here and write this blog, right off the cuff; I can devour simple books; I can write and read reddit/news articles. But I can't do a steady, high-speed, high-gear, transcription for a long period of time like I wish I could.

Okay, fuck it. We're going back in. Siri, set a timer for one hour. 

Alright. 550 words. That is not enough. The caffeine is putting me on an uncomfortable edge. And I had too many distractions. I sent multiple texts and Instagram messages. Well, damn. It's lunch time now.

[...]

I think I am having trouble respecting my writing, namely the story that I'm working on right now called Post Divergence. I started it on a whim because that's the only way I knew how to start. And it came together well enough; it's a proper story. But I wish I had planned better for it. It's going to require massive amounts of editing because of how the plot evolved. Crafting a story really takes a lot of love and care. 

I might be running low on love and care for this story right now. I regret that I just want to get it over with. Maybe that just means that I need to let it sit for a while. I was really pushing myself to finish it by the end of August because without a deadline projects can continue indefinitely, and it's better to have completed something in a half-cared-for manner than it would be to let it sit unfinished.

The voice says: Chip away as much as you rightly can, and do it regularly. Savor the entire elephant one bite at a time.