Blog

Pity by William Blake, c. 1795

Being the particular person I am, I bitch about little things. Often it's a sign, of which someone spent thousands to make, with atrocious typographic sensibility. Or when people try to make things fancy, like the humble grilled cheese sandwich. If you follow me on Twitter, this is not news.

But I don't complain about big things. I mean, I care about things like the economy and policy and whatever else people get worked up about, but I do not let them rustle my feathers. Maybe it's because I don't have a grand vision of the world, or maybe it's more that I don't buy what the visionaries are selling. Even if they had good ideas, the chances of them being realized are slim to none.

So I whine about the leftovers of bad ideas: the terrible traffic patterns devised by C-grade suburban planners, thirteen dollar cups of coffee spit out of wrecked espresso machines, and the butter boards which took over morning talk shows last fall.

Do I have control over these things, however specific I can be in their criticism? No, no I don't. In fact, this spiritual practice of mine is surely counter-intuitive. There may be but a dozen grand narratives that could rile you up, but the barrage of stupidity is unending. Every day, I encounter someone doing something ridiculous, and I of course snarl in response.

Is this some sort of neo-buddist exposure therapy? Also no. While I think exposure therapy may be psychology's most useful tool, I'm no fan of numbing one's relationship with the world around them.

So why do I pay attention to these things, if not to punish myself?

I'm in search of opinion, of a better description for the worlds I do and don't want to reside. It's the opposite of growing numb, really. I instead want to be able to imagine the world I want to live in, using concrete nouns and verbs and adjectives. One should be able to communicate a vision of a habitable future, beyond the empty words that accompany the grand narratives.

So, you have my permission to complain, dear reader.

Now tell me, what irks you?

The Alchemist by David Teniers de Jonge, c.1640-50

I don't know why I'm like this. Perhaps it's my fierce sense of self-reliance. Could it be my endless curiousity? Or maybe it's just arrogance. I think the answer is D, all of the above.

It be great if I wasn't like this. My list of todos would not be overflowing with items which I am unqualified to complete. But I have a compulsion to do everything on my own.

I have been unable to play my Stratocaster all week. A wire to the jack plate broke loose, so the signal from the pickups does not make the amplifier scream. I do not have a soldering kit and have never soldered before, but I will still fix this myself.

My favorite pair of blue jeans is going thread-bare in the crotch. My legs are too big and the inseams rub together. I can only get a year's worth of wear on my jeans, just enough to get them broken in. Last year, I bought a sewing machine and figured out how to darn so I can extend the life of my pants. But until I get to them, I must wear a stiff new pair instead.

Two autumns ago, I decided to rip out carpets and refinish the century-old red oak that lived beneath. That was a helluva a job. I spent a week straight running a sander on floors that a professional surely would've declared dead. But true to fashion, I only did 90% of the work. There were a few spots that needed extra love before putting down the oil. I moved on, so my floors sit bare. Sometimes people ask me: how are the floors? Still the same, I tell them, I'll get to them some other day.

I have a very very long list of things to do, that I must do myself. There's a kitchen table I built because it had to be a specific size and style, but it is still not done. Some bricks of my house need to be tuckpointed, and I've acquired the tools to do it, but yet another job. My fence needs replacing and yard needs excavating, two simple but intense projects. The movement on my favorite watch is busted, and I will try to fix it.

These are just things I do in effort to maintain the things in my life. I have a long list of hobbies I want to try in an effort to enrich my life. One of those things is this website, where I publish my essays and other ramblings.

It should be of no surprise that I made this place on my own. Not entirely, of course, as I use some tools to make it happen. But I could just use the tools in the default form, or choose some other platform like all other sane people do. Things have to be just so, though, so I will stay up well past my bedtime to fix the things that bother me.

I'm not made of money, but I should still be farming these things out. I have friends who can solder and my pants can be replaced for $50 and the weeks it would take to fix my bricks would be better spent elsewhere.

But saving a buck isn't the reason why I do this. It is because I'm fascinated with how everything functions and learning all that I can. And it's empowering to realize even my hack of an effort keeps things going, that the confidence I have in my abilities is justified.

This still isn't the reason, though.

The reason is my spirit.

It's all okay because the compulsion comes from his spirit and, dammit, the artist's job is to preserve the human spirit.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XrgUKL1wDPw?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Shepherd and Sheep by Anton Mauve

There's a truck stop I frequent halfway between Cincinnati and Detroit. They have a good selection of sparkling water, a rarity as far as middle-of-nowhere Ohio goes.  It's one of those red-and-yellow franchises. I'm not sure why they're all red-and-yellow, but I think this one is a Love's.

It's is a trucker hot spot. Lots of chubby American and lanky immigrant truck drives, hustling around with bluetooth headsets, preparing to get back on the road. Somewhere there must be showers, because you always hear the computerized intercom ding, then shout Number 261, your shower is ready. They most certainly have clean bathrooms, perhaps the second reason I stop there. Their little urinal deordorizers are date coded, so you know they're always fresh.

Love's has a survey panel next to the door, with a five option likert scale for visitors to rank their satisfaction with the facilities. I don't think I've ever seen a patron push those buttons, because they're already doing whatever they can to touch nothing in the restroom. But the employees are definitely rating themselves. I'm sure they cycle someone through on a cleanliness check every fifteen minutes, and those guys want to make sure their value is captured by corporate.

---

It's a funny thing, value. That word commonly sits besides you and me, implying some sort of transaction or cost-benefit analysis.

I was in a meeting a few days ago, where a manager was helping me get up to speed in my new role. I didn't particularly need it. Everything was well-documented, and I'd been able to do much of what he was there to help with by myself. Being polite, I tossed a few softballs when he asked if I had any questions. He hit a couple of routine pop-flys back at me, pretty standard stuff.

At the end, I was caught a little off guard when he asked "So if you had to pick, what was the most valuable part of this call?"

Of course, I played along and commended him on his fly balls. But in the back of my head, I was already categorizing this guy, otherwise polite and competent, with the other how can I deliver value bros that seem to be multiplying like rabbits lately. I was sure my response was getting logged in a spreadsheet to add another data point to a KPI tracker somewhere, his equivalent of the bathroom buttons.

How did we end up here? Why does every last calorie expended need to be worth something? When will this utilitarian madness stop? Is my simple appreciation for his effort not enough?

Why can we not come to an agreement that most everything is just fine? Why does information have to be subject to value-judgements? Why can it not just be some things we might need to know, but also might not? How do we even begin to negotiate around the things that don't have value, but are priceless?

Soon, our Zoom meetings will have their own set of bathroom buttons. Google Docs will have an annoying exit intent pop-up, asking what you thought of the document you just viewed. Email and chat clients will have secret downvote buttons that allow your colleagues to crash your credit score.

The Deliver Value Bros will rejoice, but I will start herding real sheep instead of digital ones.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

Routine sucks, despite all it's benefits. I've bootstrapped one over the last couple of weeks, after not having one for most of the last five years. The main benefit of a schedule-less life is that time can expand to meet the needs of the activity at hand. One place I'm particularly feeling this is in my idle thinking time.

I'm no stranger to blankly sitting still at my desk and staring out the window, letting my mind wander for hours on end. The work will get done eventually, and if it doesn't, there's always another day. For all it's quirks, my nervous system has benefitted greatly from this practice.

But mind-wandering is not something that can be time-boxed, so it's not something I can put on a calendar or a todo list so that I make sure I get to every day. And trust me, it's no good for anyone if I don't get that time.

There's no room in the weekday routine, and because of the weekday routine, the random things I formerly fit in during the week need to get done in my weekend routine. A weekend routine?! Blasphemous.

How does everyone live like this? Just moving about the world ticking items off lists and adding new things to lists, but never having any time for true leisure is a drag. Hell, people even schedule their leisure time: gym before work, a run after work, co-ed soccer on Tuesdays at 8, poker on Fridays at 9. Gotta make sure you fit it all in.

Life is long, man. Yeah sure you can get into a car crash or develop a freak form of cancer, but for the most part the stuff about life being short is nonsense. You've got a lot of days, so why be so strict about them? Why not just follow the wind, knowing that getting work done should naturally follow. The trick is setting up your life to be generally free in a world that wants you to be specifically occupied.

Lately, a lot of folks have been pushing for a four day workweek, leaving a certain class of people with an extra day of leisure to schedule on the weekends. It will be good for the economy...blah blah blah...improve work life balance...blah blah...we will be more productive. Yawn.

In response, I've been advocating for something like a crab-fisherman's schedule. I'd like to work 4 straight seven day weeks, fult tilt, followed by two or three full weeks off. This specific plan may or may not be a good one, but I think that a lot of work can and should be done this way. I can do a lot in a short period of time, and enjoy work best when I'm working like a machine. But you do need time away, and lots more than two or three days.

Anyways, I digress, as this wasn't meant to be a bone-picking exercise. I simply wanted to make the point that life seems to go better when I'm free to go wherever I may wander. Give me a few uninterrupted weeks and I'll write a novel or immerse myself in music theory or maybe I'll hitchhike around the midwest. Who knows? I certainly don't. I have intuitions but you can't go forcing plans on them.

I guess most people wait until retirement to life that kind of life, or instead commit themselves to a vagabond lifestyle. I want neither of those things, nor do I want these mini-retirements I keep hearing about. No, I just want to live life a month at a time. That's long enough to accomplish something I can be proud of, but short enough that I don't suffocate on it.

Short of simply being wealthy, I'm not sure how to do this. Most money-making endeavors require you to be consistently working, or at least consistently working at lining up work when you need it. I guess that's why artists have either already made it or have a wealthy benefactor to fund their life. Otherwise, you're working mindless odd jobs to pay the bills and buy your way out of a routine life.

Maybe crab-fishing is actually the answer to all my problems? Or at least my routine ones?

Paradise by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530

Over the past couple of months, I've frequently found myself saying things like they just didn't try hard enough and obviously they have a limited imagination. These are really quite new mindsets for me, especially the latter one. I am historically a pessimist, and a calculated one at that. I always looked for some rationale that something worked, often based upon what I believed to be a physics-engine limitation.

But I've overwritten that part of my brain. I now contain boundless optimism, unconstrained by what can be perceived as reality. There are actually few things that can prevent you from achieving everything you ever want. The trick is to have a good handle on your wildest desires and have the right expectations for fulfilling them.

Often, when people write off their actions as a failure, it's because they were attached to achieving their goals in a particular way. And when their expected path changes, they feel that their ambitions are blown to bits.

Did you really want to run a newspaper, or were you just fed up with your old boss and the perils of the publishing industry, so you decided you'd stick it to the man? If running a newspaper was the end goal, you would focus less on proving something (still an important motivation) and do everything you could to keep the paper alive. That's tough. It's much easier to draw personal satisfaction from sticking true to your ideals (which are informed by groups) than it is to feel good about being successful.

If you can strike the right balance of ambition and expectation, you'll never really let yourself down. A heuristic: the grander yor ambition, the less attached you should be from the journey unfolding in a particular way. The more you expect, the more fragile your dreams become.

This might sound gloomy, but remember I declared optimism up front. You can try hard, but you have to get creative in your pursuit of success, even more so if you're trying to live up to the expectations you've laid down for yourself. That's tricky in a hyperrational world, but it's possible.

We're all trained to see the world a certain way, with very little deviation. This is helpful when you are contributing to another's ambitions. But when you're trying to go out on your own, to push boundaries and fulfill your own desire, you need new ways of seeing. Few people are true visionaries in this sense, but lucky for the rest of us, seeing is a skill, it just needs to be exercised.

I wish I had a manual for expanding horizons. There are many techniques, but I think it is composed of a spiritual aspect and a physical aspect. Maybe they are necessarily separate, maybe not. I guess only time will tell.

A Meat Stall by Pieter Aertsen, year 1551

This is a meat market, I thought to myself, sighing and tossing my phone on the bed. And for the first time in fifteen years, I remembered a book I read about college football recruiting.

---

Meat Market was written by Bruce Feldman, and covers Ed Orgeron's 2007 recruiting class at Ole Miss. Coach O would be fired from that job a couple of years later, and bounced around as an assistant, filling in as interim coach at USC and LSU, and then finally taking over at LSU and winning a national championship in 2020.

I'd read a lot about football, and sports in general, as a kid. But I remember holding Meat Market in my hands, reading the blurbs, realizing that there was something else going on here. I would've been about 14, and it'd be a year or two before I started thinking about the world like an adult.

As an aspiring college football player myself, and general fan of the sport, I'd spent a lot of time in previous years on rivals.com, following the top recruits and which of my favorite teams would be able to sign them. And, of course, by then I had tons of experience as an ace recruiter in EA's NCAA football games. It's all about the star ratings, the height, the weight, the 40 time. Players are merely products.

So when I came across Feldman's book, I perked up. It was right there, in the name. College football is a meat market. These kids are for sale.

Of course, a lot has changed, in an explicit sense, over the last fifteen years. The NIL rules have made the market aspects of recruiting legible. The bidding is all done out in the open, as opposed to the old times when all coaches had were big problems, and if they were lucky, a shadow network of boosters to funnel cash money to recruits and their families.

Back in 2019, Feldman wrote a follow-up to his book for the Athletic, part where-are-they-now and part what-could-have been. It seems that the consensus is that Orgeron had all the guys in place but ran out of time. He inherited a bare cupboard and stocked it up for his successor, who had a brief run of success until he ran the stock out again. Those teams were stocked with now-recognizable names, many of who came from the 2005 and 2006 classes: Michael Oher (the Blindside kid), Dexter McCluster, Greg Hardy, Peria Jerry and Jerell Powe, to name a few. Even some of the names the didn't sign were obscure at the time, but a few turned into NFL Hall of Fame caliber players: Rob Gronkowski, Von Miller, Nick Foles and Harrison Smith.

Orgeron was rubbing elbows with future big name coaches too: Hugh Freeze was on that staff, and would later spend a few years as the head coach at Ole Miss, before running amok with recruiting violations. He got caught arranging for payments to recruits, and subsequently lied to future recruiting classes about the severity of the allegations levied against the school. In the end, Freeze got busted for hiring female escorts and resigned.

It's striking, to me, how fast the sport chews up and spits out the good guys like Coach O. In the pursuit of marginal improvement, schools set higher and higher expectations. They cycle through coaches hoping for someone to stick. Eventually they hire a guy of questionable character, who brings embarrassment to the institution. Ole Miss may have saved itself some trouble if it'd just let Orgeron do his thing a few more years. Or maybe not.

That's just the way it goes, I guess, when you're out for fame and glory and piles of money. Everything becomes a transaction. How much can we squeeze out of this hard-working mentor of young men? And how much can we profit off the backs of the young men themselves?

It's no surprise that the players have embraced their place in the meat case. When the money is there, I can't blame them for trying to get theirs. But one thing that's striking about Feldman's retrospective is the where-are-they-now thread. Almost all of these athletes end up selling insurance or driving trucks. One nearly forgotten player in the piece seemed to have his own influencer racket. Some become educators and coaches themselves.

I think, for me, what is sad is that in the pursuit of money, the sport has lost purity. The love of the game comes in second or third these days. But without football, and I say this speaking for everyone who's played, life looks dramatically different. There is hard work and camaraderie and intellectual challenge that is hard to find anywhere else as a kid. You do everything you can to keep playing, and I guess to do that, you've got to find a way to get paid.

It's always been this way, the grand scheme of things. It is both true that people love this game for all it represents, and also need to make a buck to keep the game going. This is just one of those things you can't think too hard on or else it drives you crazy.

After all, college football is merely one of many meat markets, which we all willingly do our best to present ourselves as a nice filet mignon. Perhaps the answer is to change our tastes, to become the humble skirt steak instead. But even that is a commodity these days. Just enjoy what you have, I guess.

---

I pick up my phone once again, tap the flame, and swipe a few more times.

This is just like the NCAA games. I'm looking for a five foot seven brunette with a nice smile pretty eyes and a penchant for European literature. And all I see here are plastic blondes with an appetite for tequila shots.

I look at my own profile, thinking about what cut of meat I'm selling myself, putting on my salesman's hat to figure out how to get everything I want. I guess I'm not so different, am I?

I close the app, press down on the flame, and tap delete. Perhaps I'll have the salad instead.

From William Blake's Milton: A Poem

It's easy to feel born out of time. I think a lot of people (myself included) tend to look back at various points in history and tell themselves that they are better suited to those epochs.

But we don't realize that what we are not looking back upon times or places or things or ideas. We are instead admiring the people who have come before us. People that are composed of matter and genetic encoding just like us. People who, the same as we, struggled with the same sorts of problems: tyranny of groups, unending change, the desire to be seen.

And in wrestling with those demons, they created a world that would be remembered or found by you decades, centuries, millenia after their passing. In the writings of the Ancients, you could replace the names of people and places, and references to the times. And you'd discover that they were asking the same questions and coming up with the same answers.

This is why fiction is powerful. It surveys all of history and all of mythology, and in turn presents an audience with many alternatives. There is an anonymizing force of fiction, which those literalists of our time desperately need. This force removes us from our own times just enough to see that although it appears that everything is changing, things have always been the same.

And while much has been said about the death of fiction, I think that the proliferation of television and movies plays the counter. Marvel is building it's own retelling of Western mythology. And James Cameron, so long as the Avatar movies keep making money, is working on telling a universalist's history of mankind. Even smaller, non-blockbuster stories have cult followings, who spend their free time uploading video essays analyzing contemporary film. (Like Stories of Old has changed my life. I'll write about that someday.)

So fiction has never been more alive, and people have never been more receptive to it. At the same time, non-fiction has never threatened like it is, but I hope that dies down as people learn the rich universes they can build for themselves.

All they've got to do is try.

---

I started this in the morning and got sidetracked, so couldn't finish. This thread of thought shows great promise, and I really like the title, so don't be surprised if I give this one another go.

Artificial intelligence is going mainstream. It's no secret by now, and while I have unfounded reservations on it's viability, I cannot deny that it's a big deal. Advancements in the various technologies are coming faster than people can really process. Some people will point out the uncanniness to comment on the computers' lack of humanity.

But lately, I've been thinking that humanity is actually the uncanny party to this affair. These machine learning models are trained on unfathomly large datasets, which are derived from average (at best) human output. So the computers are just aping us, and doing a damn good job of it. Humans, on the other hand, aren't.

Back in November, when OpenAI released chatgpt, I spent a couple of hours playing with it, and spent perhaps a dozen more seeing what others were doing, and generally taking in the commentary of an interesting point in history. In short, I wasn't blown away, but impressed by it's consistent satisfactory responses.

It was only when I stepped away from the world of promtpt and response when I began to question reality. Everything I encountered felt like it was generated by a computer. But I knew that it hadn't, that we were still at least a few months from the technology being embraced at more than a tinkerer's scale. Real live humans were responsible for all of these uncanny words and images.

It's at that point you realize that this has been the case for quite some time, that our Work has become so generic and undifferentiable that it could be spit out after prompting the computer with a sentence or two. It's really nothing on a case-by-case basis, but as soon as you start thinking about the implications of this at scale, your mind can go in a million different directions.

At scale, you start to wonder what does this all mean? I'm not steeped in any particular intellectual tradition, but I know this question and it's permutations are asked by philosophers and computer scientists and linguists and beyond.

But, to me, I think some of the most interesting takes come from semiotics, the study of signs and what we make of them. Last month, I read Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, a compilation of essays written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s about the rapidly changing media landscape. It still holds up today, and the collection prompted me to start work on three separate essays, which I plan to publish next month.

While I've just started to explore, semiotics seems to have some substance that might help us (or at least me) answer some questions about humanity's relationship with both technology and itself.

I'll leave you with a quote I read this morning, not about semiotics but about modernity in general, from Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts Into Air:

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often destroy communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it their own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihiliststic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts.

Spectre over Los, from William Blake's Jeruesalem

For as long as I can remember, I've waited until the last minute to accomplish tasks. At this point in my life, I tell myself that it's either because I find something the be pointless (but required nonetheless) or that I like having my feet to the fire. It really depends.

One thing I will say is that procrastination forces you to improvise. Or, at the very least, it removes time for deliberation. Unless you were putting off work to consider your options (often a useful trick), you are going to be winging it. And often times, I end up finding that which I seek most: Flow.

I'd been familiar with this concept, coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, for many years. Simply put, a flow state is reached when a person's skill level is matched with an appropriate level of challenge. As a result, that person becomes engrossed with the activity, and their perception of the passage of time is altered. When a basketball player takes over a game to bring his team back from behind, he is often in a flow state. Same can be said of a lead guitar player soloing during a jam track.

While I knew about flow, I'm not sure I was ever conscious about it's place in my life until recently. Historically, I've seen the it manifesting itself in a few ways:

• Putting off a task, or otherwise shortening available time, in order to microdose a flow state.

• Signing myself up for long, continuous events, like ultramarathons or exceedingly long dates and social interactions.

• Learning something new.

Previously, I was doing these things, but didn't realize that I was trying to put myself into situations that would put me into a flow state. It was only when these things began to fail as flow triggers that it became evident what I was doing.

I think they started to fail because those situations became comfortable, and comfort bores me. Looking at the graph below, my bag of activities started to fall out of the right side of the graph and drift leftwards into boredom, apathy, worry and anxiety.

Lately, I've been finding myself in some more challenging situations, where I am being forced to push my skills again. I'm improvising again, but still too often procrastination plays a big part in it. I still get to a flow state, but I'm not giving myself adequate time there.

And that bothers me, because if I never allow myself the time, I'll never get something else I crave: Depth.

So, hopefully one day I learn to work without pressure. But until then, I guess I'm just going to keep throwing up shots at the buzzer.

I was at a lunch today (Japanese BBQ, quite tasty...and fun!) and towards the end, conversation turned towards childhood development. I largely listened because I was the only childless of our bunch, but thought my different view on the matter was interesting.

The general take (derived from the Literature, best as I could tell) was that somewhere around the age of seven, the structure of a child's brain fundamentally changes. It's at this point, my friends said, your kid is basically who they're going to be for the rest of their lives. Accompanying this idea was a stat that parents only have something like 6% of an impact on their child's development. The chat traversed nature and nuture and the trials and tribulations of parenthood.

This group was a smart and analytical bunch, so I'm not surprised that's how the topic was talked about. But the very idea of relying on Science for rearing children strikes me as a cope. Well-meaning, Very Good parents want to know that they're OK, and that they have some agency with their children, but not much.

More broadly, it feels like this is a very deterministic attitude towards not just raising children, but towards life. If you accept the kind of terms I laid out in the second paragraph of this essay, you're not far from also applying the same idea to you yourself. It's not a stretch to say I have been this way forever, and the Science says I'll never change, so I don't have to exercise any will to change my circumstances.

And with that attitude, maybe your future is determined for you. Something something definition of insanity, you know? It is precisely when you are conscious enough to start thinking along these lines when you actually gain the agency to truly change.

To be frank, I hate the way we psychologize everything about life. And even if I was OK with psychologizing-as-cope, I think the substance of the arguments are bunk.

We hardly know anything about consciousness. Nature versus nurture is a very elementary way of looking at childhood development. We are so naive, so ignorant of the immense plasticity of our bodies. And ignorant is a good way to put it, because it may very well be a good thing that we don't know much. Knowledge can be power, but that power is often destructive.

Lately, my interest in perception is growing. Like, most of our studies on the matter are done on humans, and maybe more broadly, mammals. But how do insects experience the world? What about birds, who have free reign of the skies?

My point is, Life exists in many forms. And while we may not be able to inhabit those forms, it's helpful to realize that there is an Other which we have not yet explored. So maybe don't be sure sure of yourself, ya?