As parents, we both came to the table unwittingly trying right wrongs—through our children—that were done to us in the past. Both for their sakes, and for hours. Not entirely healthy.

And the complicating factor was that the wrongs done to us were in some ways opposite. And, as a result, so were our overcompensations.

This tended to serve to reinscribe those wrongs, as though we had done them once again, to each other.

— § —

A post ago I went on for a bit about the advantages of being an introvert.

Now one of the disadvantages.

In our close relationships, we are not very compartmentalized. People that are close to us tend to have full access if we can give it. This is not like extroverts, who tend to have a wide variety of access levels and manage them effortlessly.

The result is that for those closest to us, the veneer of the “professional adult” is often thin or nonexistent. This can lead to the false sense that we, as their introvert friends, are somehow inadequate, unable to cope, or less mature than everybody else.

They don’t see us functioning as “professional adults” in our lives apart from them, and we tend not to engage them on the level of the “professional adult” when we interact with our close people, because they are our close people.

This can wreak a certain amount of havoc in relationships as those closest to us can slide into that assumption that I mentioned, particularly if they are extroverts, that we are in need of rescue. Because they rarely get a chance to see the “suit and tie” us; instead, they always tend to see the “pajamas” us, and can begin to assume that we’re stuck wandering the world undressed, half asleep, and needing a snuggle.

Just as I think we’re emerging from the storm, we’re back in the storm.

How will I ever know when things are actually what they seem, finally?

Will I ever be able to trust it?

This has been the nature of the carousel for a long, long time. Nothing is solid, no matter how solid it seems. It can’t be allowed to be.

And why do I continue to go where I go emotionally? It’s harder to feel so destabilized if you can keep yourself from being tempted into feeling stabilized in the first place.

There are many posts over the years that I have wanted to make but haven’t made. Some of them I’ve created as drafts again and again, but never published. Some of them I’ve published and then pulled back. I’ll be honest and say that most of this hiding out despite wanting to say something publicly was because I was afraid of upsetting significant others, family, friends, and so on.

But ’tis the season for me to lay it all on the line and let people know who they’re dealing with. If I end up alone and have to start life over, so be it.

So let’s see how many of these “I’ve protected other peoples’ feelings for long enough and now its time for me to reveal myself” posts I can knock out in one day, shall we?

— § —

I am an introvert.

I am not shy. (Ask my wife, or any of my friends, or any of my former students for that matter.)

And it is not a disease. Or a weakness. Or something that needs to be remedied.

In fact, I get terribly offended when people imply that there’s something wrong with the way that I am. There f**king isn’t. If you can’t be comfortable with the idea of introverts, it’s more likely that there’s something wrong with the way you are. I’ve long suspected that extroverts who spend their time trying arduously to get introverts to make a dozen new friends are actually projecting their own deep fears and unfulfillable need for validation onto said introverts. They are vaguely terrified to see that someone is often alone, or doesn’t have too many friends, and that is okay with it. It triggers something for them. Just my guess.

— § —

It’s not hard for me to make friends. I just don’t make a lot of them. And here’s why. There have been times in my life—times when I was feeling lonely, or when things were trending downward, or when I was just bored—when I took someone’s advice to “put myself out there” and “make friends” and so on, and I did. It’s not impossible. The steps are pretty easy. I speak English. And I’m a nice guy.

So what did I end up with? A lot of people that I genuinely cared about that wanted to see me all the time. And then I’d have to say no. Because it was exhausting and annoying. And then I felt terrible. Because I really did care about them and I really did feel as though they were my friends. I just plain didn’t want to see them most of the time. I wanted to do my stuff. Read my books. Work on my projects. Hell, just sit and reflect. Go for a hike. I preferred to do my plain old introverty stuff, and not in a group. And as a result, I hurt people. And I had to suffer through the awkward conversations and the pain that comes along with making people feel as though you’re rejecting them all the time.

And after each of the periods in my life during which I’ve gone on such a friend-making binge, usually for conscious put-it-all-out-there reasons, naively thinking I was “doing the healthy thing” (largely on advice of extroverts) and feeling tremendously exhausted by the process, I’ve ended up letting all of those friendships taper off and away. And that’s painful, too. But not as painful as having to deal with all of them all the time and try to explain that I just don’t need to see my friends all that much, and in fact I prefer not to. Lots of times, I just like to know that they exist and that’s enough for me. In fact, it is often preferable.

But here’s the thing. People seem to think that this is some sort of disease. That the fact that I made a whole bunch of friends and then let those friendships slowly wither means that I need some kind of therapy for it. That the natural state of life is to have a massive social circle and to go out and talk every night and to prefer to work in groups and to ask for advice from a crop of heads and so on. That I need to be fixed.

I do not f**king need to be fixed. There is nothing wrong with being an introvert. It is a way to be. Just like being a lumberjack, or a Buddhist, or gendered male (or female). It is a way to be. A perfectly legitimate, functional, fine way to be. Many, many very successful and historically important people have been introverts. Introversion confers many distinct advantages, not least amongst them the ability to get things done—largely because introverts can just sit down and put in hours when they feel inspired, rather than using a significant portion of those hours to socialize instead. And when this happens, it feels good. For introverts, flow is nirvana.

Indeed, many, many very happy people are introverts. Only they are not happy all the time because nobody is f**king happy all the time, and the fact that they are not happy at any particular moment is not “due to their introversion” any more than the fact that extroverts are unhappy and liberally sharing their hurt with a hundred different people on any given day is “due to their extroversion.”

— § —

It is work for me to socialize. With my children. With my wife. With my self, even.

It is good work. Joyful work. The most valuable work in life. I could never live without it. I would be devastated without it, particularly in the case of my wife and kids.

But it is work. Even socializing on Facebook is work that I do because it is needed. That is what it means to be an introvert, nothing less, nothing more. It does not leave me feeling energized to have a conversation, even with my closest, closest friend or with a circle of family, and even if the conversation is fabulous and fulfilling. It leaves me more tired than when the conversation started. That does not mean that it catastrophically expends me to have interactions. A lot of people have over-read into the things they’ve consumed online about introversion and come to imagine that an introvert is somehow deeply damaged by social interaction of any kind. No. It’s just work. Fulfilling work, important work, work that at times I long to do (say, with my wife, whom I in fact want very much to see and interact with every day). But it is work. Again, nothing less, nothing more.

And so, as a result, I consciously limit the number of close friends and close relationships I have in my life. Because I can’t sustain too many of them and I don’t want to hurt people by just plain not having the energy for them. You can’t sustain relationships that you don’t nurture anyway, and I simply can’t nurture too many. That’s just the way it is.

This does mean that I rely on the friendships that I do keep more than an extrovert might rely on their friendships. When the chips are down, I don’t have fifty different people that I can call. I have a handful. Yes, I could go out and get fifty different people once again, just to have more people to talk to when the chips are down, but the thing is that I wouldn’t talk to them anyway. Instead, they’d be “checking in” on me and asking me how I’m doing and showing up at my door with snacks and all of that really, really nice stuff that would make me want to pull my hair out for the extra work if, in fact, the chips were down. When the chips are down, more than at other times, I need the space to just do my stuff. And contrary to what extroverts tend to say, you can’t just do your stuff as an introvert if you’re not alone. Because non-introverts that try to accompany you in stuff-doing sessions, well… They talk to you. They can’t help themselves. And that means you’re not getting to do your stuff. It’s like an itch that needs to be scratched. You get impatient. You stop being a good listener. You long to extract yourself from the situation and just be alone again so that you can… do your stuff.

So I’ve learned my lesson over the years. A handful of people. Keep them close when you do talk to them. Bare your soul. Let them bare theirs. Be economical and encourage everyone to lay it all on the line without beating around the bush. And the rest of the time, let them be them over there, and I’ll be me over here and we don’t have to spend half of every living day chatting about nothing in particular. Because introverts can’t do nothing in particular very well. Everything in an introvert’s life is, in fact, something in particular. The nothings-in-particular, they got discarded a long time ago—and it is extra work to have to recover them, much less to then have to talk about them as a matter of mere politeness.

— § —

I don’t think all of this is an issue for anyone in my life right now. But it has been in the past, with some people. And I’ve never blogged about it in just this way, head on. And I’ve just seen a meme that made me want to scratch this itch.

So I’ll just say, on behalf of all the introverts out there: if you can’t handle friendship with an introvert—being not one of a hundred, but one of six, or one of three—if it makes you feel worried or pressured that someone doesn’t have too, too many friends other than yourself or that they seem to want to immediately open their heart to you and expect you to expeditiously open your heart to them—then politely excuse yourself from being friends with the introvert in question and say that it all just plain weirds you out. They’ll be okay. They’ll be grateful. I promise.

Whatever you do, don’t make it your project to come at them from a “place of caring” and try to fill their lives with people and smalltalk all while maintaining your distance, just to make yourself feel better.

They will not thank you for it in the long run. And you also won’t feel better in the long run being friends with them, if that’s the way you feel.

— § —

Mini-manifesto over.

You know that you’re a “real” blogger not when you get paid to do it, not when you have a post go viral, not even when you’ve spent decades in your career doing it for companies of all kinds and sizes.

No, you know when you have finally given in and given up on any other aspirations in a realistic way when you make your fisrt post about sex.

So here it goes. It’s gonna be short.

— § —

I don’t know if it’s this way for other guys, but I am coming to learn that it is this way for me. Here comes the line that will create problems and disagreements and criticisms and so on. But:

In myself, at least, intimacy requires sex. It is the one and only key to bringing down the inner walls. Without it, as time passes, the walls, they go up. They just do.

I suspect that our therapist and an army of concerned people (let’s be honest, many of them women) might disagree. Tell me that it’s precisely the point in my case that I have to break through those walls with pure, unadulterated metacognition and trust.

I don’t buy it. I’ve been alive for a long time. I can only say what I deeply, deeply feel. Sex is the emotional ocean beneath the surface. The wellspring of deep feeling. The core of connection. For me, sex is exactly synonymous with trust, feeling, and commitment as a package. They cannot be separated. The presence of one is the presence of the other. The absence of one is the absence of the other.

It just is. Sex opens parts of my brain and parts of my heart that otherwise are closed. And their natural state is to be closed. They have to be opened anew each time, regularly, or they are quickly and simply inaccessible to me (much less to others).

— § —

This goes rather clearly with the love languages post I made earlier.

People don’t seem to believe that guys are ever wired this way. But I am. And there is no getting around it.

And if I am wired this way, there must be other men that are, too. Take it under advisement, any of you in the “all men are predators constantly and sleazily seeking meaningless sex” camp.

I couldn’t have meaningless sex if my life depended on it. And I couldn’t have a meaningful relationship that would survive very long without it.

I want to be reliable and rock solid.

But I also don’t want to be taken for granted. It’s one of my biggest things.

Problem is, these don’t really go together. If you are reliable enough, you will be taken for granted. That’s just human nature, and it’s a key part of why people like reliability anyway—so that they can, finally and after you have proven yourself, take you for granted.

How do I square this circle in my life? I either need to become more okay with less reliable or become okay with getting taken for granted.

The thing about kids is that if you let them get to you, you’re sunk. The only way not to go crazy is to stay emotionally above the fray. To remember that you’re the adult, you run the show, and at the end of the day they’re still gonna be there tomorrow, needing you just as much as they did today, so you can’t get caught up in drama, let yourself get worked, or let yourself get exhausted.

Say what you mean, do what you do, love them without caving to them, and let them figure out the rest. They’ll figure it out. They’re wired that way.

— § —

The thing about emotional needs is that while everyone has them, the fundamentals of fulfilling them have less to do with other people than they have to do with your own self.

If you know what you need, you’ll get your needs met.

If your needs aren’t being met, then you don’t actually know what you need. Maybe this is because you can’t face it, or maybe it’s because life is confusing. But if you go for extended periods of time in a “my needs are not being met” frame of mind, some introspection is probably in order.

— § —

Even so, and apropos of my last post, it’s not always easy to do the right thing, to do what is necessary or what you’re sure is the thing that you ought to do. But then, there is no reason it should be easy.

I’m not going to say that “nobody ever said it would be easy” because, in fact, that’s not true. Way too many people and pundits and zen-better-your-life-gurus and BFFs out in the world tend to say that it’s easy or to speak in platitudes that make it sound as though it is supposed to be easy.

But that’s bullshit. Life is hard. Get a helmet. Doing what needs to be done can break you. That’s just the way it is.

But growing up is when you realize that not doing what needs to be done will break you harder.

Life is a kind of least-of-all-evils (or, more optimistically, best-I-can-do) balancing act. There’s no way around that.

If life was ever easy, there would be someone on record amongst the smartest, wisest, or most successful people in history that had an easy life as evidence for this possibility. What you see in every biography, instead, is trouble and pain and suffering as far as the eye can see.

There is no known antidote, to date, for entropy. Nobody can hold it together because it can’t be held together.

But it’s just like raising kids. Either you can let it get to you, in which case it can and will overtake and overrun you, or you can appreciate what is, make your peace, do what needs to be done, and let the chips fall where they may.

— 6 —

Did I just paraphrase Bobby McFerrin in long prose?

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Things can be right without their being easy
– Contradictory facts can in fact both be true
– Just because one day is bad doesn’t mean the next one will be
– That a decision is yours doesn’t mean it isn’t also someone else’s
– Making choices is not the same as controlling (or even knowing) outcomes
– Twenty-four hours is a much longer time than a single day
– Watching the time and taking the time are separate things
– Space cannot be eliminated; only filled—and not all of it
– Light and truth share the same quadratic falloff function
– You can want to share with someone without it being about them
– Little boys dream about forces and their environments
– Patience is another word for respiration
– Inside every child is an adult; inside every adult is a child
– The proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem says nothing about the Riemann Hypothesis
– Heat or light, it’s all radiation
– Hope for the Riemann Hypothesis lives because Fermat’s Last Theorem was proven
– Children and adults are not the same inside
– Respiration is the most critical property of patients
– Environments force little boys’ dreams
– You can want to be with someone even while you can’t share with them
– Quadratic falloff functions impart the evidentiary properties of light
– Not all forms of elimination create space
– Separating time from watches is a good way to take it
– Every day the world is reborn in twenty-four hours
– Controlling (and knowing) outcomes is a sound way to eliminate choices
– That a decision was someone else’s doesn’t mean it wasn’t also yours
– Believing that tomorrow will be bad makes today so
– Deep truths are the hidden forces that fabricate facts
– Things can be easy without their being right

All of these long and wordy entries lately, and yet in the end it’s really all the same nonsense that it always was before. Why? Why do I do this? What is the benefit? And yet I am positive that there must be one or I wouldn’t have kept it up all these years.

— § —

“Hell is other people.”

And yet, heaven is, too.

I think that has always been the crux of things. In an existence caught between heaven and hell, some of us just want to be “heard” in a way that implicates neither. That way is, in fact, to post on my blog.”

— § —

Laying in bed feeling exhausted but unable (unwilling?) to sleep.

All of these people that don’t blog or that say it’s an inappropriate thing to do… They are the people that lie to themselves so regularly that they no longer recognize the
lies as such.

— § —

Given my nickel allergy, I’ve long been in the habit of taking my wristwatch off every night before I go to sleep. And there it is now, on her nightstand.

Only tonight I feel the compelling impulse to put it back on and to wear it as I sleep. So I will.

Another post title that could just as well be “miscellaneous.”

Thing is, the best years of my blog were years in which there were no titles. But WordPress and most CMS systems operate in a title-centric way, and you can’t really walk it back. Sure I could “not include it in the theme” but then it would still be in the backend. I could code things up so that every post automatically got the date as its title, and only this was only shown in the backend.

But it would still be there in the part of the world that I look at. And it would still color my thinking. I would still know that it’s in the database as a post title. So I may as well embrace it and play with it in the most natural way for me.

Which is to fill that field with a bunch of intuitively chosen, basically meaningless words before I begin to write—words that have some (unclear) bearing on how I feel at the moment I begin.

— § —

The popular, connotative image of “intimacy” is that of a kind of sameness, ease, and comfort. Happiness, even. Sharing secrets and so on.

That’s bullshit. Intimacy is by its very nature fraught. Someone, and probably both people, will be uncomfortable a lot. If nobody is uncomfortable, nobody is intimate.

Note that the sort of discomfort involved is important. Intimacy traffics in the discomfort of exposure and risk, in leaps of vulnerability, acceptance, and blind (dare I say: naive) faith that may result in destruction if things go wrong. On the other hand, discomfort that results from repression, confinement, and sacrifice have nothing to do with intimacy.

The most intimate moments of your life are only experienced as intimate after the fact. In the moment, they are tremendously unstable, uncertain, and off-kilter, as both people venture out onto a ledge together and hope that nobody pushes.

That’s intimacy. When both of you are there and the opportunity is calling out to you—and nobody pushes. Afterward, when you feel grateful and awed by the fact that nobody pushed, that’s when you actually experience the intimacy. Retrospectively. It is a retrospective experience.

If you think you are feeling it in the moment, you’re probably feeling something else. Love, possibly. Infatuation, desire, excitement, joy, lots of other possibilities. But intimacy is challenging, risky, and scary enough that you can’t consciously conceive of it while you do it. Your whole self—and the other person’s whole self—are entirely preoccupied with the precarious circumstances of mutual vulnerability and the heroic (also from a book) intention and will required to maintain it. If you are conceiving of intimacy at any given moment, that means you’re not quite managing to do it at that moment.

At least, that’s my working theory right now.

— § —

Whoever decided that the way that the universe would work was that “small things” would “accumulate” and ultimately be definitive… sucks.

Sure, it’s lovely and inspiring that lots of good small things can ultimately make massive positive changes. But that gift is outweighed by the unjust fact that lots of bad small things can ultimately accumulate into the kinds of mass destruction that they do in fact accumulate into.

I started writing this thinking of individuals and relationships, but I think I also mean it in relation to entire communities and societies as well. Jeffrey Goldfarb, who happens to be my Ph.D. committee chair, wrote a rather profound and optimistic book called The Politics of Small Things that explores the ways in which tiny gestures and changes can result in great transformations for the better.

The dark underbelley of the analysis is the implicit truth that it works both ways. Tiny gestures and changes also enable the kids of human devastation, sometimes at unimaginable scales, that his positive small things are ultimately called upon to liberate people from.

— § —

I know that some people would say that this a wash, or even a net positive, since it means that we can always potentially effect change for the better, even as individuals.

My inner orientation in life is and always has been toward justice, toward that which I might intuitively feel would occur as a matter of course in a “good world” or under “good natural laws.”

So for that reason, in my inner self of selves, the unjustice of tiny negative actions having outsized negative effects seems definitive. Even if that is the world that we do, in fact, live in.

— § —

I am sitting at her table, in her house, on her chairs. Sleeping in her bed, this weekend. It is lovely and right—after all, we are married—but it is also somehow troubling.

It doesn’t generally run in the other direction. A part of me is asking me the tough questions. What about me? My tastes? My places? My life? Where do I fit into all of this?

Still another part of me is binding and gagging the doubter. She doesn’t want to come over. If you’re going to make that an issue, you may as well just say that you’re done with the whole project. Are you really interested in doing that? No, of course not. Have some patience and sensitivity. Pick your issues carefully, you asshole.

They have been engaged in an inner fistfight for a couple of weeks now. I am hoping to throw them both out before too long.

— § —

And yet always the nagging questions.

Am I supposed to continue to learn from experience? Conventional wisdom says that experience is one of the foundations of maturity, and of the healthy self

Or am I supposed to discard experience? Recent events suggest that experience is often unhelpful and destructive.

Learn from experience in “new ways?” What, precisely, does this mean? Aren’t the ways in which we learn and interpret experience based also on experience? At some point, the implication is the same as it is one paragraph above—throw the experience away.

— § —

At some point, the specter of “growing apart” begins to haunt the frame.

This almost came up tonight, or at least I thought it was about to. That old narrative about both people growing and then sometimes they just plain grow in opposite directions and if that’s the case and both people are going to be their best selves, thennnn…

In the end, thats not where it went.

But it does bring this old trope to mind. For me it has always been one of the most frightening and most regrettable in all of human relationships, because it implies that we ultimately have no control over them if we are to do the right things for others and ourselves. Doing the right thing means that relationships are subject to the whims of fate; if they’re not, somebody is not being honored, supported, or accepted.

And yet I’ve always believed that somehow, relationships are an intentional act. People don’t “just grow apart,” but rather choose to grow apart. I’m not sure in practice how this intention is expressed and acted upon, but I continue to believe it.

Relationships are an intentional act. People that say that they just “grew apart” are avoiding taking responsibility for what they have chosen to do and the life they have chosen to live. They can’t bear to say:

“I decided I regretted my previous choices, and that I didn’t want to be with him anymore.”

or

“I decided I regretted my previous choices, and I decided to break the contract that was our marriage”

or

“I decided I regretted my previous choices, and I decided to abandon a friend forever.”

So instead, they say, “We just grew apart, it was decided by fate and circumstance, you have to honor reality and be true to feelings and selves” and so on.

Long and short, I still believe that people are responsible for, and should be held responsible for, the outcomes of each of the relationships in their lives. Not that the responsibility is entirely theirs; every relationship of any kind involves at least two people, after all.

But “just growing apart” remains shorthand to me for “never grew up.”

Sorry, folks. I don’t know if that’s going to change. I suppose you’ll have to take it or leave it.

— § —

Honesty at times strikes the same kind of uncomfortable emotional chord for me.

There is much that is laudable in the idea that honesty is the key to healthy human interactions and to functional relationships, communities, and societies. This is a restatement of the “communication” trope in many ways; what is implicit in the claimed need for better communication is the assertion that the problem at hand is that people have not understood one another, often because they were not given the opportunity to do so. Either someone wasn’t being honest and clear or someone wasn’t listening to honesty with clarity and empathy.

The problem is that honesty itself is something of a fraught concept.

Things pass into a head and then out of it again in a matter of minutes, or even seconds. Every soul experiences multiple levels of feeling, and we learn that some of them repress others. Which one is the right one?

Some of the books talk about “microscopic truth” and so on, but that tends to get very abstract in an ironically concrete sort of way. Telling someone “my chest is feeling tight” or “my head is hurting” still leaves a great deal open to interpretation; it seems to me that this may cause the very same kinds of communication breakdowns that everyone is trying to eliminate by writing such books.

But when to be honest, then? The easy answer is “be honest about what is in your innermost self” or things of that sort, but of course, it’s not so easy to be honest with yourself, either.

And this is not necessarily a matter of intention or a failure of clear thinking, or the result of repression. Sometimes you work very hard at figuring out what your innermost self honestly thinks or feels and you can’t for the life of you figure it out—because your innermost self is conflicted or confused in its own innermost self.

Whatever. More meta.

— § —

It’s been cold. Very cold. Cold and windy, in ways that suck the warmth right off your bones.

At times like this, it’s very good to be in love.

And here we are, in love. And married. And living in two different places. And sometimes close and sometimes awkward. At some basic level all of this still does not compute; I don’t have the proper schema, data structures, or algorithms in place inside of me to make sense of it.

So I just go with it. That’s the “live in the moment” thing.

But there is a way in which living in the moment is also a way of avoiding responsibility, of being blind to what has gone beore and what is to come next.

Aren’t we supposed to learn from the past (not least, at the very least, our mistakes) and plan responsibly for the future? Or is that not something that we’re supposed to do anymore?

And if not, what’s with all the jails and all the books on budgeting? What’s with the public schools that litter the landscape?

But I’m thinking in circles. At the end of the day, at the present moment, I want to be here, even though at times it is uncomfortable. Because at other times it is wonderful. It is the experience of having thought you’d lost your spouse forever, only to find that they’re still alive, coming back, etc. It is, at these other times, the experience of paradise reclaimed, about which much saccharine fiction and narrative have been written, and for good reason.

And I am taking those scattered moments of discomfort to be the hints and shadows of true intimacy. They go into the plus column right now.

But of course this also suggests that if there are no moments of discomfort, then we are failing. The Hollywood-and-Americana wisdom holds that the “right” relationships are the ones in which nobody has to feel discomfort.

There is, of course, also the opposing narrative, a time-worn one that says that relationships are hard work, but are worth it in the end. This is what the literature is seeming to tell us right now, and the view that I’m holding to at the moment.

But it does mean that the hard work of discomfort, at times, has to be done, so that we can also live those transcendental moments at which paradise is regained, each time. Makes it much easier to understand why people in healthy relationships also regularly need time alone. Everybody is just a bit worn out at times, that’s all, even if the life is ultimately good and right.

— § —

There is another bit of conventional wisdom that says that what will happen in the end, because we cannot help it and because it cannot be otherwise, is that people will muddle through, in messy ways that can’t be evaluated for correctness or even for their effects on happiness or sadness.

People will muddle through and in the end they will have a life and it will be what it was and it’s more to do with their temperament and approach to life whether at the end of it all they think it was worth it and well-lived or not worth it and a disaster.

The mess can’t be avoided, though it is our mess to make in intentional ways, and the only thing we can consciously order is our experience of and reflection upon it after the fact, either leaning toward happiness or not.

This, for years, is the approach that I keep coming back to. This is more or less what I think I am at the end of the day—someone that believes it’s going to be a mess. My mess. Her mess.

And that is going to try to embrace the mess that we make together.

— § —

So, despite reservations and even some moments day-to-day that are difficult to live through, this is where we’ve chosen to be and also this is a place of renewed happiness and intimacy.

Life is a mess. I almost don’t dare to say—

Life is also beautiul. In that messy, conflicted, uneven sort of way.

But I’ve just said it anyway, for the umpteen thousandth time on this very blog.

So help me.

Everything old is new again, and I am—once again—learning from myself as well.

One of the great evils of our time is that everyone is so concerned about its evils—the fact that virtually every issue is reframed by concerned parties as moral issue, after which such advocates internalize the associated moral pangs, leading them to experience all disagreements on related points with indignation, condemnation, and deep, deep fear.

Vegetables become a moral issue. Traffic lights become a moral issue. Car tires and indeed cars become a moral issue. Household textiles become a moral issue.

— § —

The ostensible justification is always the same—that the issue, in some way, in some form, is life-or-death. It is, in a way, the logical extreme of the “think of the children” argument.

Pesticides on vegetables kill.
Traffic lights save lives.
Tires fill landfills and cars fill atmospheres with waste and gasses.
Synthetic fabrics are made with petroleum. Or natural fabrics sustain a history of slavery.
Or whatever.

The problem with this justification is that it is secretly disingenuous. Applying it to any one issue belies the fact that at this level, everything is life-or-death. Humans are alive, after all, and because virtually any thing or circumstance may be said to shorten or extend someone’s life by some measure, from minutes to hours to days to weeks to months, and all in some future that, in fact, doesn’t exist yet. So nearly anything “may save lives” or “may prematurely cost lives.”

— § —

The problem with moral issues is that they recast mundane differences as moral conflicts, questions of righteousness and salvation.

When everything is a moral issue, every even minor differences must become holy wars in which lives and souls hang in the balance. And then nothing can get done, no relationship can remain intact, and the supposedly moral issues themselves become embroiled in holy gridlock. Catch-22.

— § —

Underneath it all, I suspect the reason for this reframing is historical. It’s the same reason we have an activist culture (which is, covertly, an inherently moralistic thing).

Recasting issues and disagreements in moral terms has been an effective method of issue advocacy. Morality is something that westerners in particular understand; it is the basis of much of their cultural narrative and sensibility.

A preference or a logical position may be mildly interesting, but a question of right and wrong, of good and evil, sways hearts and mobilizes support in ways that preferences simply don’t. The same goes for the ability to recast opponents as forces of evil that must be stopped.

Whether the issue is organic food or lower taxes or gun control or recycling, lives always hang in the balance. Good must triumph over evil.

If it was just a matter of policy, then we could agree to disagree and compromise. But this isn’t a matter of policy. It’s a matter of morality. And so my position isn’t merely justified, but also ironclad, not amenable to negotiation, possessing a significance well, well beyond the mundane and measurable dimensions of the issue at hand. Its meaning exceeds its substance by an infinite, indeed transcendental amount. And so you’d better concede to me, stick to the cause with me, remain involved, repent, “fight for change,” if I am to continue to vouch for your moral bona-fides. And if you are to be able to vouch for them to your conscience.

Because beyond lives, salvation also hangs in the balance.

— § —

In an age in which everything is holy to someone, and in which holiness is seen as one of the better mechanisms for pursuing policy and action, holy war becomes pervasive.

It’s tempting to accept this state of affairs in international diplomacy. Civilizations exist on a scale that makes their holiness seem plausible (doubly so given Durkheim’s discussion of society).

But it’s easier to see how pointless it is when it comes to vegetables, or light bulbs, or shoes, or classrooms.

These aren’t, I argue, or at least shouldn’t be, moral issues.

— § —

Much has been made of the need to return to deliberation, discourse, and respect in politics.

I don’t believe it’s possible, in Judeo-Christian societies in particular, to discuss reasonably anything that people come to believe is a matter of morality. That’s not how monotheistic cultures work. If there is a “right” answer, then alternate preferences are not just illegitimate, but ultimately evil.

If we want to be able to discuss things with our neighbors or loved ones again, the solution is to let go of the idea that things are moral issues—that there is, in fact, a “right” preference, and that this preference and its rightness are somehow deeply associated with our very being. We have to let go of the absolutism about “lives” and “souls” being affected by things. Lives and souls are affected by everything. We can’t afford to turn everything into jihad. Wr must accept our own fallibility and mortality and concede that if something may shorten a life by a month or a year at the ripe old ages of 80 or 65, that cannot be allowed to be the same thing as “lives hang in the balance.” Quality of life cannot become an absolutist question of anything-but-perfection-is-damnation-or-death.

Because the larger the sphere of moral issues grows, the greater the extent to which holy war will overtake communities and households.

If you make vegetables and light bulbs are a matter of moral right and wrong, in other words, you’d better be prepared to lose your friends and relationships over vegetables and light bulbs.

That seems to be okay with a lot of people. In the climate we live in, it even appears to seem “right” to many people. They end relationships with a kind of indignation over the moral failures of the people and communities that they once loved, secure in their righteousness and full of resentment.

But it seems sad and unnecessary to me. A recipe for unhappiness submerged beneath the thinnest veneer of piousness and propriety.

Morality is not the solution to our problems, it is, in fact the problem in many cases.

— § —

To restate this in simpler, more Buddhist terms, attempts to make life and people more perfect can only ensure that and they it will be less so. Acceptance and relatedness are the closest things we can get to perfection. These things and life itself are inherently imperfect and different from our own ideal preferences, yes. But it is all downhill from there, despite any crusades upon which we embark.

And these days, we tend to embark on many.

This whole therapy and relationship thing can become so emotionally, intellectually, ethically, and normatively confusing that you don’t know up from down, right from left, or whether you ever even existed or merely imagined that you did.

It’s not at all like a new relationship, in which you’re pretty sure how you feel all of the time. Instead you spend a great deal of time second-guessing yourself, not on solid ground in your thoughts and feelings and your understanding of immediate realities. Often you feel half a dozen contradictory things at once. In fact, you may not be sure whether you’re actually presently feeling this mishmash of feelings, feeling a mere memory of them, feeling anticipation of them, or if the mishmash is both temporal (some past, some present, some future) and qualitative at once.

— § —

Sometimes she tells me I’m insecure. I’m not convinced that I am, exactly, though I also think it would be pointless to rule it out. I think, rather, that we’re often at arm’s length for one reason or another and trying to navigate uncertainty and distance with sensitivity and grace while we both hope we got it wrong and we aren’t or wish it wasn’t so and we weren’t, even as we worry that we have misread something-or-other and are creating problems where none exist.

Sometimes, the best way to try to be sensitive is to just ask clear questions and hope for clear answers.

— § —

Sometimes, it’s not that you are insecure, but that you have kids. So many, many, many kids, it can at times seem, a roomful of kids, a military platoon of kids, an entire teeming ocean of raging children, that you are simply not allowed any sort of emotional intimacy with anyone else in your life. So any parents that happen to be nearby are emotionally distant as a kind of inescapale ontological necessity.

So, depending on your personality, you may talk about feeings and ask for confirmations a lot as a way to try to get things more right, because so much is turned off between you by the fact of children, or you may just be very businesslike as you try to get through the day, leaving more sentimental people to feel a bit on the outside looking in.

If it all sounds like there’s way too much meta going on, I’d absolutely agree, except that the entire goal of the process we’re in is for everyone to achieve consistent and consistently reliable metacognition. So meta is the direction we’re driving in.

No doubt that’s why it turns into an endless game of “I know that you know that I know that you know that…” follwed by a “Wait, don’t I? Do I? Do you? Shit.” And that on the exactly twelve seconds of every twenty four hours together when things are not being thrown, set on fire, or turned into a space of conflict by the kids.

When you as a couple are not being thrown, set on fire, or turned into a space of conflict by the kids.

— § —

In part, what I’m unclear about are also my own boundaries and needs. I know these very well in relation to the parent in me (something that causes us endless trouble, because I think that she does, too, for her part). I’m far less certain of them when it comes to the individual in me, the significant other in me, and so on.

So much of what I used to know about myself has been affected, transformed, altered by circumstance, that I am trying to learn about myself again as I go. This is a scary process because there’s much at stake and the consequences of any learned truths can be high.

— § —

I find myself sitting and trying to think my way through things a lot. It mostly doesn’t work.

— § —

I love my children very, very, very much. And I am an extremely involved and adoring father. But there is no doubt in my mind that children end marriages, whether literally or figuratively. And that the father in me routinely tries to murder the husband in me. And the same is true for my wife, whether or not the wife part in her is aware of the conspiracy.

Now it may be possible also for marriages to be reborn as something new after the fact in the cases in which endings are merely figurative, after much hard work. We are trying to find that out now, with hope and love in our hearts.

But it is a sentimental cultural lie to pretend that childrens’ effects on the arrangement—emotional, physical, practical, etc.—that preceded their arrival in the marriage are not definitive.

And any struggles or difficulties that existed in the marriage prior to children will magnify and multiply this effect exponentially.

— § —

In particular, and to personalize this, we had kids too soon in our marriage, before we knew each other well enough, or had come to terms with our differences well enough, to stably survive the onslaught.

I’m not a fan of desktops. I’m really not. This despite the fact that my current desktop has a RAID with a huge pile of online storage, multiple monitors, DLT for archival storage, and massive amounts of RAM.

I’d rather be using a laptop for everything. All I need is:

– A 19″ QHD display
– Four internal drive bays
– At least 64GB RAM capacity
– Six Intel cores running at >3.5 Ghz
– 10 hours battery life
– Very high rigidity and stability
– Thickness less than 0.7 inches
– Weight less than four pounds
– eSATA, gigabit ethernet, and USB 3.0
– Native MacOS or a really easy hackintosh process

Well a guy can dream, can’t he?

Super thin, super light, super rigid, super battery life, super expandable, super display. That’s all. I’d buy it in a second if it was possible to make it. Somehow I suspect there’s no mobile chipset support for the memory and clock speed needs, and of course without a mobile chipset you’re not going to get the battery right, at least not without violating weight limits.

The display could be an issue for mobile, too.

Right now for mobility I use a last-gen pre-retina 17″ Macbook Pro with the optical bay converted to hold an SSD. RAM is maxed. It’s close, but not really close enough, to enable me to abandon my desktop.

Seems like I and about a million others have made this pie-in-the-sky post before.

I’d say that I hope Apple at least brings the 17″ Macbook Pro back, but there’s no point for me without the ability to hold at least two 2.5″ drives that I can upgrade on an as-needed (read: as-incremental-improvements-are-released) basis.

I have no idea what I’ll do when my current unit dies or becomes obsolete. Ugh.

These days I try to keep my gaze as short and near as possible. It’s the only way to survive. There is no question of “thriving.”

Part of this strategy is a less-than-conscious avoidance of noticing almost anything other than the living room, kitchen, and my office. Certainly I do my best, without thinking about it, to avoid actually seeing the back yard.

But I just let myself slip, and I saw it. The toys. The trampoline. The gray-brown remnants of a garden, planted billions of years ago, now frozen. Vines snaking around white fencing. A tall sunflower, bent and looking downward.

I couldn’t afford to see that. I can’t afford to see that.

I have work to do, and I’m barely able to get myself to do it as it is.

A Slashdot post on one of the recent logos for an NRO mission led me into several hours of reading on past missions, then capabilities, then intelligence agencies in general, and finally the Snowden leaks.

I have to admit that in the abstract, this is like seeing a good horror movie. There’s something dreadful about all of it, but also something thrilling. Should I be feeling this way? I think it’s the same thing that little boys feel when they see an SR-71 blackbird or when they watch Star Wars and see the Death Star filling the screen.

These are great and terrible things. The “terrible” is the part that modern, enlightened, politically-left-of-center people tend to focus on, and certainly it is that part and the implicitly negative perspectives on it of which discussions are culturally sanctioned in such company. But the “great” in the previous phrase bears mentioning as well, because it is the source of much temptation (and, I suspect, much trouble in the world).

The little boy in me is fascinated by these things because they are immensely powerful. Powerful agencies. Powerful technologies. Powerful social structures. If, as some have argued, the essence of masculinity is efficacy, then it is easy to see why young boys gravitate so frequently toward power. Anyone that’s been a little boy, or that’s had one, can sense this before the capacity for speech even develops.

Big things. Loud things. Carniverous dinosaurs. Efficient predators. Electrical tools. Train engines. Trucks with large wheels and growling exhausts. Jet planes and race cars. Swords and guns. Power. The power to get things done. Just what things—is too often beside the point.

— § —

As a young pre- and early-teen at my parents house, I built (simply because I could) a monster computing system starting in the late ’80s and evolving into the early ’90s. Symmetric multiprocessing, dozens of megabytes of memory (huge at the time), large multi-mechanism SCSI RAID arrays, two 4-bit raster heads and three RS-232 VT-100 heads, all tied into a UUCP feed. It didn’t run MS-DOS, Windows, AppleDOS, etc., or indeed any of the common applications of the day. It ran an obscure Unix variant (the only one that I could afford to license) better suited to particular infrastructural needs in enterprise computing.

What did I do with it? Keep a diary. Play with code. Most of the storage space went unused. Four of the five heads were constantly running “screen savers” (think of it—getting a bunch of VT-100s and connecting them up via RS-232 just to log in, run a text-based screen saver over serial, and then ignore them).

Why? Power. The system and its integrations was/were powerful. No, I didn’t use most of its capacities or capabilities in the least. I used the UUCP feed to send personal email and pull a few humor newsgroups off of Usenet. I didn’t have many uses for it at all, in the end. But somehow the fact that I could do all kinds of computationally and socially intensive things with it, that it had the capacity to be a powerful instrument and system made me love it, fetishize it. Somewhere there is a photo of me holed up there with five heads and several large towers in my bedroom as a young teenager. It was taken by a friend. No doubt many of the other teens that stumbled into my bedroom thought I was doing all kinds of wild computational and networking stuff, rather than just playing around with dynamic Huffman encoding every now and then and optimizing algorithms that I didn’t really use all that much, or have any use for in fact, and all for for no particular reason.

I just wanted power. Not to use it. I had no use for it. Just to have it. Just to see it sitting there in front of me, being powerful.

— § —

The “great” in the “great and terrible” programs of the NRO, NSA, CIA and the like—and in “great and terrible” states—is too often overlooked or denied. The greatness is a matter of great scale and great efficacy. These are seductive things still, to the little boy in me.

They lead me to read about these programs, technologies, states, and so on with overt disgust and aversion while covertly repressing both a thrill at their capacity and a regret that they are not under my control, or no longer exist, or some other caveat that carries them beyond my reach, that leaves me unable to experience their power directly. Because somehow, even if they had and have been used for evil, the capacity that they represent, the raw power, lies beyond good and evil, in the realm of massive potentialities for action and effect.

The seductiveness is dangerous, I think, and it surprises me and at times makes me ashamed that I feel it. But I do. I’ve never stopped. I see it in my son, too, in his constant quest to identify bigger, badder dinosaurs, and faster, stronger vehicles. Not because he can imagine any use for them, but because they are powerful.

— § —

Another thing that I used to do on my massive system (and have still been known to to from time to time on my current, far less extravagant in contemporary terms white-box Core i7 system) is run benchmarks that basically make a big show of using every last drop of processing ability and throughput that a system offers—all in the interest of showing a cute dial or calculating an abstract number that ostensibly represents the “capability” of the system but that in fact, underneath it all for most users, shows that you have put the system to its maximum use.

Why? Why burn all of this electricity to engage in pointless calculation, only to discard it?

Because once you have power, you feel compelled to make use of it from time to time, just to revel in its raw capability. To see the power exercised, even if toward no particular end. So when I’m not busy doing a big render or processing video for my day job, I nonetheless find myself tempted now and then to crank the thing anyway. Because.

This is the place where I say that power corrupts.

— § —

I see this tendency in myself and in my three-year-old son, but I don’t see it in the same way in my wife or in my five-year-old daughter.

I stand in a kind of solidarity with my son, understanding what he feels, but I’m also well-aware as a (however inadequate) student of the world of the ways in which this fascination can come to no good—of the seductiveness of power and efficacy, the compulsion to pursue them for their own sake, and then, once they’re in hand, the compulsion to put them to use, just to see power exercised, not as good and not as evil, but merely as power itself (yet with good and evil epiphenomena that the adult in me realizes are its real importances and legacies).

Hopefully as he ages, this impulse in him will also be sublimated into the kind of bibliophilia that leaves him reading books and articles about various kinds of power, about the NROs, NSAs, CIAs, and superstates of his time—overtly to worry about it all, and covertly to get a thus (I tell myself) harmless fix.

Hopefully.