Blog went down yesterday for weird reasons—one of the WordPress PHP files was truncated.

Hmmm… Worrying. But oh well. Restored and we’re good to go again for the moment. Watching closely…

1. The worst thing you can do in life is give up on your mojo. If you lose it, you have to work to get it back. No mojo = no hope.

2. Piety is an overcoat for fear and shame. Whenever you encounter piety, suspect it.

3. Photography is the most grounded form of art, and is amongst the most conceptually pure. It consists entirely of isolating truth in a world of falsehood over which you have no control. Great photographers have more experience in truth-telling than any other sort of artist, because there are no other process distractions to dilute the honing of this skill.

4. People are rarely who or what you think they are. This is not a lesson that can be “learned,” the effect then neutralized through overcompensation. No matter how much you learn, whatever your expectations at the moment, you are likely wrong.

5. Ink is at times amongst the most beautiful things in the world, but the conditions for the expression of this beauty are finicky.

6. The sheer joy of the act—of action—is something that is experienced in different ways by different people, and some people don’t experience it at all.

7. Fear is an evolutionary adaptation, but it is also a significant disease in the literal sense. Under contemporary conditions, if you beat it, you likely win. If you don’t beat it, you likely suffer.

8. Ideologues live a drab existence. That goes double for ideologues that are critical of others. Consume life voraciously, from all quarters; don’t build walls from the limited access to experience you’ve been granted in a short life.

9. The four basic categories of goods conveyance are bottles, boxes, pouches, and bubble packs. Almost everything in a person’s life arrived in one of these things. Bags are an adjunct to all of these; almost every transition in small goods ownership involves, at some point, a bag.

10. Never worry if you’re awkward. Everyone is awkward. Humans are awkward. Look around. The most suave person in the room, if you look closely, is busy being awkward. It’s the underlying human condition. More to the point, every instance of awkwardness is correlated to an instance of hope.

11. I used to wonder where the small animal figurines in elders’ china cabinets came from. Now I know. They came from parenthood.

12. Despite the cultural resonance of snowmen, relatively few of them are made on a per-capita basis. Even people in four-seasons climes will reach the end of their lives having only made a few of them. Every snowman is precious, and marks the passing time of your life cycle.

At various regrettable points in the timeline, reality is eaten in its entirely by unreality.

It is a temporary phenomenon (in much the same way that people themselves are), but its consequences are grim, and in most cases it cannot be avoided.

On manic brush,
the paint, the paint!
And then on grain and filament—
the sweaty arms, frenetic to create—
a stroke, a stroke, a stroke, a stroke!
Backing, backing
and the endless rush—
cover, cover, cover all!
Mania to fill the minutes,
labor’s pains to fill the hours,
the job thus smaller
and smaller again—
alabaster creeping thus—
into the cracks, the veins, the knots—
across the wooden universe!
Across every surface of the room—
a stroke, a stroke, a stroke, a stroke!
To what shocking end
has this sleight of fate
been conjured up here yet again—
feet caught at angles now acute,
and back against the dampened wall—
each drop a means, a craven tool
to cover every surface save—
the corner—
the corner!
Catastrophic, bare!
Its laughing amoral in the creeping dusk!

I am a compulsive reviser. A fan of perfection. I hate getting things “slightly wrong” when I feel, just a bit down the road, as if they could be better.

That’s bad.

One of the things I’m trying to learn in life is how to one-and-done. To do, then to accept that it is done, and move on, even if it could have been better. Everything does not have to be perfect. And trying to make everything perfect is a way of never letting anything be what it is.

It’s a way to drive yourself and everyone around you absolutely nuts.

Sometimes the perfect isn’t just “the enemy of the good,” it is in fact a roving predator that devours everything in its path. And what the perfect is really made of, of course, is fear.

There is nothing more beautiful than the halo of light cast on a dewey window in the middle of the night by a lone street lamp. The world is a kind of endless ecstatic vision, amazing and touching, if you open your eyes. Little things hold incredible beauty that can’t be captured in words or on film. They are the things that are the greatest loss when you die—you are no longer able to embrace the tiny miracles of physics and happenstance that speak to the gossamer, subterranean order of the universe.

Oh yes, order is beauty. It is the only beautiful thing. Happily, there is so much of it that if you learn to pay attention, you’ll never exhaust the little visions of beauty that multiply everywhere around you.

I just said to a friend: Inside every guy is an inner creep that he spends his whole life fighting. People tend to think that it can’t be cured. I hope it can.

We guys spend so much of our lives pretending to be so much more than we want to be. Stronger, faster, cooler, smarter, whatever. It comes off as so fake, and so asshole.

What’s so wrong with just wanting to be us? I don’t know. You’re not grown up until you can get over this. And I suspect that you’re never entirely grown up.

The truth about guys: we’re scared not to be stronger, faster, cooler, smarter. We’re not scared of getting punched in the face, or of the challenges of the world, but we’re damned scared of looking weak, of being emasculated, of feeling emasculated.

We should admit it more.

Here is one definition of “life needing to be fixed.”

Very, very often these days sometime between 6:00 and 8:00 in the evening, I want the whole world to stop. When the kids aren’t here, it’s around the time it starts to darken outside. When the kids are here, it’s just after they go to bed.

I find myself wishing that that moment could simply go on forever—that it would never get late, I’d never go to sleep, I’d never wake up in the morning, no new workdays or challenges would ever come, nothing would ever happen. We could declare an end to The Story of Humanity and the World at that moment and just live in that moment eternally—forever almost dark, forever nothing in particular to do or think about, general relief from everything.

Of course, it’s very good that time keeps ticking and tomorrow comes, because otherwise I could get stuck there forever. Time is a way for human lives to actually mean something, whether the humans want them to or not.

— § —

Things that I should do but haven’t yet done for fear of failure (which is new to me, having crept in sometime over the last decade):

• Become a professional photographer.
• Write a novel.
• Start an eBay selling business in earnest.
• Throw out 90 percent of my personal possessions.
• Write a proposal to turn my rapidly aging dissertation into a book.
• Make a new list of things that I want to do before I die.

Consider this to be the “to do bucket list” of the moment.

More and more, I find Facebook to be absolutely intolerable.

— § —

I keep stumbling across articles old and new that are roughly like this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/08/why-economics-failed/23361/

They get the need for critique right, but they miss the deeper point about rational choice modeling and any form of inquiry the presumes rationality:

Rationality is culturally determined. Full stop.

Until and unless a field like economics can segment and enumerate workable models of cultural values and valuation, mathematical modeling of cultural phenomena will remain forms of inquiry that have purchase only in highly (and justifiably) ethnocentric contexts, and they will always run a decade or two behind the present, as culture and cultural values are invariably and unavoidably subject to ongoing change and evolution.

I used to teach this in some of my anthropology and sociology courses—the way in which cultural knowledge and cultural canons are not actually integrative but in fact suffer from internal contradictions. Now for a moment in my life I live it. Let’s see:

• Live in the present only, at the same time as
• Learn from your mistakes and
• Follow your dreams

• Be completely honest and share yourself entirely, at the same time as
• Pick your battles and
• Control your impulses

• Live with integrity, at the same time as
• Put other people first and
• Accept life as it is

The lesson? It’s all bullshit. Culture is designed to make us feel better, not to be objectively effective. It is a way of rationalizing our differences in the interest of collaboration, not of accomplishing greater things or actually becoming happy.

Which is what I used to teach. But it’s different to live it.

— § —

The entirety of our modern world is dependent upon flat surfaces with either 101 or 102 keys (buttons) on them to be pressed in varied sequences. The keyboard is the human-system interface that has enabled the entirety of the late modern era. Without the keyboard, we’d be absolutely a different world. No internet, no computing, no code, no Wikipedia, no email, no messages…

Despite all of the hero worship and fanfare, it’s actually Charles Krum, Howard Krum, Frank Pearne, Frederick Creed, and others that together developed the modern QWERTY keyboard that are responsible for virtually everything that we now associate with modernity.

Do you remember, years ago,
black night and frozen worlds together,
as we talked under fatal sky, rainy weather
shivering in collapsing unison?

We’re long apart now, and I think to myself:
What do you do now, in the world, for applause
as big as it is, with its colors and dogs?
It’s been a long time, you see, since I knew.

That’s what I’ve realized, in the odd moment,
now and then when the lift strikes a chord
to dispense of me onto another floor
in my own reality, now separate from yours.

My sight of such a once vivid past
has clouded as weeks and months fly by,
and soon I find that through a squinting mind’s eye,
I can’t remember your face anymore.

Where did you go, that night, once you’d left,
and where have you been since last we spoke?
And how have you been, and do you still smoke,
in the odd moment, like you used to?

And so it will be a day of many posts. Fine, it’s been a while since I had one of those.

Here’s the thing. The greatest times in my life, and the times during which I got the most done, and felt the most positivity, were the times during which I shot from the hip, said what I thought, did what I did. When there was no filter and no judgment. When I lived as me, really me, come what may.

There’s a kind of vicious cycle that happens in life.

Live honestly -> Make great gains -> Become attached to those gains ->
Try to protect those gains -> Live less honestly to avoid risk ->
See what is effectively your dishonesty destroy things -> Hit rock bottom ->
Live honestly again …

You’d think that after living a few decades and seeing this play out over and over again, a person could move on and break out of the cycle and just stay at “live honestly.” But human nature is such that we become attached to things, and then we want to protect the things to which we’ve become attached, even if this protection sows the seeds of the destruction of any and all gains that come from living honestly.

I seriously don’t know how many times I’ve lived out this cycle. Over and over and over and over again. Maybe it’s just the human condition, the nature of life?

— § —

There is a deep, dark, secret part of me that realizes that what is missing is courage. I have courage for a lot of things in the world. I have historically been fearless in front of crowds. I have stepped into the most fraught situations to defend girlfriends. I can face mountains of debt and Ph.D. programs without batting an eye.

But a different level of courage is required to throw caution to the wind when it comes to your primary relationships in life. To say to yourself, “I’ll be who I am, and if I lose my significant other or my children, oh well.” I’m not there yet.

So I will keep living the cycle, I suspect, until I get there.

Okay, ask yourself this honestly: how many times have you written letters to people, carefully crafted letters of passionate intensity in which you try to get every word right, only to keep them to yourself rather than to deliver them?

If you haven’t done this, then you are a better person than I.

I do it all the time. And it has to stop. I’m not sure what this stoppage will look like. Perhaps I need to actually deliver them. Perhaps I need to stop writing them.

But the fact is that it is entirely counterproductive to spend so much time on communication that never occurs. People don’t know what you don’t tell them. But by having spent so much time on the writing, your subconscious can start to believe that you’ve told them, that it ought to be obvious, that it’s an established truth, that you’ve done your part. That’s a breeding ground for dishonesty and resentment.

Writing letters and not delivering them can become a disease. I have the disease. It is time for me to cure myself.

In the haunted room
where you used to live
nothing much has changed;
white sunlight still brings a glow
to the bedsheets and white furniture;
the carpet is clean;
the air is, too—cleaner than it is elsewhere in the house.
The children play there, now and then,
but not so often as they do in other rooms,
and not quite in the same way;
there is a reverence about the room,
and a fear of it as well,
of its power and of its bitter truth.
You are gone, but your ghost is there,
threatening pain,
passing judgment,
narrating the story
of human mortality and the ends of things.
At times I pause,
as I furtively walk through it,
and imagine it differently—
your things gone,
the furniture and the blue paint changed,
new purposes and new projects there,
filling the room with the vital hum of everyday life.
But then I move on, realizing
that if I drive you out of the haunted room,
leave no place there for your memory to dwell,
you will come out into the open
and be omnipresent,
haunting the entirety of our lives.
And that just wouldn’t do.
Better to keep you imprisoned there,
unjustly,
in the haunted room.