• The fact that “think of the children” is now a phrase to be ridiculed on our society is evidence of our society’s catastrophic level of pathology.
• The expressive violence problem in the country is becoming acute. By “expressive violence” I mean violence that is committed not in furtherance of a crime, but as the expression of the actor’s feelings in a given situation, whether personal or political.
• I am feeling perilously close to predicting a Trump victory in November. Shades of Nixon’s election everywhere.
• The thing that every faction, cause, interest, and population in the country, left or right, has in common is an unapologetic certainty of their own self-justification and the righteousness of their ends, and of the sure moral corruption and irredeemability of any opposed. That is the primary ingredient in the recipe for violence in the streets, or worse, for civil war.
• Like the era of the dot-com boom before it, the era of the mobile device is now over. Apple is the bellwether here. What is next? I suspect the era of the electric car on the industrial technology front, and the era of environmental (no, not wearable) computing on the consumer front.
• If I have to buy another vacuum (and I may soon), I will buy a robot vacuum. Just because.
• I have waited my entire life for the perfect keyboard, and I’m still waiting. I don’t expect input devices to move beyond keyboards in my lifetime if they can’t even get keyboards right a century later.
• There is a hole in my soul where my bicycle used to be.
• Our dog is getting old. Sometimes I forget just how old. This is sad. But for the moment, he is still very fit.

— § —

© OddurBen / CC BY SA 3.0

The thing that strikes me most about the present and—say—the last ten years in global society—is just how angry everyone is. Political leaders, commerce figures, populations, press, civil society, religion… everywhere you turn, they are increasingly angry.

Generously deliberative disagreement has virtually disappeared, as has the witty form of “debate-banter” that once graced the airwaves regularly between public intellectuals. Conversations in which friends hash out their differences in verbal and evidentiary sparring have given way to immediate friendship breaks—this person can’t in good conscience be friends with a “bigot” while the other won’t countenance a minute longer in the company of a someone that wants to “destroy civilization” and so on.

The opinion columns of the news press and the endless writing of the editorial and magazine press are filled not with questions and points of reflection but with strident answers and desperate calls to panic and to action. Everyone, on all sides, private and public alike, declares repeatedly a state of emergency.

Candidates for office, already elected officials, captains of industry, activists and volunteers, voting factions, and indeed entire voting populations are all hated by other voting factions and entire voting populations.

Everyone is strident. Social trust and charity have broken down. Sometimes, say on Facebook or in polite company, anger masquerades as so much high-mindedness, but hardly anyone is fooled; such high-mindedness only too obviously serves as cover for deep resentment with the unenlightned; it is invariably aggrieved virtue-signaling for present company rather than moral munificence.

It is an ethos of taking-to-the-streets, of judgment, of endless protest and self-justification. The question is which came first, the activism or the indignant angst? For surely both are now universal forces in a way that is historically unusual at the aggregate micro level. It begins to seem as if the whole place is gradually becoming a powerkeg of afflicted atoms on all sides.

I am a product of my time.

In general, this makes me sad because I simply don’t like my time. I’ve always felt that way, but in recent months the feeling has become much, much more acute. Weber spoke of the disenchantment of the world, and modern sensibilities tend to imagine this as a regrettable necessity if we are to arrive, finally, at an enlightened world.

They take far too much for granted. There has been zero progress toward enlightenment, even if enlightenment itself is the panacea that it is so often taken for granted to be.

The world has been disenchanted, yes, but only disenchanted. It is not that the end of enchantment necessarily also ends ignorance. Instead, we have replaced an ignorant world and population that were at least at times enchanting with an ignorant world and population that are distinctly ugly, gray, and callously self-serving.

— § —

© Aron Hsiao / 2008

What’s left is nature, or what remains of it as we have known it (the troubling fact being that nature itself is no more vulnerable to us than it has ever been, and that we have known it only in its most human-friendly mood), as the climate shifts, the cloud cover flees to the poles, undeveloped spaces are replaced by consumer spaces, and the rate of species extinction reaches shocking proportions.

But in what’s left of nature as we have known it, there remains some enchantment that we are able to comprehend, even if we try—with all of our indignant and moral might—to stomp this enchantment out as so much injustice.

The deep greens of the springtime flora remain, as does the scent of cool humidity at dawn, the stars in the sky, the breath and rustle of the wind. These things remain. They are ageless, they are biased, they are prejudiced and unenlightened and totalitarian. They traffic, celebrate, and evince laws, hard boundaries, and immutable essences, those things that give such affront to modern sensibilities, as singularly concerned as we are with the misguided value of individual freedom and individual self-identity.

Since time immemorial mankind has known that nature was a brute—now, just when we are careening toward the greatest display of its brutishness, we have lost—or should I say, we lie to ourselves about—this essential knowledge. It obtained until late modernity, at which time the impulse to cover nature over with an ideological veneer more amenable to our adolescent tantrums led to two natures—benign nature, which somehow cures every disease if you breathe just so or rub just the right leaves on you, and which understands how to mend broken hearts, broken societies, broken childhoods, and so on—and “old” nature, the one that used to kill people, which we swept away through some unmentioned means during—civil rights, was it? Or the end of the cold war? In any case, it was during some progressive period that the enlightened power of mankind led nature to reject its former hatefulness and embrace the progressive agenda and our universalist world of tolerant peace and individual striving toward the ability to virtue-signal.

Only this is, of course, bullshit. The former image—that of nature as Buddhist monk—is a fabrication of the Western elite social justice class, protected as they are in their consumerist bubbles. Nature remains a brute. That is the reason—the only reason—we have ever loved it, and at the same time the reason—the only reason—we must so industriously lie to ourselves about it now.

We want so badly not only to escape nature’s definition of us, but in fact to neuter nature as well because we perceive nature as it is, unmentionable as it is in any honest way, to be illiberal, unequal, and unyielding. And at the same time, we secretly long for nature’s riches, which we rightly perceive to be hidden from us just now, but which we refuse to admit to ourselves consist almost entirely of enchantment and individual helplessness—those things that speak to us of our own solidity, unimportance, unfreedom, and mortality.

You know, the concepts that are politically and consciously anathema that the entire West tries, day in and day out, to repress, work around, legistlate away, and protest against.

Nature is, of course, illiberal, unequal, and unyielding. Period. And somewhere deep down, a few people still realize this. That is why, in fact, it is beautiful. That is the very nature, as it were, of the sublime.

We’d do well to learn a thing or two from this fact, if it’s not too late.

© Aron Hsiao / 2006

The thing I hate most about the cultural present in the west is the embrace and rationalization of failure and flaws.

Social media shares a huge part of the blame here, but so does the culture at large. We live in a “feel-better, it’s-okay” culture. I’m guilty of participating in it, but not as much as some.

Whatever you’ve done that’s wrong—it’s okay. Whatever your failings—they don’t matter. In fact, quite the opposite. Whatever is wrong with you, there are two dozen Facebook memes a day to make you feel better about it. Your weight. Your temper. Your divorce. Your laziness. Your social withdrawal. Whatever. Someone—and likely thousands of someones—are out there telling you and everyone else that it’s okay, that you shouldn’t be blamed, that this is a difference to be embraced, and so on.

It’s too much. It’s too far. There are zero sins any longer. Or at least, very few. One can imagine a time in the not-so-far future when there are Facebook memes that say, “Killed someone? You are not alone. Behind every murderer lies a sensitive heart in pain!,” and “Some call you a rapist. But you know that you are a victim—a lonely, disempowered person who had poor role models and never had a chance. Embrace your inner child. The rape you committed does not define you!”

No doubt these will lay over silhouettes of the Buddha or outline graphics of green trees and leaves.

This is the bullshit of the SJW world that we live in. And it is bullshit.

There are bad things. People do bad things. Bad. And they ought to be ashamed. This culture that says that “Your sins do not define you!” or that tries to assure every sinner that “You are a victim, not a monster!” has to go.

Understanding and empathy, sure. But also ethics. Morality. Wrong is wrong.

I expect to be held responsible for my mistakes. I will stand up, face my children, and admit that I and their mother fucked our marriage and their lives up entirely. I expect no one to justify this with an explanation of our “victimhood,” and I will vomit if my children try someday to tell me that “it’s okay.” Because it isn’t. Wrong is wrong.

There is no belief in “wrong” any longer in our society. No willingness to even countenance the thought. Nobody is ever wrong. Everyone is just misunderstood. Under such conditions, society is not possible because trust is not possible. Because no matter how tolerant and accepting everyone is, if you know that the fellow human beings around you may hurt you, even if you don’t believe they’re wrong for doing it, you are not going to collaborate with them—be sociable with them—in the same way.

Radical tolerance, acceptance, and embrace are the path to social anarchy and warfare through the backdoor. For society to work, wrong must be called wrong, and everyone must know it.

So basically—the next time someone on Facebook tells you that you’re a victim and not a free agent, that your wrongs are merely misunderstood rights or were unavoidable given your background—ask yourself whether you want to live in a world in which everyone forgives wrongs against you, your family, or your children on the same grounds. Ask yourself whether you will be able to trust anyone else in a world in which there are no wrongs and all actions by any free agent are permissible and must be embraced.

Tolerance? Tolerance within certain well-defined parameters enables the maintenance of the nation under conditions of globalization and multiculturalism. But culturally mandated tolerance of every difference and every choice and action? That is pure and in fact imposed social darwinism, disguised as enlightenment.

This is madness. I hereby leave the left. It has gone off the deep end. As of now, I am a conservative, albeit of a different stripe than those in national politics. Because I actually believe that ethics, morality, justice, and society ought to be conserved.

— § —

Corollary: Maintaining an inner mental map of the territories of right and wrong is hard. Trying to live them is even harder. People will hate you for it. This is the world we live in. The one thing that the tolerance culture can’t tolerate is someone that believes in right and wrong, prior to “talking things out” or “embracing difference.”

It is seen as bigotry, prejudice, hate, xenophobia, you name it.

Well that is me. I am a bigoted, prejudiced, hateful, xenophobic person that actually believes that there is a Right Way to do things and that it is Honorable(R) to try to live a life of things done the right way. I won’t give it up. Even if they kill me. Certainly they’re trying, over the years.

I don’t think I’ve had a friendship, relationship, or job that ended, ever, for any reason other than that I was firmly committed to doing things the right way, prior to any commitments involving empathy, tolerance, social justice, etc.

But it is in my bones. It is the core of who I am. I am the person who tries to do the Hard and Painful Shit That is Right, even if it kills me.

And kill me it probably will, eventually.

© Aron Hsiao / 2006

Weird night of dreams last night and a weird day of sensations today.

The best analogy that I can think of is that I feel like a high school student or a college student that has suddenly realized that they have seriously fucked up.

Do you remember it? That feeling that you got when you arrived at class and the instructor asked everyone to hand in their term papers, and everyone began to shuffle to the front of the room except for you, because you had spent the weekend skating in the park or watching television after reassuring yourself—without any actual grounds for doing so—that you didn’t have anything coming due on Monday. And now here it was Monday and you were without your paper and recalling the instructor’s adamant warning that no late work would be accepted and anyone without a term paper on Monday would flunk for the term.

So there you sat realizing that you had flunked. And you knew it. And a pit sat in your stomach. And you stared straight ahead and tried not to think about the only thing that you could possibly, at that moment, think about. And you tried not to feel exactly how you felt, which was full of dread and crude oil and mercury.

That feeling.

In fact, it’s not entirely an analogy. I have been having these weird moments in which I actually am convinced that I’ve forgotten something or made some sort of terrible mistake that is just on the edge of consciousness and then I mentally sit down and prepare for my unconscious to deliver the memory of just what it is that I’ve just catastrophically fucked up without remembering it, something that is so terrible that my whole life will be affected.

And then, a moment later, I realize that there is no such unconscious thing. There is only one dreadful thing going on in my life right now, and I am fully conscious of it, and it is not in any sort of state of having been ignored or forgotten.

They are sort of like phantom pains, these momentary impulses of panic. They are the vestiges of worries that are so big that the conscious mind isn’t able to hold then in their entirety, so they take over the subconscious as well, and come out as all sorts of other worries that make no sense whatsoever once they come to consciousness.

I woke up with the feeling that something important had been stolen and I needed to report it to the police. Later in the day it was the feeling that I’d missed a very important bill and was in for severe penalties. Then I suddenly felt as though I’d forgotten an important medical test or task that could have life-threatening consequences for me.

And so on.

Yet on ten seconds of reflection, in each case I realized that there was absolutely nothing of the sort going on. The feeling of dread was not related to the circumstace that for a moment I’d impulsively “recalled,” but—upon full and actual recollection—I understood that the circumstance creating the feeling was, in fact, divorce, pure and simple.

The assessment failed. The thing stolen. The unsettled bill. The creeping pathology. And so on. They’re all so many thousand metaphors. My subconscious mind is working overtime to try to get me to do something about it, and of course that sensation of failure and too-lateness, that darkness, comes from the fact that in fact it is a done deal, it is too late.

My subconscious simply hasn’t received the message yet.

Funny how the mind works. I thought that it had “hit me” already, and indeed that it had been “hitting me” for months. But now I suspect that there will be another wave or three of it “hitting me” as my subconscious mind gradually gets hold of the realization that it is too late for us and that there is, in fact, well and truly nothing any longer to be done ever again.

Finality is so… final.

— § —

I gave everything I had to my marriage. I have few regrets. Everything I had, and then some, and then some more. I poured every last drop of blood, sweat, and tears into it. I believed. I was committed.

But in the end, it wasn’t enough. That’s my biggest regret. And it is also an echo of the illusion that has been shattered. That perhaps two people can pour everything they have into a marriage and in the end be miserable—and, more to the point—unable to survive together nonetheless.

It is a sad, bewildering thing.

© Aron Hsiao / 2011

Well, we did it.

Today at noon we engaged in an act of wanton destruction that will echo throughout the rest of our lives, and through the lives of our children, and likely future generations after that.

At the end of the day, I have no coherent, intelligible explanation for any of it. When I was younger, I hated the genre of historical justifications that went, “It’s impossible to explain; you just had to be there.”

Now I find myself understanding precisely where such justifications come from. There is no reason, no way to conceptualize it. It simply is. In the swirl of events that is time, things happen and, as a result, other things happen, and ultimately—and particularly when there are people involved—history takes on a life of its own, often to everyone’s ultimate horror, though it remains impossible in retrospect to establish precisely when such horror creeps in.

— § —

Here we are in a tent for the third night in a row, in the outdoors, by reason of no necessity.

It is as though we—I—have conspired with fate to step out of my life while this was to happen, to enter a liminal state, to resign myself to nature and bare humanity to make this even plausibly imaginable without going insane.

And so I type, in utter darkness, with lumps of dirt and grass beneath me and crickets droning on and on about the justice they’ve been seeking but can never find, shivering and sore.

The children are warm and snoring in sleeping bags. I refuse to crawl into one.

I demand, tonight—demand—to be cold. To feel what is real.

— § —

It is a conceit, yet I have new empathy for those that are forced, in whatever area of life and the world, to make difficult decisions.

To drop bombs with the risk of collateral damage.
To send young people off to war to kill or be killed.
To sentence someone to be executed.
To shutter the last factory in the town, sentencing it and its families to slowly disappear.

Yes, as I said, it’s a conceit. And at the same time, within the context of my own life and my childrens’ lives, it is equally tragic.

And what do all of these things have in common? A kind of helplessness. The total impossibility of doing any sort of right thing at all, particularly when one is playing chess against fate and is already in check.

The die cast, it can appear and feel as if no matter what you do, the result will be the same, or perhaps even worse. Finally and reluctantly, when the best off ramp you’ve seen in a very long time comes along and offers even the smallest promise of respite, you simply take it, covering your eyes and praying as you do so.

No doubt you then regret, bemoan, and second-guess your choice forever, knowing at the same time that in the moment you were sure that there was no better choice, that there was unlikely ever to be a better choice, and that you had only an instant, in the grand scheme of things, to make the impossible decision.

Catastrophe. Utter catastrophe. Circumstance masquerading as agency. And meanwhile the stupid hairless monkeys drone on about the E.U. and Foucault and the price of crude oil and the politics of race. It’s all nonsense. It’s all bullshit. All of it.

Yes, I’m being dramatic. Because it . is . fucking . dramatic, and it always will be.

The end.

— § —

“Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

(T.S. Eliot)

© Aron Hsiao / 2016

My daughter has been asking, over and over again, when we can go camping. So I’ve told her that we can go this summer and have acquired a tent and some over-the-fire grilling skewers.

But it didn’t seem like a good idea to head straight for the mountains for our first outdoor camping adventure, so this week we’re doing a dry run in the backyard, on the lawn.

As luck would have it, we’ve picked a reasonably chilly, windy night with off-and-on sprinkles to begin. My senses tell me that it’s simulating the high country camping experience quite well, when all is said and done. The air inside the tent is bracing and the leaves haven’t stopped rustling.

With the kids zipped into their sleeping bags and asleep to the left and right, it’s just me that’s awake, hearing the sounds and feeling the sensations of nature.

— § —

It’s been a long time since I did this. Over the course of our marriage there was one night of sleeping in the backyard, but it was a still, hot night on which fireworks were expoloding in the background, and the tension was already very thick.

This, tonight—is different. It feels like camping once again, and I’ve not been on a proper mountain campout since 2001. That’s fifteen years!

— § —

So, the days are passing. A wedding here, a divorce there, a job here, a car repair there. Life goes on.

The leaves, they are rustling everywhere outside the tent.

This is my life, that I am living right now, for better or for worse. I suppose it is for both, at the same time.

And it’s another Monday tomorrow.

And in the meantime, backyard camping, and a chance for me to actually feel something of nature once again. It is quite beautiful.