My day off.

Finished  work one day to discover that they had instituted a new “one shift drink per shift” policy w/o warning.  In disgust I stormed off to the local liquor store and returned to work having dropped $40 on a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin.  Staff members were invited to partake of the booze.

The 2/3 of the bottle that survived that night has been sitting in my freezer until now.  I mixed myself a gin and Tonic half an hour ago and in place of the usual ice cubes I used frozen whole strawberries.

This is a drink I can recommend you.  It gets better as it goes.

Brinkmanship.

I’ve got a good friend that I’ve tried to do favors for in the past. I’ve loaned him thousands, he’s done the same for me. We pay each other back. We take care of each other, you know? Little things that make the world go round. It’s a positive-sum game.

But the ante was just upped- he bought me a few hundred dollars worth of new bicycle. Out of the blue, no explaining it. There it is. I’m about to head out and greet the day with it.

He may think he’s won but he hasn’t.

There will be retribution. It may not be swift, but it is certain.

The survivors.

A study came out recently, a study that crunched data from American veterans of the wars of last century. The rates of violence of these veterans, after their wars, were identical to those other men of their age in all regards but one: suicide. The veterans from all wars committed suicide in double the number of their counterparts. In some way they couldn’t free themselves from what they had experienced.

Carlos was at the bar again last night. The bar is part of the Somerville restaurant Sagra, owned by three police officers that work in the area. Carlos, also a police officer, works with the owners, and that might explain why he was drinking there rather than elsewhere, but not why he’s recently been there so much, nor why he’s started tipping so extravagantly. His recent demotion might explain part of it, but not after you found out he requested the demotion. Carlos requested the demotion so that he could take leave of work and go back to Iraq, for a third time, a visit from which he believes he won’t return. And that’s why he’s been coming to the bar, and that’s why he’s giving his money away.

The employees at Sagra believe that Carlos is going back to Iraq to die.

Everything is beautiful.

I slept in the classrooms of MIT each night of one interesting homeless year. During the summer of that year I tried, a few times, bedding down in the shrubbery outside- but that always proved less hospitable- poking sticks, insects, oscillating temperatures. The classrooms of MIT became comforting to me and soon felt much like home. That situation lasted close to a year.

But although at first I had had no real class objections to joining the part of the underclass known as “the homeless” by year’s end it had begun to wear pretty thin. Late at night I’d have trouble falling asleep. My insomnia had nothing to do with the now-comfortable concrete floors or the bulky pillow of my bag. My insomnia had to do with the disparity of my hoped for future and the conditions I lived in.

All my nebulous dreams for my future self were grandiose and none could be conceivably arrived at from my then condition. What was wrong with myself, I began asking, that I had arrived at such an ignominious social condition- often drunk, barely employed, and homeless? Could I ever reasonably hope to attain a grand future? What could conceivably, realistically, change within myself to change my circumstances?

I worked this over in my mind and began, to a small extent, to quietly despair.

There was one thought, though, that became comforting to me, and it was a thought that would ease my clenched brow and let me fall asleep: the thought that perhaps I would never achieve anything in my life. Perhaps lying on the floor, semi-sober, making minimum wage was the pinnacle of my life. My life might be one of squalor, ever-wasted talent, bad choices, wrong choices, and choices wrongly never made.

This was comforting precisely because I knew that I could live with this if it came to pass. Come the worst, I knew that I would survive. What was killing my peace of mind wasn’t my circumstances, but the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between dream and reality. By accepting that all desired futures might never occur- and that that would be all right- I was nightly able to find surcease from anguish.

A friend of mine has a similar philosophy- she believes that on her deathbed she’ll be full of regrets. She believes that she’ll probably look back on a life full of missed opportunities, and feel that the life she lived was barely adequate. And this belief has freed her. Although she had a childhood tinged with abuse- with alcoholic, abusive (and soon absent) parents, shuttled through foster homes; today she’s got a great long-time boyfriend, a nice home, a fulfilling well-paying job, is constantly learning. She acts as a Big Sister to a needy young kid, is learning to sail- etc. Needless to say she spends no time on regrets or woe.

Her life is going to suck no matter what, she believes, and as she can’t possibly make the right choices, she might as well maximize the return on the best of all of the bad choices she’ll make.

My friend is a pretty happy woman. She’s constantly optimistic in the short term, and willing to try many new activities and viewpoints. It’s only in the long term that she deprecates her chances for happiness, or her likelihood of choosing well. Her belief may be wrong, but it’s not limiting- it frees her. If things go well, that’s great, but if everything falls apart, she’s ready to face it all with a brave heart.

Soon after I began wrapping myself in the nightly fantasy of permanent squalor I moved out of the MIT classrooms. After I accepted that I might never be able to do anything good or permanent in my life, I found options surrounding myself. Being able to face the worst possible scenario and realizing that it’s bearable has often been an enlightening and empowering experience in my life. And in my friends’ lives.

My footprint in muck.

We have certain societal norms that are so established, and so accepted, that to run counter to these norms would be almost to shock the conscience. Take the daily human act of excretion. Not an act that runs high on the list of “remembered acts” at the end of the day. It’s a trivial part of our daily routine, in a sense, and one that we happily forget about. Yet there’s almost a fascistic quality to the way we expect everyone to use the “proper” waste disposal system. Toilets and urinals are provided everywhere in homes and offices and it’s expected that all will use just these and no other ways of disposing of our bodily wastes- to take a dump in a bag at work and toss it in the garbage would be to nearly to “shock the conscience.”

The mass of effluvia processed daily by the Boston sewer system is not my responsibility, no significant percentage of it do I produce. My contribution to this mess is negligible. If I chose to bag my waste and toss it into a rubbish bin, probably there would be no real repercussions from it. I shit so infrequently, and in such moderate amounts. It’s such a small part of who we are. Why should we all buy into this system blindly? Why shouldn’t I take midnight shits on the sidewalks and streets of Boston? Because it would be incivil, or gross? Is that the reason?

Perhaps because this is such a tiny part of our lives is why we all accept that it’s for the best to buy into this system. We feel no restrictions on our ego to all follow the same course of action. We don’t feel that, “Since we don’t have a more perfect way to process all waste, I, personally, refuse to partake in the process.” It works reasonably well, and we just don’t care how it gets done, as long as it does. And we’re all willing to pay the price, whatever it is, to keep the system running as it is.

And I think there’s more- there’s a sense that this act is one that has larger ramifications for our society. If we have a filthy society, disease may follow. This is an area where personal ego MUST be subsumed, and a herd instinct MUST take over for disease not to flourish. As egoistic as we are in our society, as hell-bent on personal expression as we are (something I can applaud, by and large), there are contexts wherein we view ourselves not at all as individuals, but as collections of tiny units in a larger society, wherein we must all work together as ants, lest chaos easily prevail.

I’m not saying this is parametrically rational- one can take the occasional piss in an alleyway w/o the sky falling, after all- but I think it’s overall a reasonable view, and the most healthy one. We have established systems to handle the effects we as a society have on our environment, wherein we all subsume our individuality and go along with the rules.

Yet we do this only with some of the systems that we have set up. Take, for example, voting in elections. In first-world democracies my fellow Americans rank among the last in terms of the percentage that take part in the electoral process. Given the state of political campaigns I understand cynicism- cynicism is the appropriate response to attempted manipulation. But I do not understand the economist’s view that voting is irrational from the vantage point of an individual. Perhaps my vote makes no difference. Perhaps no one’s vote makes a difference. But in the choice of whether or not to vote I have no right to view myself as an individual but as one of a collection of tiny units in a larger society, wherein we must all work together as ants, lest chaos easily prevail. A healthy democracy depends on the full participation of it’s electorate, therefore I am not voting to choose a candidate but to keep the system running.

It’s a dirty process. I often dislike most of the candidates and all of their rhetoric. But this is not a place for personal expression.

I feel similarly about writing letters to newspapers and congressmen. My voice is important to me. I do not want to speak aloud and not be heard. And I do NOT want to speak out on a matter I feel passionately about, to the best of my ability to be eloquent, and not only not be heard, but to know beforehand that I will make no difference.

But this is unimportant. The choice of whether or not to use these systems, imperfect though they are is not ours to make. We must use them, or our society will suffer.

{That ends this attempt at the subject matter for now.}

Scatological musings. Apparently, Part I

(Several hours of my day were spent with an ex-girlfriend and her husband after which I went to work for a full day. I then came home to check in on a guest that had arrived from NYC while I was busy, he had settled snoringly into the guest couch. All being well I’ve retired to the computer and now begin a new post. I’m tired, nearly loopy. This is how I’ve written each of my posts. This may simply be the state in which I’ll always post to this web log. We’ll see.)

And in fact this entire post below, erased for the moment, is to my mind quite interesting yet unfortunately half-baked AND incoherent. I’m removing it for some serious re-work. I know I stated at the outset that this blog might be “under-weeded, poorly seeded, under-pruned or overly florid, but … what I have to offer right now”, but that doesn’t mean I have to offer output that I know to be seriously flawed at the moment fo writing. I’ll leave it and come back to it when rested and caffeinated.

The global war on “evil”.

There’s no such thing as evil, motherfucker!

And there’s nothing wrong with fucking mothers. If no mothers were ever fucked we wouldn’t be sitting here typing/reading this. Fucking’s fine for most of us, including mothers and those that fuck ‘em.

Fucking is what it is, and although I guess it can be a horrible violation, a great wrong, most of the time it’s pretty o.k. So the word “motherfucker” is a simple and somewhat silly pejorative.

As far as evil goes- what is evil, anyway? Pain, fear, death and destruction? Pain, fear, death and destruction are what they are. They can be horrible violations, great wrongs, but most of the time they’re pretty o.k. We all got to die at some point and we’re all going to feel a lot of pain before we get there. Destruction is one natural precursor to construction. “Evil” is simply a silly person’s way of casting pain, fear, death and destruction- AND those that cause them- into a negative light. Which is pretty silly. So the word “evil” is a simple and somewhat silly pejorative.

A doctor that bombards a young child’s slight frame with massive doses of radiation, causing them great fear and pain isn’t all that evil. The shepherd taking arthritic 18-year old Lassie out for an abruptly curtailed last walk through the fields, isn’t evil. He’s simply doing what he feels is the best thing for all concerned at the moment. These are people doing what they consider to be the best thing overall.

Rarely do death and destruction have malicious intent. When mullahs danced with glee at the bombing of the WTC there was joy in their hearts at seeing the righteousness of Islam triumph over the sinful decadence of the West. When we bombed the crap out of Europe in WWII and started to make steady headway into the final phase of the war, the jubilation at home had nothing to do with the thought of the carnage that we were producing- which was considerable- but at the thought of an eventual triumph and a return to normalcy- an end to the madness.

All of us try to get those ideals that we think of as “right” to overcome. Whether the ends justify the means we try not to think of too hard. The Iraq expedition we’re engaged in didn’t become unpopular because of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, but because it looked like it wasn’t working.

So although the hallmarks of “evil” are destruction, fear, pain and loss of life, the actions that produce pain and death, fear and destruction only become evil when we disagree with another person’s- or culture’s- intent. Iran’s characterization of NYC as “Great Satan” is NO different from the Bush administration’s characterization of N. Korea, Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil.”

Evil is only used as a term to diminish another. It’s used to cast the opposition into a non-human light- the light of hellish intent, demonic status; pure malevolence of mind and acidity of heart. Osama bin Laden, destructive and warped though he is, is a human being with a clear set of goals for his actions and a set of misguided moral precepts by which he lives his life. Not so different from many of us. He’s shown an unconscionable willingness to accept a great deal of death and destruction and pain to get what he wants, the same unconscionable willingness I’ve seen in Donald Rumsfeld, another man with a clear set of goals and misguided moral precepts.

But neither man, destructive and death dealing as they are, can be termed evil. Neither is allied with Satan or Loki; neither has AS THEIR GOALS the agenda of pain, destruction, fear or loss of life. These may be their means but they are not their ends. Any attempt to paint them as evil is an attempt to deny them their humanity. Human beings can be cruel, and misguided, and we need to accept that. Actions that are gross violations- genocide, carpet-bombings, invasions, sweeping human rights violations- are produced not by great evil, but by simple ordinary humans. To attempt to magnify their flaws until we banish all their virtues is to deny them their humanity.

This is the worst danger of all. The worst thing we can do is to see another human being, or culture, as evil. I don’t need to see evil in a murderous child rapist. Nobody does. The wrongs that this human being causes to other human beings, and to their communities, are manifold and manifest. It’s comforting to look at him as evil rather than as a screwed up human, but it’s false comfort. It turns him into a goblin, it diminishes him, and lets us treat him as less than human. It’s comforting to look at other states as evil, freedom-hating, murderous in their goals, but that diminishes them and lets us treat them as monsters.

Nietzsche got one thing right- “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” When we see others as evil, we allow ourselves to treat them however we choose. But eventually we always snap out of it and discover that we’ve been treating human beings this way, not monsters- and then we have to confront what we have become in the process.

I think that I believe that I feel- or so it seems to me.

It seems to me that my flowers need watering.

I don’t believe in God.

I feel strongly about the Red Sox.

I think language is powerful and should not be misused.

We have millions of different impressions over the course of a day, sights and sounds, briefly felt intents and emotions, more sustained streams of conscious that might include rote patterns of activities (bushing our teeth) or stock phrases that rush through our mind, and occasionally we receive striking new information or experiences that will be filed away for future recollection. These last moments are not common, and it seems to me that even less common than these are our new thoughts.

At the end of a day, as we sit back and reflect, a cool wind coming in through the window, on any of the phenomena we’ve experienced during the day, we may be able to recall these experiences vividly. But when so, it’s often difficult to express these phenomena verbally. We try to frame our meaning with tightly parcelled little jumbles of words, and yet with so many meanings so ineffable, and with most words so bulky and crude, it can be difficult to construct our exact recollection even when we’re sure what our meaning is.

This is why clarity of language seems to me to be paramount for the success of any attempt to be understood. If we truly think something to be so then we should not be afraid to state outright that we think it is so, but it is vital to have done some thinking- complete with having defined our terms, examined our premises and tested it briefly for holes before we do so. If all we really have, rather than a thought that something is so, but rather a recollection, an overheard statement, or an inchoate belief, we shouldn’t say that we think something is so. To back up our statement, we might honestly say that we think it might be so, and then give whatever backing we have.

Feelings are fine and valid and worth expressing- but rarely in the course of rational discourse. On the other hand most of life’s conversations aren’t rational discourse but social discourse. Thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are all welcome in this arena. If the world seems to you to be made of Green Cheese, say it loud and say it proud- but remember to refrain from mentioning this belief to people that are trying to have a rational discussion about this- unless you have some reasonably deep thoughts about this to back it up.

Life is deeper, more mysterious and more meaningful, than any of us will ever grasp, I believe, although it seems to me that physicists, lovers, poets and sots may have a better grasp on some aspects of the ineffable than the rest of us. By and large they’ve learned either to value precision in speech* or to largely forsake it altogether when engaged in their vocations.

We could learn much from them.

*precision, not concision

3quarksdaily goofs?

This post is pretty dry: it’s a good thing I’m not attempting to build an audience. Someone just let me know if I’m wrong in this, sooner or later, o.k.? This post has to do with one of my favorite sites.

3quarksdaily.com is an interesting and often informative link-portal to the web. I’ve discovered much modern art and philosophy here, many encapsulated workable tid-bits of knowledge that promise to be of worthy of further review. I can’t emphasize enough my high estimation of the site’s worth.

But this article astonished me. The title claims that “The most eminent evolutionary scientists have surprising views on how religion relates to evolution,” which is interesting as only 275 were polled and barely half that number responded. The lack of response is not surprising given choices such as “the relation between evolution and religion: A, they are non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) whose tenets are not in conflict; B, religion is a social phenomenon that has developed with the biological evolution of Homo sapiens—therefore religion should be considered as a part of our biological heritage, and its tenets should be seen as a labile social adaptation, subject to change and reinterpretation; C, they are mutually exclusive magisteria whose tenets indicate mutually exclusive conclusions; or D, they are totally harmonious—evolution is one of many ways to elucidate the evidences of God’s designs” without ever defining their terms.

Finally yesterday, days after this was first posted, somebody pointed out in the comments what I had been thinking: without more specificity B and C are not mutually exclusive. The authors don’t seem to realize this- they say “72 percent, of the respondents chose option B” and “we did expect a strong showing for choice C“. But they’re NOT mutually exclusive! What’s going on here?

The only surprises I can see here are 1) that even 55% of the scientists deigned to answer the questions and 2) that 3QD linked to this article. But I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed- perhaps I’m missing something integral here. Can anyone help me out?

Hello world!

Hello world.

This is our blog, welcome to it.

I’ve had a habit of sitting over many cups of steaming hot coffee, cups that steadily grow ice cold from hours of neglect as I verbally dissect, with friends, the narrow slice of the world that I come into contact with.

Everything here will be my contribution to the community garden of online discussion. This little patch may be under-weeded, poorly seeded, under-pruned or overly florid, but it’s what I have to offer right now and you’re welcome to enjoy it as best you’re able.

I’ll express a number of ideas here. Although none of them will be terribly original many of them won’t be of the highest quality. Please let me know where my thoughts are misinformed, underinformed, poorly worded or poorly thought through. I’ll appreciate the help.

This is what I meant by “our blog.”

And thank you.