On Wisdom and Joy

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

I've quoted that before, but I was reckless, for now is a more apt occasion. What is the place of wisdom in a life we must try our best to enjoy? Tonight, I got two clues.

First, I went to a party where I said everything I had to say to anyone there. It was not much. It could almost have been nothing. Is this an emanation of wisdom? Am I so sated with knowledge so as not to need any more? Obviously I say this tongue-in-cheek, but even so, what sort of way is that to be happy? I can sit and look in the mirror and confirm that "success" (in whatever asinine form this is supposed to be) has visited me. I am certifiably knowledgeable enough to be bored by some people into having very little to say, through no fault of their own, or mine (as far as I can tell).

The second thing I saw tonight was the new profile timeline feature on Facebook. Even as a product guy (by employment), I don't really care about the details of the "feature" in any conceptual sense, although it was fun enough to play around with. But I got hopelessly caught up in scanning back through old posts and events from my past. The thing that really struck me is how people's use of Facebook has changed. Especially the tone and quality of their posts.

By definition, I generalize here, but people's tone today, on average, is more refined. Fine. But the sad part is what that turns out to mean about quality. Facebook is not a book. It is not articles or ad copy or an email or a phone call. It is truly unique. And it turns out that the Facebook medium - through brevity - calls for earnestness, for no facade. That is its strength and its opportunity and the truest measure of "quality" in this medium. But time is carrying it away. As people refine their skill for creating posts, they are concealing the earnestness. They... it... is becoming something else. We end up with a marketing tool instead of an urgent communications tool. It is because people are infected by a sort of creeping common sense that steers them inexplicably away from being forthright, exposed, and earnest and towards being measured and calculated, and it is everything that kills me about interacting with certain people.

I guess what I truly miss is my friends and the things they would post on my wall. And ironically, out here in the real world, I miss the days when I had things to say to them, too.

Why I Feel Compelled to Write

"Basically I wanted to undertake the task of writing songs about a particular year of my life. Not the task of telling that story in a linear way, or in any way that would make the story explicitly knowable to a listener, but rather, to tell the story to myself. I was starting to see a lot of connections, and I wanted to make them more substantial to myself, or at least explore them. Writing these songs was a way to organize my brain and organize these events and how they had affected me."

- Joanna Newsom, on writing the songs that became "Ys"

http://www.pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6488-joanna-newsom/

Two Comedies

I discovered the Noel Baumbach jewel of a movie, "Kicking and Screaming" a few months ago. I watched it and thought about it a lot. Then, about a month ago, I watched it... eight more times. Although I haven't had this experience with a movie in a long time, I have had it with books - when there's enough to hold onto the first time, but it challenges you beyond that with a language that you have to learn slowly.

There is enough evidence to support a hypothesis that the characters all started as caricatures, but such a hypothesis would be moot. I don't know how many revisions Noel went through with his script, but there is not a sharp edge to be found in any of the characters, nor their various interactions. This is all the more impressive given the pushing and pulling the script does with the characters and, in the case of Grover and Jane, the evolution we see. I imagine that Noel could tell you about each character's childhood in depth, and it would all ring just as true as what we see in the movie. Call me a simpleton, but that is a "good movie trump card" in my book.

Like most glowing artistic criticism, listening to my tone will set you all wrong on the movie. It isn't perfect, and a big part of why I like it is undoubtedly that I relate to it so well. But maybe it is worth watching.

----------------------------------------------

Tonight, I saw "The Trip", which was hilarious. I can't remember the last movie I saw that was as funny as it is. And it, too, rings of truth foremost in its conversations and relationships and it too leaves narrative form (even further) in the background - good for it. But the real bonus was Steve Coogan's dream that Noah Baumbach wanted him to star in his next movie. Now, I can't claim that Michael Winterbottom was thinking what I am thinking. But, I am thinking that Steve Coogan's character in The Trip is an older, British version of Grover - cynical, listless, intelligent, talented.

I suppose that we all fit on some great tree of archetypes and sub-archetypes, and whatever you call it when someone you just met reminds you of someone you used to know, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is about them.

A Conversation With Myself

I have been engaged in writing for some time now, and although a flurry of keys has not been a constant current, my thoughts have undeniably stayed active and I have been having a consistent conversation with myself that underpins my progress. To avoid producing a one-sentence paragraph, I will now point out that I have sufficient writing instincts to notice such a trivial violation that, as a rule, is little more than a crutch for weak writers, or: I could title this sentence, "Treating the Symptom".

I have found it difficult to answer even such simple questions as, "For what purpose am I writing?" But, today I certainly made some progress. Before a person can write for others, they have to be able to write for themselves. Or: first comes the art of writing, which I would call a selfish pursuit because how could we know otherwise? For others to agree with you is this other matter. Others might disagree. You could suggest that the art of writing includes this, but I choose to believe that aesthetic considerations are aggregated only because they are subjective to begin with and thus must be aggregated if we are to talk to others about "works of art". To me, art ultimately resides in one person's mind, and if others agree, then fine - but agreement is not a prerequisite to the presence of an aesthetic experience. But to get back to the point - why do I write?

I have felt the answer all along, but I didn't quite get it into the correct words until recently. I initially thought it possible that writing was a means of closure to the subject matter. (I suppose this is simply a more charitable take on Nietzsche's, "That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." But I now believe I was wrong. The new theory I offer for writing is to understand what I have experienced by having a conversation with my memories.

I have traversed a lot of mental and emotional ground in the last ten years. One day I wanted to understand what the hell had happened. It's not that I was unsatisfied with where I was (although it helps to realize that such issues are always a mixed matter). I couldn't accept that I had gone unaffected by my decisions. I couldn't believe that different decisions would have spit the same "me" out at the end of some other causal sequence - that the same "me" might be writing these same sentences having joined the circus years earlier or living behind a bedroom door all this time. I needed to see how I happened. Ultimately, I needed... need... to learn how to see ahead through the emotional perturbations of my decisions to the person that will come out on the other side. Not a decision made out of time and in a bubble; a decision that must be anti-fragile. It is critical that I make the big choices ahead of us the best that I can. I should have no other goal.

The effect of transferring memory so directly into writing is to have a conversation with those memories. They are pulled apart and I get some sense of what was present there, see how their essence changes with embellishment. It can be fascinating - the aesthetic content of a life. That it can be made better or worse strikes me as some enigma. This is the strangest of all mirrors I know - between what we are and what we imagine and project.

The Opposite of A.D.D.

I spent about six hours one evening this week reading Jens Lekman's online diary backwards from July of 2011 to the early days of 2004 when he started it; following links, listening to music he posted, and so on. I came to a couple of conclusions:

1) He is the "real deal" and has not simply gotten lucky or tripped and fell into a thematic goldmine

2) He is cursed with emotional instability, which always feels like something the world does to you but is actually a personality trait. The results are generally binomial - you get better or you get worse. Staying the same is the equivalent of walking an increasingly flimsy tightrope.

3) Because of #2, I am nervous as hell that his next album could be great, horrible, or anywhere in between.

I admire music that is unique, and he has shown several enviable qualities that few other artists have achieved:

1) Not only is he funny, but the humor improves the songs without lowering their replay value like other "funny" music, most of which is simply gimmicky.

2) He succeeds with sampling other music and turns great music into new music that is often equally great

3) His songs are often both overstated (the arrangements) and understated (subtlety in the lyrics) at the same time.

4) Many of his songs are sublimely ironic and are therefore something like modern poetry.

5) If you only listened to a song or two, you might make the mistake that he is a clumsy lyricist. With enough exposure it becomes clear that what he really is, is a brilliant lyricist who writes songs perfectly suited for a charmingly imperfect baroque singer who just happens to be himself. (See just about any of his songs; for instance, from "A Postcard to Nina": "Your father is mailing me all the time/ He says he just wants to say hi/ I send back 'out of office' auto-replies")

I skipped his show in Omaha in 2008 for $2 long island iced teas at The Underground, the dirtiest bar in town. I don't know that I have words to place that decision into any sense of order except to the degree that it, itself vividly testifies to the order of my own sorry existence in 2008.

The Day I Surprised Myself

I always liked the part in American Beauty where Lester says, "It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself." For many years, I would remember that quote and ruminate on it and determine that I had never done much to surprise myself. I wasn't hard on myself about it. I just assumed it wasn't my personality. I thought myself careful and steady and I thought someone would have to at least be less wistful as a requirement to be surprising, most of all to themselves.

I surprised myself when I went to Europe. That place is painted with such overwhelming and uniformly romantic brushstrokes as a place that young people from the United States visit to grow or "discover themselves" or whatever. Wonky. Anyway, that is something like the experience I had there. It doesn't embarrass me. For a very long time, I shied away from stereotypical actions and behaviors for no good reason except as some sort of rebellious reflex. But, that is just so exceedingly silly. What really matters is that our experiences are genuine and are our own. Whether others have shared similar experiences does not matter. So, let that be a lesson if you are a young person - you should not align your thoughts or actions by any particular expectations of the world. You should simply align yourself to your own expectations.

The last few days I have been preoccupied with thinking about the summer of 2008. It does not come naturally to us to remember our mindset some time in the past. We cannot recreate the blindness that is the future. But there were days that summer where I was looking at apartments because there were just three of us living at the house and rent and utilities were expensive split three ways. It felt, I guess, like it was finally time to move on, and I am guessing that my idea of moving on was to change as little as possible. I'm not sure that's the same thing as the "path of least resistance" but maybe some people's actions simply construct an unwitting pattern where relative stasis helps to ensure comfort or happiness?

I nurtured a big ball of angst about moving out of Omaha all that previous winter and spring and when summer rolled around I was proud that I had come to the conclusion that everything I needed was in Omaha. Moving somewhere else would not magically bring exciting people or opportunities to myself; I would have to change myself to find those things, here or otherwise. And I did and do love Omaha and my single overwhelming emotion towards it then and now is affection. So sometime in late July of 2008 I was going to move into an apartment and stay healthy running or biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas because of course all these things were a simple destiny.

On January 1st I flew to Chicago and from Chicago I flew overnight to Stockholm and in the early hours of the new day I sat in the international terminal at Stockholm - Arlanda International and looked out the window into the strange dark of the Scandinavian morning. It was 5:30 am and it wouldn't start to get light out until nine or so, by which time I would have taken the hour-long flight to Helsinki and wandered around the Helsinki airport and taken a bus to the downtown train station. But sitting there in the international terminal, I had my first meditation on how that moment was such a product of my ability to surprise myself and nothing else and I think that one of my initial reactions was, "what the hell have I done?", but of course that was simply a reflex that I had constructed unwittingly from all my wistful years of stasis.

I had been traveling for about a full twenty-four hours when I got off the train in Mikkeli and got into a car and rode the ten minutes through a quiet snowfall to my dorm and I was up most of the night, impossibly isolated and all I wanted to do was talk and in the absence of the chance, I went for a nighttime walk with Bon Iver. I think it just took the moment in the airport for me to internalize impossibility into what it really was, which was reality. I did many amazing things the next five months, but they all felt immediate and real and indeed it was the return to Omaha and a pattern like the one I had previously known that felt unreal.

There's a part in the song "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song" by Jens Lekman where he says:

"I could sit and watch my life go by
Or I could take a tiny chance, 'cause
Someday I'll be stuck in some museum"

And I think that I have taken one step that I had to take and now I need to learn to become that person always, because I am living in Omaha and staying healthy biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas, which is not a criticism, just an observation.

The Pulse

My personality and my choices have brought to life a strange, long pulse that dances me interminably between the strangest of extremes - ones I have learned to control so readily, once they appear to me. The bipolar axis between joy and despair, urgency and boredom, optimism and purposelessness. I suspect my mental and emotional stabilizers are too loose, allow me too much freedom. I stand my joys in front of myself so eagerly to indulge. I am no longer afraid of running out; I want it all now.

Let's just talk about at least one up and I will leave the downs to worry about myself:

On my recent trip to Colorado, after the second consecutive long, strenuous day of hiking, we settled into our camp and I crossed a narrow stream with my iPod. I had gone to great lengths to compile a playlist meant to listen to in the dark and alone in the wilderness. (If you're wondering: something like a miasma of ambient and minimal music (Fennesz, Boards of Canada, Animal Collective's "Campfire Songs", snips of Eno) with a handful of delicate melodic numbers (Will Oldham, early Grizzly Bear).) I was exhausted, certainly too exhausted to be hungry, though I was depleted mightily. The ground was a little spongy under my feet, or perhaps my feet were simply spongy things now. The rocks and trees of the forest acted out of turn; I sensed something light, a web of presence beyond randomness. My brain caught this anthropomorphism and checked it out of existence and then went back into sugar-starved remission. Perhaps I simply sensed order and perhaps we are evolved to feel awe at that. I walked up a slope, down a slope, looked back up. I caught sight of trees that begged me with gestalt identities, wandered through breeches of enormous split boulders. The trees and rocks stood patient for me to look into and look through. And I, too, I knew then and now, am re-learning patience in moments such as this; the world, I sometimes forget, must stand always waiting, but I have a choice. I have not had a drug-induced psychedelic experience in a very long time, but my heart seeks out their specters in strange moments of respite, my brain away or asleep. What does this mean? Why are these things as they are?

I am always trying to answer the question of what I want my life to be. I often have some model of the world built to satisfy questions like that and it often burns down in moments like this. I search through the rubble and feel remorse towards the match.

Aesthetics and Objectivism, Living Together

Buffett has said that we should try to go to bed each day a little wiser than when we woke up. What a wonderfully robust idea. I would go one better - in a Nassim Taleb way - and say that we should learn to experiment with alternate approaches to things we do wrong. Such an idea is not simply robust, but anti-fragile (induced stress - in this case, many things going wrong - will prompt the system to grow stronger).

I resisted reading Taleb for a long time, because my first exposure to him was a video in which he most completely ruffled his feathers at an interviewer in his most arrogant way. But, I am such a hypocrite! If it is difficult to suffer fools (I must admit I think it is, although the sole strategy I allow myself is simply to attempt their avoidance), then it is difficult, too, to suffer lesser philosophies. He is no quasi-intellectual (read his recent paper on tail risk treatments across distribution domains here). But do not misunderstand me - I am no snob. As these formless (though potent) ideas have taken shape and combined and aged within me, I have found the most common effect to be that I speak of them less. (to assume that such a tendency belongs also to others is to be shown convincing evidence that we are not evolved for this society we have formed)

Such things are not my primary joys today, though. I have come back to literature after being gone so long, and it has been something like a renaissance. I have been both reading and writing with a joy beyond what I have experienced in a long time - ten years or more. What strange teleological thinking I have always had, to assume such things could simply end. I believe I have banished that from my mind, although I may find myself broadening such a thought beyond my wildest dreams before I am done here. BioTime (NYSE:BTX) seems to be cracking the code to deliver stem cell-derived regenerative therapies for everything from retinal degradation to heart disease in the next few years. Speaking of telelogical thinking, what will happen to the earth's population when regenerative therapy is not only complete but ubiquitous? The effect on availability of human capital practically begs for a new era of slavery (we may consider our laws to be based on collective morality, but over time the morality implied by our laws bends towards profit).

And quite separately, others will find me endlessly delusional to suggest it - and although I still mean it only as playful conjecture - one day we may find that we are not from the past, but from the future. Extrapolate the history of video games and regenerative technology into the future and what do you have? Would you want to live in that world or this one? It even invites fractal arguments of iteration - probably the outer world does not quite look the same as ours, with both symmetries and derivations pervasive in its architecture and ours. What a book that would be to write.

But I digress. I was talking about books, and I was sitting here thinking about one or two of them, even as I was writing something completely unrelated. I want a long holiday alone with my books without urgency, alone with thoughts and easy desires. I want to escape the anxieties that my lifestyle has injected so unnaturally into my everyday composure and disposition. I want my mind to clear. So, I will work on that first - eating healthier, developing an approach to health that will work because it will feel natural. Now, if only I could wake up early to do yoga or take a long lunch at work to meditate.

And finally, I can see my two worlds living together, after all these years. I believe my future is to accept objectivism and aesthetics into the same place in my mind and go forward. But if I must choose, objectivism will not stand a chance. Give me the loves in my life and set me off.

A Book and an Update

I am reading "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb, which by any standards of what I have read before, makes me feel still inadequate. It can almost be described as a treatise on knowledge. A wide subject, and one he does not completely traverse, but he touches many parts and many of them turn to gold. I think his next book - Anti-Fragility: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand - looks to be even better and I can only hope that its ultimate influence is both strong and positive. He is a dreadfully arrogant and disagreeable man but he is also often right.

What else is there to be said about the present? I am happy with myself and find myself wondering if this is the eye of some great hurricane, passing - for sure - too slowly over me to notice what is happening at all from one day to the next. Coming to understand some layer of life only succeeds in breaking confusion through to the next layer. Lately I have become concerned with my health. What have I done, what do I continue to do to my body and mind? I can't help but think that I have become a bit of a hypochondriac. I imagine my mind slowly destroyed by medication, my eyes and my ears by my own failure to acknowledge their fallibility.

But these feelings are fleeting. Hopefully they are just strong enough to motivate my own tempered and rational action. Hopefully they ultimately serve to bring me back to myself as I have been and continue to be - not as something permanent or immovable but as someone at peace with his own being that follows a long arc towards an end we can be sure is unavoidable.

The weather is warm, the food lately has been great (great Mexican Eggs Benedict this morning and an even better Moroccan Brochette sandwich this afternoon), the bike riding enjoyable and Merry's company always wonderful. I'd love to get greedy but instead I will try only to be thankful.

Some Thoughts on Trying to Write Well

After a hiatus of close to a week, today I was rereading what I have recently written (12 pages I am currently happy with) and I found that many of my conclusions from a week ago were now much different. In the past this is something that I would have been instantly offended by ("how will I ever be happy if my goals keep changing?"), but I persevered in thought and realized quite simply that the idea that my new conclusions were more important than the old ones was actually quite inconclusive. I simply quieted my mind of these concerns and revised to the best of my humble intuition and was happy with the result.

I am not an authority on the subject of writing (although I read about half of Norman Mailer's "The Spooky Art" in early mornings manning a cash register at Barnes & Noble some years ago), but I have been thinking a lot about the limitations of the medium. It seems to me that one of the most obvious limitations is not actually specific to writing at all but is a limitation of the world. We cannot perfectly reconstruct subjectivity no matter how hard we try. You cannot turn a reader into the character in the book. So in writing, you have to make lots of compromises to get as close as possible.

It seems to me that another problem is that as you attempt to plumb deeper into a character, the standard litany of storytelling tools becomes less and less useful. It is easy to show - even through action alone - that a character is angry or happy. It is far more difficult to thread words and actions into a tapestry that enumerates the person's life. But good writing tells us far more than what is on the page (i.e. Hemingway's "iceberg" theory). And though I do not claim it is the same problem (merely related), at the micro level, how indeed do you put the reader into the character in some specific moment in time when the character's own consciousness must differ so far from the reader's? You have to bend the story or bend the character or bend the actions. For example:

I am writing a scene where a character is drunk. I want to express the delusion that feels so incontrovertible when in that state but that is an absurdity later. How can this be done in writing? I don't want to describe it as such - I want the reader to feel all the same emotions, not read literal description of the event. It is a full dimension of difference. Well, I can't make the reader drunk (that would be some trick), but I can distort action (or in this case, the rigor of logic carried in a conversation) to frame an idea as evasive to the average reader as the idea is to the character in his state. So the "drunk" character is thinking far above his level because what "feels" difficult to the character takes something very different to "feel" the same to the reader. This is a work in progress but I believe that of the possible distortions, it is the best choice.

I also can't be certain but I believe as I was rereading part of my work today, I picked up a note of Shakespeare in my writing (not trying to congratulate myself - I'm talking about the spirit of the writing, not the quality). I think what I have been writing can't help but explore the boundaries of its characters. My work has no narrative momentum or consistency in dialog (yet) but it has a tone and I think it has ideas.

In the Throes of Process

Today I began writing. This is a milestone not because words were produced but because I smiled afterwards. Here are my thoughts today:

1) I must establish tone.

2) I will force myself to make the first pass through a continuous chunk (not sure how big it will be yet) about story and tone and leave pacing for a revision.

3) I have a sense of theme but that is not enough. I need to figure out what themes are going to work together and how. I know what I want to say but what is my vocabulary for doing so?

This is a mysterious enterprise, but I am excited to be underway.

Inspiration Strikes

Over the past few months, I have mentally explored the proposition of writing something careful and focused. I will not go so far as to say that I have given genesis to the idea of a "book", or "story", or anything particular, in fact. But, I believe the writing process would be good for me.

I suppose there is a preconception with writing that the person writing does it to fulfill external desires (communication, sharing, etc...). I cannot speak for others, but in this case, I would say that is not true. I believe that I need the writing process to give myself an understanding of what has happened to me in the last ten years. How did I come to this conclusion? I think it was Joanna Newsom who first planted the idea in my head that writing can be an intensely introspective activity; she described a song she wrote as an attempt to make sense of certain events.

Although I do not think it is adequate to invoke the saying, "art imitates life", it may be a start. If art is expected to retain truth, than I believe art approximates life. They are a continuum, but it should not be forgotten that life is the primary and must necessarily be the anchor to art, just as the sun is primary to the moon and anchors it interminably.

This means that although the process of writing may be difficult, the concept of good writing is exceedingly simple. You must simply write reality. All formalism is but the hope of some shortcut that must necessarily be a compromise, or a beautiful distraction.

I could itemize the times in my life that I have come across grand statements that I thought needed to be made, but these statements would make for terrible reading because they were all cast under a common illusion - that the order of the universe allows us to remove or change one thing and expect all else to remain unharmed. That is a lazy way of writing. Good writing does not tolerate shortcuts. Words cannot - in essence - say more than the content of the words, and a story likewise cannot say more than the content of the story.

As I undertake the process of writing, my hope is not to complete some certain thing, but rather to understand the material I will write. Perhaps it seems counterintuitive, but I believe that I will be more likely to complete whatever is required by the content if I rather pursue the goal of understanding. But I digress. All is conjecture, and it is a destructive enterprise to try to outguess the future. Time will tell all in the clearest voice.

The Shadow of the Wind, part 1

It has occurred to me on numerous occasions that Radiohead produce better album art - and more consistently - than any other band I know. For this feat, we have Stanley Donwood to thank, who is Radiohead's perennial visual artist/associate. Years ago, when I was obsessed with Radiohead (let's say, 2002), Mr. Donwood produced a written work that you might call a story and that took the form of a thin book. Now, most of the productive output of the people in or associated with Radiohead is hard to nail down (I think I am being complimentary to say this), but Mr. Donwood's "Catacombs of Terror!" had a basic formula. Were it to be stocked in your local Barnes and Noble, you'd find it under mystery, but this mystery was suffused with intentionally-inelegant plotting and a peculiarly affected ("lo-fi"?) writing style and was marketed as a rip-off of third-rate pulp thrillers of the past. I cannot vouch for that comparison, but Donwood's style was idiosyncratic enough (and carefully attuned enough) that I doubt that simple comparison does the novel justice.

Lately I have been reading "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and in the process of doing so, have had a hell of a time un-knotting my mixed and myriad feelings towards it. There are some things I can say for sure:

1) The pacing is outstanding, as mystery novels must usually be to be a success.

2) The literary references to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the reviews are legitimate and truly bound into the tapestry of the text and specifically, Zafon's imagination. The references to Borges are topical (a labyrinth of books, temporal mirroring and incongruity) and 400 pages in, I would judge them to be irrelevant. I can't speak for Eco, having not read any of his works.

3) Zafon writes good scenes and good dialogue, and has a way with evoking place and time without trying hard. However, he places all of this between filler that is often boring, obvious, cliche.

4) If Zafon is capable of writing a female character that is not one-dimensional, he does not explore the talent here.

It took me until tonight to realize that the reason I have been overwhelmingly willing to cut him slack on #3 and #4 is that the clunky characteristics of the book are reminiscent of Catacombs of Terror!, a book where these characteristics are taken to be ironic (or at least intentionally absurd). I believe my mind has mapped this absurdity/irony onto The Shadow of the Wind, and therefore I respond to it as a compelling story told with the author winking at the reader. Ironically, this level of formalism that glosses over the entire story - a construct that I have to believe I alone see - may be the most Borgesian thing about the book.

So, to review, a second-rate book written as an affected tribute to third-rate stories has convinced me that this first-rate book with several notable drawbacks is actually something close to sublime. Wish me luck in the last 100 pages.

Impressions from Colorado

I recently went on a skiing trip to Colorado, a trip that I can say had two highlights: skiing, and the drive home.

Skiing sort of speaks for itself and you could do worse than simply to say that it costs a lot of money and it is money well spent if you get up on the mountain and can manage to enjoy it. We had lots of mountain weather variety (snow, sun, wind) and lots of friends around to ski with, which at one or two points congealed into a borderline-transcendental experience. I had a lot of fun doing dangerous things (never a good combination) like flying through the woods on narrow paths, which I have promised myself I will not do again with such indiscretion. For someone who is neither a speed nor adrenaline junkie, skiing really brought both out in me.

I suppose you could say that I like to be the driver when leaving home and the passenger when returning. Most people will say that the drive home is a drag and a chore, which the act of driving itself can be, but there are few things I like better than the chance to meditate on the events of the vacation during a drive home. This trip afforded lots of time, ample back-seat room, appropriate homebound weather (rolling storms in the distance, a variety of overcast tones), good music (thank you, Brian Eno, Great Lake Swimmers, and Junior Boys) and good reading material (The Crossing). (It cannot be denied that I surely know what I like, and I have expended much thought and energy refining the process of achieving it.)

I have been especially struck lately by the way McCarthy's novels of the Southwest, filled with so much desolation and violence, only increase my affection for the land. The Crossing is my new favorite of his stories (not bad for a book I couldn't finish the first time I tried), although it would be hard not to admit that Blood Meridian contains a much stronger and tightly cohesive vision. More importantly, though, the protagonist in The Crossing contains a more closely observed moral character. I cannot relate to the Kid in Blood Meridian in the slightest, but I am with Billy every page of The Crossing. I believe I will reread it again and again in the future.

Lost in Translation

The soundtrack to Lost in Translation is done by the band Air and is quite good, but watching it tonight, it occurred to me that thematically - not just aesthetics but the suggestions presented in the constant companionship of the incomprehensible city that surrounds them - the band M83 might make for a tighter fit. There is a strange presence in each of... is it possible - oblivion? Air is appropriately surreal but inappropriately reassuring - or am I wrong? Perhaps Air isn't reassuring us at all. Perhaps they are merely working at the same punctuated speed as our higher cognition - requiring events, lapses, days to wear through generic boredom into something conclusive.

A couple years ago, I had a very positive initial reaction to the film sub-genre uselessly known as "Mumblecore", when I saw both Mutual Appreciation and even better, Quiet City. The latter made practical use of the space between characters as well as the characters themselves - what went unsaid and undone and unseen are all in our minds when a movie has the patience to let our minds wander - carefully, purposefully. But Lost in Translation (and Coppola's earlier "The Virgin Suicides") does this even better. The strange alien city is constantly speaking underneath Bob and Charlotte; after a time, it is there even during relatively grounded scenes like those that take place in the hotel bar.

I have liked this movie more after each viewing, as my attention gradually shifts from the largest moments to the smallest. My favorite moments tonight are the flower arranging, the first night in the club with Charlie Brown, the shots of Charlotte sitting on the windowsill looking down at the city that she doesn't understand; as her marriage, as her life.

The Best Laid Plans Do Not Suffice?

I am happy to say that as of today, when I look back at the last eighteen months, things have gone well:

1) I finished my degree. I succeeded under conditions I would have scoffed at attempting not long ago. I achieved a GPA (3.5) that was an ambitious target just two years ago (my final two years brought it up significantly).
2) I was hired back at my old job in a limited capacity. I proved myself and was hired back full time. Not only have I grown far beyond my old capabilities, but I am learning faster, "learning to learn" faster, making better use of my time, making wiser, more holistic decisions, utilizing knowledge and ideas from a variety of fields, and executing on my own goals more consistently than ever before.
3) I am extraordinarily close to being free of the need for my AD/HD medication. This means I am near the end of a 10-year long journey to become behavioral medication free without repercussions for my mental state. I am close enough today to free of it that I consider myself "there" already. I can again see the medicine as a worst-case safety net, rather than a constant crutch.
4) Although it is a simplification, I have made one big investment in each of the last two years that I feel was a real home run. I have refined my methodology considerably in the last two years and have concrete ideas that I am highly confident in to continue moving in that direction. Less is more and I am striving for significantly less.

Still, all the machinations of a society cannot - within themselves - produce contentment. Indeed, I am NOT content, and maybe no closer. Perhaps what I have done so far is the easy part. Witness what is to come:

1) Eliminate the need for stimulants and mental hyperactivity in order to navigate weekdays. Utilize some combination of exercise, meditation, and other mental conditioning to replace hyperactivity with true clarity and balance.
2) Balance societal attentions (job, money management) with personal interests. Find the right books and read them. Spend time specifically with music. Find a satisfying and natural way back into making music.
3) Work because it is a satisfying challenge. Become sufficiently financially independent to spend time unemployed, traveling. Extinguish the wealth accumulation compulsion and make decisions that affect finances holistically. Acknowledge my inherent expectations for my own life, rather than falling into a fate one day at a time.
4) Fully acknowledge and internalize my obligations to my partner. Make decisions together for a future we will share.

The Search for Meaning, part two

"Isn’t that what being young is about, believing secretly that you would be the one person in the history of man that would live forever?"
- David Aames, Vanilla Sky

Boy, does that quote hit the nail on the head for me. I really believed that - quite exactly - when I was young, but it was more than that, too. I imagined the graduation speeches, and television interviews, and one-off dinners with prominent people that I would give; a gift of my extended wisdom, the sightlines of my brain that stretched farther than others for reasons that today I can only describe as "heroic". (Thanks go to Jung, who correctly saw that Superman is not arbitrary.)

It is sad to look back and see that such boundless dreams have been extinguished by nothing more than the passage of time, but such is life. The ultimate mystery is alive in the universe; what complaint regarding our existence can be brought forward that is not a misunderstanding? Indeed, I am fascinated by Leibniz' posit that we live in the best of all possible worlds, although my view of a "God" does not require that it be so. On the other hand, I am philosophically unsophisticated; perhaps a few years of concentrated reading on the subject would bring around one or another of my supporting positions.

What more is there to say? The thoughts of youth trail off now, although I try to hold on. We are what we used to be for only so long, and I - perhaps in contradiction - try each day to fall asleep a little wiser than I was when I woke up, even as I try to hold on to what I was. Which do I want more? I push on bravely because the past will fade regardless. I don't ultimately want complicated things; only to be happy.

The Search for Meaning, part one

I learned in business school that execution matters more than ideas in delivering value to the customer. I suppose that execution is similarly relevant in the search for meaning in the world. It has done me little good to sit on the couch and read amazing books, gaining knowledge and yet failing to process it into action. My world - hidden away in my mind - rhymes but it lacks rhythm.

I experienced a troubling period of boredom late in my stay in Finland, after many of my friends had left and all the "easy" things around to do had been done. I often went ice skating alone, or walked to the coffee shop and read. This was at the tail end of a particularly active period of time in my life - both Finland and before - but also foreshadowed a particularly frustrating period of inactivity over the six months following my return home.

I have continually attempted to deconstruct myself over the last several years, to attempt to understand what I am doing wrong and fix it. More than any external changes in our lives, internal ones require bravery. By the fall of 2008, I had already long wanted to make myself more a person of action. But despite my readiness, it was the external world that shoved me into action - I had merely to not resist. The period of time proved nothing of my ability to coerce activity from the world.

I didn't mind - indeed I basked in it - but I should have seen the recoil coming. I returned to what the persistent parts of my personality required me to return to - a frustrated introvert. The summer and fall of 2009 were painfully inert for me, as I waited in expectation of further opportunity to step up and shake my hand.

Failure: it has been said that the world looks like a nail to the man with the hammer. Perhaps I was guilty of seeing the world through one lens. I tried to fix the situation with medicine combined with thought, but I mistakenly believed that thought was the hammer and all change looked like a nail. Our minds are not so robust, but they can do an exceptional job of appearing to be to us.

Failure #2: we are all creatures of habit, but the variety of habits from one of us to the next is enormous. As much as true self-awareness cannot exist without honesty, we can be blindsided. I have crossed the boundary of the popular definition of "alcoholic" and returned, but my addiction was never physiological. My psychological addictions, numerous and robust, have required hosts of otherwise irrelevant habits. The search for meaning - marked by uncertainty, doubt, and fleeting solace - leads those of us compelled by its promise to places outside our discretion. I can not explain where the existential comfort comes from when I sit with my close friends at the bar, but I do not complain. I am happy there and with them, and if it is indeed a delusion that there is some grand reason for me to feel that way, then long live the delusion.

The Closest I Will Get To A New Year's Resolution

I have always believed in the adage that the best solution is usually simple, but this is a difficult thing to remember in regard to ourselves. Many of us who analyze ourselves do so out of habit, and thus do so restlessly, ceaselessly, confabulating problems and confabulating solutions and playing a game akin to "throw every idea against the wall to see what sticks". At times I have been stuck too much in a process of analyzing my every changing habit to try to understand its genesis and ultimate destination, but this is a losing battle. We ruin ourselves when we try to wire ourselves for self-improvement but do so in a way that does not respect the rule that the best solution is usually simple. Unfortunately, all this time my unstated creed seems to have been "urgency", rather than "simplicity".

What do I want to accomplish? I want to see the arc of my life in a lucid way, come to terms with it, and proceed by my own design, with the knowledge it affords me (or offends me) with. And, perhaps now I am at a stage where I can see that - through no particular virtue of my own, but rather as a simple arrival at a clearing in the fog that occurs throughout life if we maintain sufficient honesty and patience.

Ten years ago, my life shifted from an external struggle with the world to one resolutely internal, and I have little reason to believe that it will ever shift back again. By the scale of the internal, I am sobered to look back and assess how far I have come in that time. So little has passed before me. I feel that if I have proven anything, it has been that one human has so little chance to change the world. We are at the mercy of the tides.

McCarthy wrote, "In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments." How true this has been for me. In many stages of my life, I have guarded my precious sentiments dearly, wanting to believe they are eternal. In every case the turning of the world has slowly washed them clean from me. What did a notion like "true love" ever do to me, in the end? Nearly kill me? For what? To believe that I belonged to something? Or to believe that something belonged to me? In the end, it simply engendered new sentiments. My life today is in the notable decline of the echo boom of sentiment from this one initial folly that has reverberated through my emotional life, from then until now. More conclusively, curing me of my sentiments has meant curing me of my personality, a shameful outcome in a world that I once believed I was destined to make a difference in.

What remains for me here? Can I be surprised again? Can I find anything to sustain myself above the sadness that returns so consistently?

I have asked these questions before, certain that the answers were bleak, and yet, in time I was proven so very, very wrong. I hope that it is true again. I want to believe that this place, so defined in my mind by the actions of an inscrutable past, also precedes greater joy to come. I wish for myself that I may outrun the gravity of apathy into a future filled with meaning.

The Mistake of Dualism

Of all the illusions that the mind bestows on us, one of the most invisible is the illusion that consciousness is a robust and ubiquitous presence in ourselves. We build ideas of the mind's working but we do so by mapping lessons we learn elsewhere in the world to it. To quote Cormac McCarthy:

"The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part"

The mind is chimeric in our visible universes and we are not equipped to understand it; we are equipped to understand where to find berries and how to associate sets of stimuli.

One of the recent illuminations that introspection has given me is to be skeptical of dualist concepts - that is, pairs of concepts, working differently but both explaining one thing, that we believe represent that thing correctly. For its part, dualism is a bad word in consciousness studies, and perhaps for good reason when you pull it apart in concept. Quite simply, dualism is the acceptance that no practical model exists for a phenomenon, so the next best thing is to have two that both do part of the job.

I had just woken today when I caught myself thinking that the man of id, confronted by dreams and instincts, is separate from the man of ego, reasoning what these things must mean and how to deal with them. But, in truth they are and can only be one man. The man of ego does not exist separate from the man of id; he is and has always been a product of their interaction, and vice versa. Instincts and logic are imperfect anchors; often so imperfect as to be inoperable. They do not have the luxury of existing in a vacuum; rather, they are always and everywhere set upon by external forces that they themselves affected but can never decidedly control.

Ultimately, dualism is a mental weakness. Dualities like this exist in our mind because of two facts:

1) We believe our minds police and enforce their own logical rigor; and

2) The mind does nothing of the sort

Such a combination is commonly known as a "cognitive bias". We may like to believe that we are more mentally resilient than we are, because our analysis of our resilience is a gestalt response, which itself is subject to all sorts of memory survivorship and other biases. Humans consistently overestimate their mental resilience in comparison to empirical testing.

A strange question to end with: would life be better or worse without cognitive biases? For my part, I'm not sure it would be possible to enjoy it at all.