Massive Tribal Dump

Give that man a job. Seahawks seventh round draft pick
Justin Forsett ran like a cat dipped in turpentine last night
in the 'Hawks preseason 29-26 OT victory over the Bears.

Greg:

I'm glad you finally got to witness first hand the huge screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass that is a Seahawks game at Qwest Field. Granted, it was only a preseason game, and therefore was only "sports orgy lite". Still, it made our backup QB Charlie Frye's foibles - the interceptions and whatnot - no less rage-inducing. (If he were more competent perhaps we could get "World's Most Athletic Human" Seneca Wallace out where he should be, catching passes instead of backing up Matt Hasselbeck.)

But I have to tell you, every year at the first game when the players come flying out of the tunnel to all the smoke and fire and beer-gurgling fanfare, it reminds me of the scene in "Gladiator" when the fighters are brought up into the light of the coliseum for the first time and all nearly crap their loincloths over the sheer fucking size of it all.

Now you also know how oh-so-very-goddamn loud it is. Again - it was only a preseason game, so it was "ear-splitting lite". Increase that cacophony by a factor of 2.5 and you get an idea of what a post-season game is like.

Now that you know what I mean when I say that I find it quite satisfying to take a gigantic emotional dump in public, and to do so without consequences, and to have it be an expected behavior. Also, as you pointed out, to not just take an emotional dump individually, but tribally as part of the tens-of-thousands-strong screaming steaming drinking throbbing mass. (SSDTM for those of you who need an acronym for everygoddamnthing if it gets more than two mentions. I'm looking at you, Microsoft. -Ed.)

If you know me as well as you do, dear brother, it begs the question how I, who never had the athletic inclination to throw my voice fer Winchell's sake, would become a frothing sweating screaming flailing fan of football. (Or FSSFF. Not the second mention yet. I know. I'm just getting ready. -Ed.)

Easy. I think football is a dharma. It represents an integral concept of this difficult and oft-confusing life that is represented in my favorite fuckin' haiku of all goddamn time from Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

It is a dewdrop world

Surely it is

And yet

And yet -

Football is only a concept. (Oh yeah? Try convincing Bears backup QB Caleb Hanie that the 600-pound sack of man-crete that flattened him last night was a concept. I'm sure his chiropractor would like to hear that too. -Ed.) (Quiet you! -TRG.) It is what it is - to flog a hackneyed football interview phrase - because we all agree that it is. The fans, the players, the coaches, the ticket scalpers - you get the drift. It only has as much importance as I interpret it to have. I scream until I hyperextend my pyloric valve in anger when our backup quarterback Charlie Frye throws an interception, but I do so by choice. If it were, say, Bears QB Rex Grossman throwing the interception, I would shriek with glee and dispense high-fives to everyone within high-fiving range.

I find it enjoyable to become a FSSFF (Nice! -Ed.) because it is one of the few times in life when I am conscious of the emotional choice. In the rest of my life, it's not like that. Someone tells me shocking news and I startle. People die and I weep. My brother grieves and I despair. The cat pukes on my bedspread and my heart is filled with blackest rage. All of these things, though they seem appropriate to the situation, arise spontaneously and therefore seem as autonomic as a sneeze.

All these emotions, however autonomic they may seem, arise from values that I possess: the worth of my bedspread and the importance of my brother's well-being, for instance. These could be subject to emotional choice as well. I could choose to help others breathe through their upsets as I breathe through mine, to listen compassionately when my brother grieves, and transform the urge to punt the cat into compassion for his dyspepsia. (Or if you must punt the cat, punt him delicately and with loving-kindness. -Ed.)

But I will always rage over the foibles of Charlie Frye, because as Issa put it so succinctly two hundred years ago:

It is a preseason game

Surely it is

And yet

And yet -


Cheers, -Thaddeus

Benchin' For The Buddha

Greg:

You're not gonna believe this. Back in October, when I started working out in earnest, I could only bench 80 pounds and do 14 push-ups. Check it out: I bench pressed 225 pounds this morning. That's three reps on a ten-Mississippi count, too.

No, I do not lie. And get that disbelieving smirk off your face. I crap you not. It was me. I benched two hunnert and a quarter. That's, like, thirteen stone, five ounces, six quid and tuppence. That's fifteen pounds more than I weigh. And if you want an idea of how slow my reps were, count to 10 Mississippi up and 10 Mississippi back while pretending to bench. Yeah, like tai chi slow.

"But Thaddeus," you sputter in disbelief, "you've always been a weenie-arm of the smallest magnitude. You even got knocked out by a girl once. And not even a very big girl. Plus, you represent the most effete of all God's creatures: The Middle-Aged Man. How did someone of your extreme weinertasticity develop such Herculean strength?" Short answer: the dharma.

Okay, so, you ever seen those guys who do feats of strength for Jesus? They bust baseball bats over their necks and break bricks and blow up douchebags like party balloons and all sorts of other meathead stunts to show people how ossum it is to be Christian? Okay, so, you've gotta be pretty well aware that I'm not a Christian. Twenty or so years of being a Christian pretty much cured me of Christianity. But I was reading an article in Shambhala Sun a while back about Buddhist athletes that really fascinated me. What was particulary fascinating was an interview with Jet Li. To say that Li is an accomplished martial artist would be putting it lightly. He's been studying Wu Shu since he was eight. He's also a hardcore Buddhist. And he's kicked enough ass to fill Wisner Stadium. So when they asked him if meditating improved his martial abilities, he told them that it was 't'other way 'round. He said he became an expert martial artist so he could meditate better. I don't know if you'd call that Kicking Ass for Inner Peace, but it was an interesting idea.

So then I was thinking, hey, what if I turned my workout into a meditation? Couldn't hurt. And it'd probably save me some time, 'cuz gawd knows that what ya really wanna do is hurry that meditation stuff up and get it the hell overwith. (I told you I was a bad Buddhist!) So what I did was to slow my movements waaaay down, tai chi-style, and to focus on my breath instead of the effort of moving the weight. I also decided to not get emotionally involved with the weight any more than I get involved with my thoughts when I meditate - just observe what is happening. And guess what? Boo yah, I'm Hercules.

Granted, part of what made my arms so weak was the fact that I had loose rotator cuffs. Both of my shoulders have been dislocated a number of times during the past thirty or so years. I did a whole lotta work to get those bad boys put back together, and I'm sure that helped a lot. But still, the meditation trick - pretty cool, huh?

Now for my next feat of strength, I'm going to go bench the Internet.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

-Thaddeus

My Brain Has Turned To Creamed Fucking Corn

Henry Rollins demonstrates the benefits of Neck Farming.

Greg:

I don't know what you do all day other than sit around and think up novel ways to not respond to my letters. Oh wait - that's right. You invent stuff. Each day you chisel a larger niche for yourself in the abbey of history. Whereas I sit around all day and try to think up novel ways of getting people to buy stuff they could probably do without. Barring that, I at least try to write mass marketing emails that get read before they get deleted. So therein lies the difference between us: you have lofty goals, whereas I would be happy if my goals reached as high as the crown molding in a dormouse's terlit room.

Which brings me to my next point which is that I don't have one. The wife? Fine. Kid? Awesome. Work? Same as always. And I've had some pretty fun holiday gatherings so far. So why do I feel like I'm up to my neck in cement?

So speaking of neck, there is something I have been doing, which is to do some neck-farming down at the Intramural Athletic center at the University of Washington. I have spousal privileges there since Teresa is an employee of the UW. So I've been down there hitting the plates a few times a week and am becoming rather a fetching and well-muscled (albeit hairless) beeve. (That's an archaic term for beef cattle, in case you do something other than sit around and read the dictionary whilst avoiding work.) The IMA is just about the nicest health club I've ever been to. It has plenty of space, plenty of high-tech machines, and surprisingly little cock-ogling going on in the sauna. Yeah, I know that sounds crass, but what is it about guys that makes them want to stare at another guy's Ben Johnson just because? And it's always the old farts, the tenured faculty who are staring at your nether parts wistfully as though the were remembering that they had one once. I swear to Buffo Guatto, the next Professor EuroGeeze who stares at my bits is going to be asked in no uncertain terms to buy me flowers first. But still, it's nothing like the downtown YMCA, where tonsil jousting carried on day and night with complete impunity.

Okay, so there's that. And then there's football...oh wait, did I just put you to sleep? FOOTBALL! I recently got to meet Jerramy Stevens, a Hawks tight end, and a little slip of a fellow at 6'7" and 265 (about 14 and 3/4ths stone if you're Scottish). Both he and several other of his Gridiron Brethren came back this year with full-on Amish style beards. Perhaps it is the God-fearing, clean-living ways of the Amish that enables these mastodons to perform at the height of their game (4AM! Time for milking!). Speaking of which, you'll be overjoyed to hear that the Seahawks are doing quite well, have won their division, and have the #1 win-loss record in the NFC right now at 11-2. They've scored 83 points in their last 2 games, shutting out the Eagles on Monday Night Football 42-0, and cracking the 'nards of the 49ers six days later at 41-3. So yeah, it's a good time to be a Seahawks fan, and I'm happy to have made it to 2 of the last 3 games. Still, we get NO FREAKING LOVE WHATSOEVER from the press, one MegaDullard even going so far as to say "we don't know much about them way up there in the Pacific Northwest", neverminding the fact that there are such newfangled things nowadays as the Televisory Unit, the Home Telephonic Transceiver and the InterWeb whereby people can converse 'round the globe as though they were in the very same room!

I would say "I digress", but then that begs the question from what.

So with that said, I'm glad we had this chat.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

-Thaddeus

Born To Be In Rehab

Jim Carroll, c. 1968

Greg:

So, to continue our conversation about the relationship betwen madness and artistic/musical ability, I submit the poet and musician Jim Carroll, who had prodigious talent in many areas, junkie-ism being only one. He was also a basketball prodigy and academic wizard. Notice the stunning resemblance to Leonardo Dicaprio who played him in "The Basketball Diaries".



Ted Kooser puts the "rock" in "Adirondack chair"

Now, for comparison's sake, I submit Ted Kooser (aka The Kooze, Terrible Ted, The Ten Fingers of Doom, Sorry I Missed My Last Poetry Seminar Professor Kooser) current US Poet Laureate, abundantly talented old coot and retired insurance company executive.

So, beyond the argument that every wildly talented person is nutso-ballo, which may or may not be true, I further submit that artistic inclination (or talent, if that's a measurable thing) has nothing to do with how screwed up or un-screwd up you may be, and is in fact only a perception/expression issue. In other words, artistic inclination is a matter of expressive or communicative style, and not a function of emotional makeup or personality. To wit - on the obverse, fantastically talented poets who were neither nutso nor ballo, and held down regular jobs (mostly) in the private sector: Wm. Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Wallace Stevens. And now the reverse, fantastically talented poets who pickled their livers, took the gas pipe, or booted themselves to Palookaville: Dylan Thomas, Wm. S. Burroughs, Sylvia Plath. And finally, the control category, fantastically talented poets who were hit by dune buggies while vacationing on Fire Island and died at age 40 without developing a really serious substance abuse problem: Frank O'Hara.

As my optometrist is so fond of saying, "Better A - or B?"

So, brother of mine, tortured live = artistic talent is a fallacy in my book. It leads to that whole "if I could just drink/shoot/snort/skrog more, I could write better" line of thinking that even I have been heir to at one time or another.

Thoughts? Comments? Or would you just like to boot some smack while listening to Stan Getz and reading Allen Ginsberg? Or eat a hash brownie the size of Linda Hunt while reading Gertrude Stein?

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Spheres Under The Influence

Hey - what the hell did I just put in my coffee?

Greg:

You know what would be really nice? If a person could actually know what their sphere of influence was.

Wait, let's try that again. You know what would be really nice? If I actually knew what my sphere of influence was. But for that, we need to start back in ancient Rome. Or was it Greece? Some place with statues and "free love". Okay, San Francisco. Good enough.

So here we are on the Embarcadero, discussing a philosopher who has long since turned to bone meal. His name is Epictetus, (I know that I mentioned him in one of my previous letters) and he came up with one of the most pithy philosophies that I've ever heard of. In a nutshell it is this:

There are certain things that you can't do anything about, so it's a waste of time to distress yourself about those things. Instead, you should just chill right the hell out and let those things go on their merry way as things are wont to do in this life. It is the nature of life for things to pass through it. Okay, so I just paraphrased the hell out of his philosophy and probably misquoted it, but you get my drift.

So where that leaves me is here: it's fine and understandable to not distress yourself over things that can't be helped, but how do you know which things can benefit from your effort, and which things are beyond your control and should be left alone? It would be nice if I could say for certain that I could do some good in this or that situation by applying skills, talent or input. But determining which things those are is the real pisser.

For instance, I figured out long ago that I can't do anything to change another person's behavior. Beyond that, I feel it would be at the least meddling and at the most disrespectful if I did, no matter how repugnant I found their actions. However, I can do something about communicating to that person what the boundaries are in how they treat me. On the other hand, the fledgling Buddhist in me feels that if I have an opportunity to do some good or at least ameliorate some harm, then I am ethically bound to do so. I know that I can prevent harm to myself and another person if I can prevent them from doing harm to me. Viz., stopping someone from hitting me stops me from being harmed and stops the other person from harming someone (and from a karmic standpoint, prevents them from harming themselves), so it's clear how defending oneself is the right thing to do in all cases. But beyond that...

I know this much for sure. The one place that I have the most influence is between my ears. That's where I apply most of my efforts. But beyond that? Still stumped.

I know that your eyes are weak , your legs are grey and wizened and your digits are knackered. But if you could summon up what little strength you possess to offer an insight here, it would be most appreciated. I'll send you a can of juice for your efforts.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Screw Insomnia Already, Okay?

Vigilance! Eternal vigilance!



Greg:

First it was the cops shouting at somebody to take their hands out of their pockets (followed by much screeching of tires and blaring of sirens), and then it was the Chinatown Street Cleaner/Demolition Derby that interrupted my sleep. And now, here it is, a buttock's arch away from the ass-crack of dawn, and I'm flogging my blog once again.

It's at times like these, when my eyelids feel like emery boards, that I envy those who can take a shot of bourbon and a Seconal or while away the early morning hours practicing the bhong, and thus render themselves unconscious. I can do neither. Gone are the days when I saw this hour of the morning through a hogshead of gin and a fistful of blow. (I mean, c'mon, did anyone do anything else in the 80s?) But considering that alternative means of reaching the state I'm in, I'll take old, cranky and woke up by the cops any day over that.

So for larfs, I was clicking on all the links in my profile, trying to see what other blogophiles there were out there who shared my affinity for - okay, pick one - William Carlos Williams [Side note: have you read Williams' "Kora In Hell"? Duct tape yourself to a chair first.], when I came smack upside the realization once again that I really don't like people. Or maybe I just don't like their blogs. And here I am being an apologist for that fact and feeling genuinely bad about it. You know what that means? Probably means somewhere deep down inside I hate myself, or feel superior, or am utterly insecure, or some other completely unflattering fact that I'd rather project onto some poor blogger like virgo_kween than ponder a means to fix. Then again, perhaps rising beyond the level of garden-variety crank to actual apologist crank is a step in the right direction.

Which brings me to the line from the "14 Things That I've Learned" that says "When I finally realized how much hatred there was in me, I no longer wondered why there was war." The problem is not sitting over there somewhere. I am the problem.

Okay, so here's the upside. (Take the gas pipe out of your mouth for a second. It's not all bad. Really!) I have a lot to work with on this issue. First of all, I know how emotions work. So that means I can get a handle on what it is that makes my eyes want to roll heavenward with flabbergastration (new word!) every time I come across, say, a Gloom-Encrusted Goth-errific Paste Merchant writing something about how certainly none can be more forlorn than they. Example: 6th June - Dark of the Moon; my heart wails to break its bony cage. I traded all my Magic the Gathering cards for a new set of fangs. Adieu.

Second, I do practice vipassana meditation, which may actually one day cure me of this affliction. And third, to date no one has kicked me in the treats for being such a judgmental douchebag.

Hey, what's that? I think it's - yes it is! Sleep! Blessed, blessed sleep!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Screw Depression Already, Okay?

Any emotion that does this to a kid's face
oughtta be dragged into an open field and shot.



Greg:

Fuck depression, okay? Just fuck it already. It's a fuckin' waste of time. Goddamn my brain chemistry anyway. The only reason I write this stuff down is in the off chance that somebody might find it helpful some day. I was looking around the Web yesterday for resources on anxiety and depression, and that in and of itself is depressing. Why? Because there are no real humans talking about the issue. Just academics and doctors and salesmen - none of whom can adequately empathize with what I'm feeling. On top of that, every other website is trying to sell you something. Buy my tapes, eat my drugs, join my overly expensive therapy group. It's a disgusting load of crap, I tell ya! Capitalizing on a person's depression. It's unconscionable.

So I'm beginning to think that Alan Watts was right with that whole "you oughtta think less" thing. And here's why. If you entertain fewer depressed thoughts while you're depressed, then all you're left dealing with is the physical manifestations of depression. You've effectively taken the "fuel" away from the depression for maintaining itself. I'm not saying that you should stuff all your feelings. That's not healthy either. The most effective thing I've found is to simply observe your thoughts, understand them for what they are, and let them go on their merry (or not so merry) way. The problem with thoughts is that they lead you to believe that there's something to be done. The underlying truth is that there's nothing to be done about being depressed. Depression seems to be a group of particular thoughts and bodily sensations that lead a person to certain actions or inaction as the case may be. The thoughts are what keep the bodily state in place, so fuck 'em and the depression goes away.

It's at times like these that I have to remind myself that there's actually nothing going on. Like I said in one of my previous letters, actual events are over in a millisecond. Then there's a vast tract of time before any salient event takes place again. In the interim, all you're left with is thought cycles that are either grinding on what already happened, or desperately trying to anticipate what might happen next based on previous events, or trying to figure out a way to have thus-and-so happen again. It's all pretty much a monumental waste of brain power. All of those thoughts are getting in the way of the unshakeable presence of reality. It's tantamount to saying, "Get out of the way, wouldja? You're standing in the way of the view of my own ass!"

I was riding the waterfront trolley to work this morning, having all my depressed thoughts and whatnot, and trying as best as I could to just let them roll by, when right in the middle of it all the memory of the fact that riding on the trolley is fun pushed everything else aside. There's no reason why riding on the trolley is fun; it just is. There's no explaining it. And for some reason that recalled realization made me want to cry right then and there. It seems that realization would've made me react in some other way - getting happier, I suppose - but instead... Maybe it was that I wanted to weep with relief. I dunno.

But there you have it. There is still fun in the world, there is joy without reason, mirth without consequence, up without down - all of this regardless of whether I can "feel" it at the moment or not. Life itself is not an unfolding drama with me as its central character. Not even my life is that. There is much more in the world than what goes on between my ears.

Thanks for listening. Give my best to Marie.

The Secret To Authentic Crankiness

Old and cranky am I,
so punch you in the crotch I will!

Greg:

I suddenly realized this morning why old people are so damn cranky. Yeah, there's that thing about how everything hurts all the time, but that's not quite it. It's about reaching one's threshold for tolerance of stuff that probably should never have been tolerated in the first place. Remember how Dad, after 33 years of being an Episcopalian minister, ostensibly sat bolt upright in bed one morning, slapped himself on the forehead, and went - "Wait a minute! Jesus was never Christian!" And then of course he ran off to Israel and the rest is history.

I think there is a time in adolescence when a person develops a healthy cynicism of all the beliefs that they've been handed, and I think the same sort of thing happens in middle age. When you're eighteen or so it's like somebody says "How about mowing the lawn?" and you suddenly realize that there's nothing in mowing the lawn for you, and that there never was, and what you say next is something like "How about mowing my crotch?" That's perhaps not the best way to handle things, but with the limited experience of adolescence, it may seem like the most self-affirming and expedient.


Fig. 1: Pre-adolescent crankitude


Although the middle-age corollary of this may not have as much sauce, it is nonetheless as potent a realization. You wake up one day, take a look around, and go "HMO's? 401k's? Mortgages? All these people are fuckin' crazy! I'm going hiking!" And thus, armed with that judgment of society and the clingers thereto, you set about gathering up vast basketloads of ass to kick. The minute that someone comes by and tries to convince you that some value based in that society should be of the utmost importance to you, you reach into your basket, pick out a pre-kicked ass, and hurl it at them. That, sir, is crankiness in a nutshell. It is the unshakeable commitment to not buyin' it coupled with a healthy chorus of fuh'kawf.

And so, dear brother, I am now trying to extract myself from the embrace of that tarbaby a little more every day - the tarbaby that convinced me once upon a time that what I really needed was a nice car, a lot of income, and prodigious amounts of kowtow to the mores and wherefores of the society that supplied those two things (viz., be able to speak at length on the history and etymology of Seinfeld). Hereforward, anything that has to do with said tarbaby or its ilk and progeny gets a pre-kicked ass and a hearty fuh'koff!. And that is what I call authentic crankiness.

World without end. Amen.

Watts Pt. 2: He's Zen-tastic, Yet Alco-rrific!

Check it out! It's Tenzin Mo-Dope!

Dear Fart-Stain:

It is becoming ever-so-obvious that not only can you not reply to an actual posted letter, you can't even get your grubby dick-skinners to peck at the keyboard long enough to reply to a freakin' blog! And this whole "InterWeb" thing was supposed to make communication easy. Besides causing rampant infomania, compulsive shopping and increased access to porn, what good has it done? It can't get you to reply to a letter, so what's it worth? I swear to horse-tits, they'll be turning lead to platinum before I ever see a letter from you. Knowledge of that sad fact, however, will not stop me from ranting here and now.

So to get back to Alan Watts, Wikipedia (the open-source online encyclopedia that any autodidactic wankster like myself can edit) tells me that he was something of a sot and put away quantiferous amounts of booze that no doubt foreshortened his life. He died at age 58. You probably already knew all this, but it was a surprise to me. Oh yeah, there was that and all that acid he ate. And all that stuff he smoked. So. Yeah. Short life.

Which brings me to the point of why it should be so surprising that someone who wrote and spoke with such lucidity should also be a world-class boozehound-slash-fried-hat. Somehow I was under the delusion that someone who was so educated and practiced in Zen - viz., mental purity - would be trying to maintain physical purity as well. Maybe that's a bad assumption on my part. Perhaps the point is that one has nothing to do with the other. Or that some people are good at handling substances, and some are not (like me). Or that alcohol and narcotics are what they are, and work on the nervous system in a definable way, and all of that has nothing to do with the mythology and superstitions that have grown up around them. I've heard that certain yogis can munch down hundreds of mics of acid and remain completely lucid (Ram Dass has a story about that one), yet these same yogis do not choose chemically-augmented consciousness as their path to realization. Maybe they're hip to the fact that the consciousness does not lie within the substance.

So perhaps the point is that spiritual and mental acuity are over here and substance use is over there and although they share a sliver of a Venn diagram, neither one is utterly related to the other.

And with that in mind, I'm going to polish off my usual tankard of morning coffee. And boot some smack. And smoke the dog.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Watts: Set Your Brain On "Low"; Baste Frequently

Dig that 100-Watts smile!

Greg:

Either it's a really good idea to listen to recordings of Alan Watts while you're depressed or it's not. Here's the problem. I pointed out in another letter some time ago that one of the things that supports the refractory period of an emotion is a sort of "channel" of thought that seems to arise that will only support thoughts congruent with that emotion. Depression, f'rinstance, like the one that's been chewing at me for the past three or so days, will only entertain thoughts that support its reason for being. So I don't even have to tell you what my mental story has been the past few days. All I have to do is say that I've been depressed and you can pretty much guess the internal dialogue.

So along comes Watts, courtesy of Audible.com, and exclaims that thinking is the thing that separates us from reality. And as I said in a previous letter, thinking is almost never concerned with what's going on in the present. It's mired in the mud of some previous experience, or anxiously trying to anticipate future events. Since "present" is the only moment there really is, then maybe Watts is on to something there. I spend a lot of my time when I'm depressed not only gnawing on actual negative events in the past, but brewing up imaginary negative events to stew on even more. "Throwing rocks in my own pond", as Teresa would say. It's not bad enough that I actually had an argument with this or that person at some time in the past, but I have to go and dream up an imaginary argument to have with them in the present! Christ Jesus, do I have the fucking corner on the neuroses market or what!? What a waste of a perfectly good brain. And the real kick in the prunes is that as much as I know about emotion, it doesn't seem to stop the process from happening.

So there must be some way in which I benefit from doing this or I'd stop doing it, right? Or is that completely off the mark? Do humans continue behaviors that are of no benefit to them whatsoever? I have no idea. How is your vantage point? What can you see from over there? Tell me what this is that I have caught in my philosophical teeth.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Secret To Lifelong Happiness Revealed Once And For All! (Or Something Like That.)

This is your brain on Zen

Greg:

Here's something that I thought it might be worthwhile to pass along. I had a few realizations about happiness and quality of life, sort of like that realization that I told you about a couple months ago – the one about how most of the time, there's nothing going on. Remember that one? Okay. So. I'm going to record here, if for no other reason than my own edification (and to create a "backup" copy of my thoughts), a few observations that I've had in the last couple of weeks regarding happiness.

When I was reading about emotions and what they are and how they work and why we have them, I came across Paul Ekman's explanation of hatred. Hatred, he says, is not an emotion. Rather it is better described as an "emotional attitude". It is too long–standing and inflexible to be an emotion. It would be better described, I think, as something akin to delusion. A person who is truly delusional, in other words a person who has a definable delusional disorder, is suffering from a crystallization of logic regarding a certain subject or person. The logic is perfectly circular, seamless, and self–supporting, and furthermore does not stand up to logical scrutiny from the outside. It is a maladaption of the basic function of emotion, which is to limit for a useful time period the type of reasoning a person does. A delusional person has taken that process and frozen it in time, as it were. In that way, hatred is akin to delusion because it has a lot of the same characteristics. The emotions and actions generated become completely disproportionate to the situation, and at the same time, become the only emotional choice available to the individual.

Now if you were to take this notion and stand it on its head, you'd get happiness. Happiness has no logical connection to environmental circumstances, and doesn't have to have any apparent proximal cause. However, where happiness and hatred diverge is that the latter is an extreme narrowing of heuristics and the former is a vast broadening of heuristics (hence the description of happiness as a feeling of "expansiveness" or "elevation"). To wit, there is a greater number of heuristic choices available to a person whose prevailing emotional attitude is happiness than to a person who is not. The net effect? Happiness seems to be the wiser evolutionary choice because happy people are better equipped to adapt and respond to any situation.

I have to make clear that I am talking about the emotional attitude called happiness and not the emotion called happiness. They're two different things, just like anger and hatred are related but are not the same. The pleasant–but–transient emotion that we experience from a proximal event is what we call happiness, but the thing that Buddhists call happiness is a permanent emotional attitude which has no refractory period and no apparent connection to either distal or proximal events. One is a wave, the other is the level of the ocean. When people go about asking "how can I be happier?" what they're really saying most of the time is "how can I experience more moments of joy?" There's certainly nothing wrong with the pursuit of joyful moments, but one has to realize that the defining characteristic of a moment is that it eventually ends. If you've set yourself up so that you have to do this or that thing to experience a joyful moment, and your goal is to be more joyful, then you have a lot of work cut out for yourself. You have to keep re–obtaining the reagent that "makes" you happy. An extreme and obvious example of this is drug addiction, but people do it with all sorts of things – love, money, fame, attention, whatever.

So in a nutshell, here's what I've learned. Hatred is a type of delusion. Happiness is an unchanging emotional attitude that you either have naturally (if you're lucky) or that you can develop. Thus, there's nothing you can do to "make" yourself be a happy person. You only believe that if you have the emotion of happiness confused with the state of being called happiness.

So all of this ruminating on happiness in the past few days led to a compulsion to write down all the important lessons that I've learned thus far in my life. I set out to list 20 things and so far I have 14 written down. Hopefully I'll have 20 things some day. Here's the list so far:

20 - no, wait - 14 Things I've Learned

1. Atheism beats the hell out of a codependent relationship with and invisible friend.
2. My life has a purpose that is greater than my immediate needs. When I am aware of this purpose, it becomes the backdrop and motivation for all my actions.
3. Pain is an unavoidable fact of human existence; suffering, on the other hand, is an emotional choice that I make about my pain.
4. "Death concerns neither the living nor the dead; the former it is not, and the latter are no more." –Epicurus
5. "You can't do anything about anything that you can't do anything about, so don’t spend any time worrying about it." –Epictetus
6. The hard stuff is never as hard as you think it will be. What's hard about the hard stuff is getting around to starting it.
7. Slacking is not nearly as fulfilling as you think it will be; work is way more rewarding than it sounds.
8. Nothing that you're taught is useful until you learn and assimilate it on your own.
9. Arguing never solves anything.
10. When I finally realized how much hatred there was in me, I no longer wondered why there was war.
11. My tastes are always subject to change, therefore my definition of myself is too.
12. I have skills that I don't even know about yet.
13. Doing a little bit of something about an issue is way better than feeling overwhelmed by the immensity of it and doing nothing at all.
14. Most of the time there's nothing happening.

And now, speaking of happiness and unhappiness and the like, I have to go back to stewing about why Toolhouse hasn't responded to my counter offer yet.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie,

News Flash: Your Head Is Mostly Empty Space!

Boredom, Last Refuge of the Overstimulated 

Greg:

I had one of those great "a ha"[1] moments yesterday, one where certain ideas that you've heard over and over and over again finally make sense. When it does make sense and you say it out loud, it sounds like a tautology[2], and in fact it often is, but that neither negates nor describes the impact of the realization. To wit, coming to the realization that it's not over 'til it's over seems like a tautology, and it is. But there is a deeper realization within that statement that isn't apparent from just saying it or reading it. Even though it is an empty statement, perhaps that kind of revelatory emptiness is the kind of thing that Zen[3] is all about.

Okay – so – I was getting to that moment of revelation.. I'll tell you what I think finally galvanized it. I'm reading a book by Paul Ekman, the psychologist who's famous for discovering the universality of human expression. Ekman is the one who discovered that recognition of facial emotion is not bound by culture or race, although there are certain display rules that govern what face a person can show to whom and under what circumstances. The Japanese are famous for having strict display rules. It's also interesting to note that Ekman was trying to prove precisely the opposite of what he eventually discovered. The book I'm reading is called Emotions Revealed, and it's essentially about how to get better at reading the facial expressions of others, but the real meat and taters of it is the first few chapters where he explains what emotions are and how they're triggered. For me, that's the really interesting part. As you know, I'm fascinated by emotions, specifically the emotional phenomena of empathy.

Ekman says, as I've heard before, that emotion is "a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of physiological changes and emotional behaviors begin to deal with the situation." I would only expand on that by saying that emotion, then, is a method for managing heuristics, each distinct emotional category containing a limited number of heuristic choices. Those choices in turn are influenced and motivated by the amplitude of the emotion. He goes on to say some really interesting things about how emotions are triggered, but first, my realization. It was this: that the present moment is inconceivably vast and peaceful; and that the present is only briefly punctuated by events. These events, the ones that we respond to emotionally, are not going on all the time. As a matter of fact, they hardly ever happen. When they do happen, they're over in a split second. What makes them seem like they're effecting us continually in the present is the fact that we ruminate on events of the past or rehearse events in the future, which may also be extrapolations of events from the past. (These ruminations and rehearsals are sometimes called worry.) It's tantamount to saying that music is mostly made up of silence, or that our physical mass is made up mostly of intermolecular space. So if it's true that the events that elicit our emotional responses are only like sparks in the unquenchable blackness of space, then these events have already come and gone by the time I've seen them happen, and since I can't do anything about anything I can't do anything about, what's the point in worrying about it?

Now it seems on the surface that it might have some survival advantage to be able to prepare oneself with appropriate responses through rumination and rehearsal. I'd say that's true to some degree, but what's more important than that is possessing the ability to respond appropriately at the moment when it's needed. What's probably most effective is to keep one's emotional amplitude low and thus keep a wide palette of heuristics ready by keeping an open mind. One way to do this is through meditation. Meditation is best practiced not as an ameliorative measure for some condition that already exists, but as a prophylaxis for things that might occur. Like the Dalai Lama says, patience is something you practice when you don't need it so that it's there when you do.

So that was my moment of revelation. To say it out loud it doesn't sound like much, and it's not like I hadn't heard it before hundreds of times. Maybe it was just the addition of the realization that "much of the time, there's nothing happening" that finally turned the crank.

I have a lot of work to do today, so I'm going to have to cut off earlier than I'd like. I'm not one to leave my correspondence and keep going back to it. It's more of something that's spontaneous and created in the moment. I think that's what makes correspondence special. It's not so spontaneous that it's completely off the cuff, yet it's not so rehearsed that it becomes disingenuous.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie,

[1] No related to that hair band from the mid–80s that sang "Take On Me".
[2] Tautology: a term used in predicate logic which describes a truth which has no content.
[3] "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" always gets credited as being a Zen koan when in fact it is not. The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of someone being slapped. 'Atsa fact. Heard it from a Zen monk.

Cog Sci For The Masses!

Thos. Moran: A Scene On Tohickton Creek

Greg:

Okay, I'm writing again. I've gone to Crane's (obviously) and picked up some more stationery. I've also bolstered my collection of artwork that I use to decorate my letters with a little Thomas Moran (above). Also, as you can see from the envelope, the US Postal Service has decided to issue a series of stamps that really has some artistic substance and looks like money – you know the way God intended, the way they used to make stamps back in the good old days when the adhesive on the back of them tasted like the horsehide it was made from. It's the most beautiful damn stamp I've ever seen, even if it is printed on Mylar. Too bad it's a memoriam to two crazy muffuckers who blazed a trail that was too soon followed by the founders of trailer parks. In this series, the US Postal Service has issued the panoramic stamp you see on the envelope, plus one portrait each of Lewis and Clark. Sacagawea got nothin'. They probably figured she already had a coin, and if they gave her more than that, they might appear apologetic.

It's only been a couple months since I was formally enrolled in a class and I can already feel my IQ taking a vertiginous drop. I feel like I need to get back to my math right away before I forget all of it. There's a precalculus for life sciences course that I'm looking at taking this summer. One of the people I tutor with has a degree in math from Dartmouth and she has agreed to tutor me if I need it. I have an awful lot of math to get out of the way (117, 122, 123 and then Calculus I and II), so it would probably be wise to get started on it as soon as possible.

I'm sure I lamented to you on the phone about the fact that all the really groovy schools are in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Hampshire and Bennington are two that I'm really considering right now. The interdisciplinary approach that I'd like to take is Cognitive Science and Creative Writing. The reason for the combination of the two has a practical purpose in my mind. I believe that Cognitive Science is the fastest emerging science of all and will also have the greatest impact on the average person. It seems to me that the best way to get the most beneficial discoveries in the field into the hearts and minds of the population is to be able to write about them in the vernacular. The rubber has to hit the road in other words. What good are any of these discoveries if in the end they only make for interesting cocktail party conversation between a bunch of academic wanks? On the subject of creative writing, I just found out today that Mary Oliver was until recently a faculty member at Bennington. She's a poet that I mentioned in a previous letter. I included her picture. She kinda looked like Joe Namath in it. Remember? Anyway, I read her poetry handbook and it just stunned me. I also told you that Ed Hoagland teaches there. He is, in a word, the dope shit as well.

Christ, but it's late. Eight thirty already. I'm off to bed now, and I promise it won't be so long between letters.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie,

TV Good. Bandura Bad!

Bandura's studies showed that
if the kids didn't beat the clown,
it would eventually eat them. 

Dear Greg:

Sorry I haven't been sending as many letters as of late. I've been trying to finish my personal statement for Brown, which is about like writing a novel, and I've been reading Albert Bandura's Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis. It's 388 pages of way–the–hell–over–my–head. I got it from my professor, who I suspect was once a hardcore bruthah of the fist–in–the–air variety. He told me last week that he smoked a joint with Stokely Carmichael back in the early 70s. Or was it Huey Newton? One of those cats. Anyway, Bandura is the guy whose research was used to vilify television violence. To oversimplify social learning theory, the upshot is that people respond to environmental cues in order to model their behavior. We accept this as more–or–less common knowledge today[1], but in 1976, behaviorists had a dynastic stranglehold on psychology, and this was big news. It also made for great and alarming news bites: TV will make your kids violent. Of course, it's not nearly that simple, and in the end, the whole thing boils down to what the layman could infer from everyday observation. The more I study psychology, the more I adopt the viewpoint that we don't have the first goddamn idea how the human mind works, at least not through the use of psychological simile and metaphor. What's encouraging is that the whole of the science is insufficient to meet its aims, so it has morph and meld with the four other sciences of mind to become cognitive science if it's going to make any progress in explaining the human mind. And that is exactly what's happening. Some day far in the future, psychology will be to the science of thought what alchemy was to modern chemistry. You and I can meet up in 500 years to reëxamine how correct I was.

But before I take leave of Bandura and the 70s, lemme just say this. Yeah, kids watch TV and freak out. They watch Bruce Lee and start screaming and kick each other in the nuts and whatnot and freak their parents right the shit out. Some people would point to that and say "See? TV makes kids violent!" And if you're a complete idiot douchebag numbnuts lip–strumming yokel pinhead, you'll investigate the issue no further. You'll just stick a Kill Your TV sticker on your bumper, happy that you done went and eddicated yo'se'f. Now, for the rest of us who actually think about things, here's a little more information. Even Bandura's famous Bobo Doll experiment showed a massive rate of extinction for the violent behaviors that were emulated by the child subjects – from 88% to 40% in a matter of a few months.[2] If I were conditioning somebody to be violent, I'd want a hell of a lot smaller rate of extinction than that. My take? Kids (and everybody else) attempt to reach cognitive equilibrium with a new stimulus and subjectify new information by kinesthet–izing their experience. In other words, we often act out what we don't understand as one means of understanding it better. Conditioning someone to be aggressive takes a lot more than watching cartoons. Now all you freaked out parents sit down and shut the hell up.

Since I've been spending so much time with Mr. Bandura, it's what is foremost on my mind. There have been other events in my life of course, like the abject drudgery of my daily job. The best thing to happen recently is that I got accepted as an AmeriCorp volunteer tutor. I had my orientation[3] last night, and start tonight helping a high school student with his homework. It's a pretty cool program. They've built tutor centers, essential one–room schoolhouses, in various public housing projects. Kids from the building sign up for help with their homework. It's a hugely popular program with a long waiting list of kids trying to get in. I'm really happy to be a part of it. I've been trying to volunteer with various social service agencies, and this is the first one that I've had success with, believe it or not. The other ones didn't get back to me, or just couldn’t seem to get it together for one reason or another. I'm happy this one worked out, and we can all thank President Bill Clinton for creating AmeriCorps. It seems to be one of the most efficient social service agencies out there. This is going to give me some very vital teaching experience. Not that I don't have it already, but I'm much more used to lecturing whole roomfuls of people, rather than working one–on–one. That's a whole different art form. Did you know that in order to teach in a college or university, you don't have to take any education classes during your college years? It's a ridiculous tragedy. To teach in the public schools, elementary through high school, you have to be trained specifically in education. To teach at a college or university, you don't have to know anything about teaching at all. You just have to have good academic and research records. How freakin' stupid is that? I want to teach at a university, but more than that, I'd like to know how to actually teach when I get there.

I'm off to crawl back into my volume of Bandura. Give my best to Marie.


[1] Strange how we accept it as common knowledge only because it was simplified and vomited at us by the news media.
[2] Children emulated violent behavior toward a clown doll after they saw an adult doing it on a television monitor. That's the experiment in a nutshell.
[3] Does that mean I'm Oriental now?