Acedic

I learned the word "Acedia" today. The wiki about it is quite instructive: "Acedia is essentially a flight from the world that leads to not caring even that one does not care." Ominously it says it can take it's final expression in suicide, which is a bummer.

I am not suicidal, nor do I think I will ever be as I enjoy suffering a little too much, and I think I care that I don't care, but a flight from the world born out of an apathy for both the good and the bad of it more or less describes my current state. I just don't know where I fit after leaving the church, I don't know who my people are, I, in short, don't know why I get out of bed in the morning. I am that stereotypical actor asking in scene after scene, "what's my motivation here?"

Acedia is described as a cousin to depression, although it is typically described as a more spiritual sickness, typically countered with a spiritual practice of some sort. Both the diagnosis and the solution seem resonant to me, but I have yet to motivate myself to do it. I'm not sure what my spiritual practice is anymore.

Part of the problem is that "spirituality" and "spiritual" are overly broad words with a definition I am still trying to pin down. The plain definition is "of or relating to one's spirit" which really narrows it down oh-so-helpfully. So the root word in dire need of coherence for me is "spirit." What do I mean by that? I'm not sure, but I think mine is a little sick. And it's difficult to talk about, in a world where dogmatic materialists roam the streets, eager to jump down my throat should I be perceived as believing anything too "woo woo." 

Don't get me wrong, I am proud of my critical thinking skills, I believe in reason and evidence. I'm a mother-fucking scientist and you're not, maybe I should mention. Most of the people who try to jump down my throat in defense of science and reason are, themselves, NOT motherfucking scientists, just passionate groupies who have forgotten how much they don't know about the world. But I digress.

But the humanities exist for a reason. There is a portion of human nature that is not fed by and does not function in the service of reason. It is not meant to. We are born with high-powered learning systems that help us process past events and convey their relevance to the current situation in the form of our feelings. Sometimes those feelings get in the way, or lead us astray, but they are generally quite helpful as the sum of all of our experiences with something from birth to the present (more or less). My goal is not to discard them or the body. I am not engaged in a holy crusade of intellectual domination over my animal nature or some clever hack around the body's limitations. Rather, I intend to reach some harmonious accord between my feelings, my body and my intellect. Somewhere in the sum of those things is something I am calling my spirit. Although still, that seems too fuzzy and vague for such an important idea. Still, mine seems sick, even though I find I have a hard time unpacking what "it" even is for you. 

So where should I turn when my spirit is sick? My general impression is that the secular world has no time or respect for even the concept of the human spirit, so I am left with the traditional guardians of spiritual knowledge: organized religion. Shit.

Christianity's out immediately for me, of course. However much it may still contain universal truths, the institutional sicknesses and authoritarian nonsense that pervades much of it still blinds me to the more positive qualities. As a man who tends to love other men, I don't find their current stance on LGBT individuals too welcoming.

Honestly, I'm terrified of getting caught up in another cult of some sort. I'm too skeptical to take anything at face value anymore, but still, my spirit is sick. I am worried about the intellectual concessions I might make in order to feel better. I am worried about embracing cognitive dissonance again.

This is probably a good time to do more reading on this kind of thing, if I'm being honest. Buddhism as a practice appeals to me, of course. I'm not sure I could ever believe in the more supernatural aspects, but what I've experienced of meditation leads me to believe it might actual be a useful exercise.  I guess I'm coming around to the idea that while supernatural beings may not exist (although who I am to say, other than to say I haven't seen any myself), spiritual practice may keep my mind and spirit healthy in the same way that exercise keeps the body healthy. Maybe intellectual/spiritual/physical exercise needs no story stronger than "you will feel better if you do these things." But I know this, and still find myself asking, "but what's my motivation?" This is the point where most people just want to kick me in the ass.

I don't think it would bother me if these supernatural constructs turned out to have some basis in "reality." As in, they are real and intelligent and out there somewhere. Mostly because I think everyone would be surprised at what they were really like. But since I don't have much direct evidence of that at present, I tend to think of them as ideological constructs to orient oneself toward. Even my intolerance of christianity abates a bit when I think of God more as a bundle of ideas and ideals to aspire to (forgiveness/charity/love/etc.) and prayer and weekly church attendance as the humble admission that we are limited beings who need to be reminded frequently of our higher ideals and to support each other in trying to embody them. This could be as true of the humanist as it is of the buddhist as it is of the christian I think. 

I am currently in search of the ideological constructs that I want to orient myself towards.  Whether those take the forms of pre-packaged gods one can find in the currently available pantheons or just some simple concepts expressed in a buddhist practice, I'm not sure yet. Maybe both! Maybe neither.

But I'm still looking. Because my spirit feels sick. Acedic.

Vaporware

I had a few things I wanted to write about today, but they have gone, gone away.
Not today.

This whole week has kind of been a wash.
I've basically checked out for most of it and nobody really seems to have noticed.

I'm kind of in an in-between place in my life right now and I'm still trying to make sense of it.
I've left the fold but not joined another yet.
I am foldless.
Ideologically formless.
Unaccountable and unaccounted for.

More pudding than jello,
more jelly than mellow.

Hoping to figure it out a bit at a time.
Hoping the thoughts that have been circling find a place to land.

This is an update with blank space.

Post-Finale

Like, the highly controversial How I Met Your Mother Finale, I have been unable to look at Seinfeld's previous seasons the same way after the series finale. I seem to be one of the few who both enjoyed those finales and found them a fitting end to each series, even though they weren't the end I saw coming. Actually, maybe BECAUSE they weren't the end I saw coming.

In watching previous seasons of Seinfeld, I knew they were kind of selfish curmugeons, but I never thought, "oh, these are truly awful people." I feel like a lot of the controversy came from some small misunderstanding about what these people were. Seinfeld finalized the series by laying out just how much those four miscreants had screwed over anyone else in their lives, because to him that was probably always how he viewed them (he and Larry David seem big into mining their self-loathing as comedic material), and the fans kind of recoiled in horror. "What kind of people have we been rooting for?" they asked. "Well," replied Jerry, "what kind of people did you really think they were?" I think for all of their faults, the characters were easy to get attached to, and I think suddenly pointing out that these were, in fact, terrible people made people a little defensive, because they had grown fond of them.

Of course, the complaint may have been largely tonal. The finale kind of had a "well, you four have had your fun at the expense of everyone else, and now the joke's over" kind of tone, which is kind of a down note for a comedy series to end on. It was the equivalent of turning the house lights on and telling everyone it was time to go home. Seinfeld had always existed in an absurd alternate universe, and to end on such a "realistic" note just seems discordant in retrospect.

Still, I find I appreciate it. Initially, I liked watching a "show about nothing" and just kind of laughing along with the loveable goofballs. Now, I can't help but notice how every single episode involves one of the 4 screwing up something important for one of their friends out of sheer selfishness, short-sightedness, and insecurity. Now that I rewatch it post finale, I can't believe I never really noticed just how terrible they all are, and how entertaining it is to watch one spectacular implosion after another. I think when I first watched it, I subconsciously attributed their troubles to sitcomical bad luck. But of course, they brought it on themselves every time. OF COURSE they did. How did I not see that until the last episode?

Nothing brings home "the party's over" feel of the finale and just how oblivious the four are, than the moment after the verdict is announced, and most of the series regulars cheer triumphantly and leave to celebrate. Left behind are the grief-stricken relatives, which are partly played for laughs (Frank Costanza shaking a collapsed Estelle shouting that he wants to beat the traffic out of there), but frankly the look on Jerry's parents is just devastating. They are deflated, defeated and sad. I find I want to hug them. And, of course, his family isn't even on Jerry's radar. This is not surprising, coming from the man who sincerely remarks that using less milk in his cereal is the hardest thing he's ever had to do. It seems a little too real though for a light-hearted show though.

And finally, they end right where they started, with the same conversation that started the series, having gained nothing and grown not an inch, on their way to a prison sentence they will likely learn nothing from. Honestly it seems apt. They are cartoonish caricatures of people, eternally selfish, narcissistic and shallow, who learn nothing. It's why they're funny. They'll never do anything surprising or out of character or new. And I love them more now than I did then.

The Last Man on Earth

I'm still fascinated by this show. It has very unusual pacing and is a weird mix of comedy and melancholy beauty, and I find it utterly fascinating. It manages to capture intense loneliness and cringingly awkward insecurity, poor social skills and painful, agonizing personal growth all at the same time.  Tandy's ongoing nightmare, where the end of the world erased the socially awkward side of his life entirely, only to have it return with a vengeance as he find survivors is so painfully resonant.

It's kind of a painful truth to realize that no matter how you change your situation, or where you go, the problems you need to work through to be a happier, saner, healthier person follow relentlessly. In Tandy's case, even the end of the world isn't a big enough distraction from the problems created by his severely arrested development. He hovers constantly on the precipice of self knowledge, but neurotically drives himself back into his old habits, and it's so painful to watch. And beautiful. I can't look away.

Totally not a Cult

I'm watching the new Hulu series called The Path right now. Which seems like a really good and a really bad idea. A surprising amount of the portrayal of cult life reminds me of Adventist life, which I am surprised to find surprising. I mean, we used to talk about how Adventism used to be a cult, but was now considered a respectable religion. We were all jazzed to realize we were not technically part of a cult, despite the many cultish aspects of the lifestyle. It is both helpful in confronting it, and borderline triggering.

The major difference of course, is that you can leave Adventism without threat of violence, which is important to note. Which isn't to say there aren't guilt trips, peer pressure, mind games and loss of community involved, but no real threat of force or overt coercion. So that's positive. Also, Adventists are strict teetotalers, so the pot and the ayahuasca would be right out.

That said, a lot of the portrayals of cult life were uncomfortably resonant. The jargon, that you all use so much you forget it sounds weird to outside observers. The focus on The Future, where sinners will be destroyed for their sins and a chosen few, the cultists of course, will be saved to create a bright new future. The prophet, widely believed to have access to divine wisdom. The strict legalism, especially concerning sexuality and marriage. The resulting sexual repression leading to weird and neurotic sexual behavior.

I'll probably keep watching it, but it's a roller coaster if you've ever lived anything close to something like that experience. On the bright side, feeling constantly weird is starting to make more sense to me. I grew up in a weird religion, that was totally not a cult* apparently!

*It just felt like one. Frequently.

That Hideous Strength

I'm two chapters into That Hideous Strength, the final chapter in C. S. Lewis' 1946 space trilogy. I'm reading through some of his work again from a post-christian perspective, as I believe I've mentioned. So far, it's been a lot of university politics, which was something Lewis dealt a lot with in his life. Having read Alan Jacob's biography on the man, it's interesting to watch some of his complaints about academic culture work itself out in his fiction.

In particular is the loathing Lewis had for the "Inner Circle," which must have been a dynamic that irked him in his dealings with people. Actually, you get the real sense that that kind of thing stuck in his craw. This is the all too human tendency to throw all principle aside in order to fit in with some exclusive social circle that fancies itself the cream of the human crop. The story starts with a small college campus being taken over by a small cabal of professors who fancy themselves the progressive element in order to sell off part of the college to the bad guys.

My favorite part so far though was the small aside about spending some time in a small wooded area kept by the college, with an ancient well at the center that has been preserved for centuries. The quiet seemed nice just to read about. I think I just need to get out into the forest more.

I don't know, the jesus talk doesn't move me much, and his views on women can be a little cringey, but there are some sensibilities C.S. Lewis had that I really resonate with:  college life is nice, people are frustrating, there's magic in the forest. Check, check, check. Good stuff.

Such as they are

The thoughts I have
such as they are
well up in the shower
or on my walk to the office
and before I get them out
onto paper
or maybe a screen
they're gone

I get distracted
by a small dog
some noises and lights
bells and whistles
half-remembered memories of a past life
an unending parade of human beings
and other stuff
that has left my thoughts
such as they are

Poisoned Sweets

I leave poisoned sweets for ants
and they take it
and they give it to their mother and their friends
and then there's some indigestion
and then they die
hopefully not screaming

 they send a scout from a neighboring colony
after they haven't heard from their friends
the entrance to the colony is dark
no sound but his own nervous scuttling
he doesn't understand shotguns but he wishes he had one
corpses everywhere
it's a real goddamn ant horror show
but he finds some sweets to take back
 back to his mother and his friends

 I leave poisoned sweets for ants

Perelandra review

Up at CMS. I wish I cared more about copy editing.

Badman vs Sad God

Batman versus Superman: No matter who wins, we lose

I don't know what's wrong with Zach Snyder. This is probably unfair, but it's what I walk away from all his movies thinking. There's just a vital, human element completely absent from his latest blockbusters (see also Michael Bay). I appreciate the attempt to answer the glaring moral issues presented in Man of Steel, but the sequel still feels like a robot trying to figure out what human feelings are and why it's bad to kill; a conundrum it largely fails to compute.

I think most professional reviews have addressed the host of cinematic flaws, so I just have a few bullet points to add.

• It really does feel like a series of scenes stitched together. I didn't feel much about the characters or what was going on, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.
• Eisenberg's Luthor is not a compelling villain. There's a scene where he's babbling, and it's nonsense, and he realizes it's nonsense, and he just stops and says, "thank you for coming." "Hi, I'm Lex Luthor, I play the villain, thanks for watching the movie this evening." more or less sums up his character. No deep exploration of his motivations, just some awkward guy who doesn't make sense.
• The best part was when the music changed like it was a WWE match and Wonder Woman showed up. "Mah God, I think that, is that, that's Wonder Woman's music. Yes, she's here! The amazon princess is here!" She was great, but wasn't really on screen long enough for Snyder to fold/spindle/mutilate her character.
• Affleck was good as Batman. With better writing and a director that understands the emotions different facial expressions indicate, he could be great.
• Cavill was sexy, but I still loathe the politics his parents taught his character, framed for some reason as "good" in the movie. "You don't owe those fuckers nothing." is the main philosophy of the Kents, which is why their son turned out to be a sad murder god (whoever said this was brilliant) who thinks consequences are for other people. 
• Batman and Superman never resolve their taut erotic tension by making out. It might have saved the movie for me.
• I went out to get a second beer, because it was that kind of movie, and came back to a weird scene I didn't understand. "Wait, is that a apocalyptian fire pit? And, oh hey, parademons? Parademons!" Between that and Luthor's last unhinged rant at the end it's pretty clear the Justice League movie is going to be about Darkseid. On some level, Darkseid and his anti-life equation is probably the most appropriate villain for Snyder to handle, given that he seems to apply said equation to every one of his films. "Good, good, one last piece of editing motherbox, to suck all joy and vitality out of every second of it! Muahahaha!"
• Cyborg! Flash! Aquaman! 
• I wish movies would stop interrupting themselves to set up the next movie. A movie should naturally flow into the sequels, not launch the sequel halfway through and finish the movie still playing as an afterthought. It's like reading a novel where every chapter the narrative stops abruptly to throw in heavy-handed previews of the next chapter. Before, going, "where was I again, oh yes, all this business needs to be wrapped up I guess." Maybe in the era of widespread ADD this is the new normal?
• It would be interesting to see the ideas explored here, which are genuinely interesting to me, explored by someone who doesn't seem entirely cynical about the source material.
• You know what happens when you take the idealism out of DC comics?  NOTHING GOOD. Idealism is the only thing saving comics from macho violence porn.

This modern era of superhero films is everything I wanted as a kid. The tragedy is that I got it.

Saturday at the Museum

I managed to drag myself out to the farmer's market and museum again today, which is a small victory. Not particularly early, but still, I'll take it. There were 3 whole floors I missed at the museum's main building, so I took some time to wander through, before finishing on the gorgeous cat picture again. Portland Art Museum has a truly great collection of native american art, both contemporary and historical.

Of particular note this visit was the "Next Level Fucked Up" exhibit on the 4th floor by Vanessa Renwick. I'm not always too into A/V installations, but this one I liked. In it, there's a short video of an artist on one monitor talking about the gorgeous mural he painted in Portland decades ago, which is in danger of being destroyed by the building's new owners. He has been assured that the new owners are reasonable people. But he kind of wrestles with that, and how that didn't entirely reassure him, and he struggles to articulate why, because reasonable and art aren't necessarily good friends. "Do you know what I mean?" he keeps saying. Which is the part that sticks with me. Because what's great about art is not it's reasonableness. What's great about art is the way it tries to puncture holes in the reasonable and comfortable world you've built for yourself.

The joy of the artistic experience is probably not best summed up by, "well, this seems perfectly reasonable."

"Wow, this is kind of fucked up!" is where it starts to get good, right? Whether it's too real or too surreal, it should move you a little.  Jostle your good sense uncomfortably. Good art is a broadside across the bow of your sensibilities, a reminder to your conscious mind that "reasonable" is the mask your animal wears, and there are uncomfortably unreasonable layers always squirming around just underneath.

The museum is not where you go to be reasonable. It's where you go to bludgeon your reason within an inch of its life.

Bullets

• So that last post is an example of writing I want to get away from. I believe those things, but I'm still struggling to find a way to express it in a way that isn't preachy and off-putting. People are hypocrites and I don't think we've ever really tried adhering to our highest values out of a fear they won't really work when things get scary is the short version.

• I'm thinking of starting an email newsletter. Almost entirely because of the quality of the newsletters I currently follow (especially Warren Ellis and Ghostcop).  

• Still working on that "So you've hit 40" post. It's either going to be really long or really short and possibly really bad.

• In a recent newsletter, an author I follow described her depression as a thing in her head that wanted her dead. It was a really frank and thoughtful letter about living with depression. I think it's fair to say I struggle with depression, and it feels like a thing in my head that is not quite me as well, but I wouldn't say it wants me dead. It just wants me inert. Curiously inert. Never-changing, never succeeding, never happy. Coasting along short of happiness, but just clear of misery (although I hate to tempt fate). A fuzzy, lukewarm, unremarkable, grey goo comatose state that doesn't end until the inevitable heart attack. So, yeah. Depression sucks.

• I still want to retool the site. Maybe as wordpress. Blogspot is serviceable but I want more control over format. My failure to reinvent my blog really echoes my failure to reinvent myself though. I figure when one happens the other falls into place a little more.

• I took a break from stubbornly refusing to change by heading the the farmer's market and the Portland Art Museum today. I'm going to make a weekly thing of it, because they're both RIGHT THERE. I had the egregiously wrong assumption that the annual pass was $65 a month, but it's $65 a YEAR which is well worth it in my opinion, so I finally picked up one of those.
  I like going with friends, but it's really quite lovely to go on my own as well. No pressure to appear more artistically knowledgeable than I am, no social pressure to move to the next thing because the other person is bored. Just nice to look at whatever and linger at whatever speaks to me. And lingering on what speaks to me is a big need in my life right now. I can see this being a good habit.
  Of particular note right now are the 80s New York art scene installations, the giant and glorious painting of cats in the lower level connecting the main building and the modern art wing, the contemporary native american exhibit (indian taking pictures of tourist taking pictures of indians was kind of awesome), and the teeny, tiny animal sculptures, the name of which escapes me. Get your art on y'all!

Being is believing

I know I adopt the position of liberal scold far too often, but I'm really not on board with the righteous crusade to disrupt Trump's rallies. Not only is a terrible idea strategically, he actually has the high ground on this one issue currently because he is, to the best of my knowledge, NOT sending his supporters to disrupt democratic rallies.

I don't really weep too many tears for a disrupted Trump rally, although the optics are truly terrible, but I do worry about the hypocritical self-righteous streak on the left sometimes. It's becoming clearer to me that this poisonous idea that these are unusual times and it's important to put our usual moral values aside is not a phenomenon limited to republicans or conservatives. This was the justification for torture and how many other immoral acts ("there's a ticking time bomb, maybe, so we just have to kill innocent people with drones!"), and for me the issue was not that the conservatives had just chosen a poor reason to put aside their morals, it's that putting aside your morals for any reason betrays a fundamental disbelief that higher morals are actually better and more effective in achieving a better world. On the liberal side, this seems to thrive as well, with the conceit that only a liberal can truly decide who is and is not a monster, and therefore are the only people able to fairly decide when to abandon their moral principles. Which is the same madness, just maybe in lesser degree. I agree Donald Trump is frightening, I don't agree that unusual times means it's okay to skip straight from name-calling ("how did calling him names not work??"), to provoking physical confrontations at rallies.  Clearly not every incident at a trump rally was intentionally provoked, but you'd have to be blind not to see how many clearly are.

I truly believe you can win people over, it just takes time. It takes genuine empathy. It takes full acknowledgement of their humanity. I think even people like Trump himself can be talked down, but starting off with "you and your followers are monsters" negates that possibility entirely. Liberals claim to understand how counter-productive demonizing the other is, but do it at the drop of a hat themselves. I think the most important test of liberal values is when it's REALLY difficult to adhere to those values. Because I believe those values are not just nice fairytales, i believe they are truly the best guidelines to the best possible resolution for all involved, even when things get scary and it's easier to and more emotionally satisfying to resort to demonization and aggressive conflict. I believe it's possible to effectively resist hateful rhetoric and dangerous movements without compromising any of these morals "because these are unusual times," and without demonizing opponents and that it is, in fact, the better option for all involved.

We've just watched anyone afraid of terrorists throw their morals out the window for the last 15 years because "terrorists are uniquely dangerous," even though it's completely obvious that this state of affairs will not be changing in the near future.  So they've effectively thrown away their higher morals for more a expedient, incredibly violent moral structure purely out of fear more or less permanently. Why the left is so eager to do the same exact thing with Trump and his supporters, I don't know. No, no one's talking about bombing them, but they're starting to adopt the same, "you just can reason with these people" and "we have to stop them, by force if necessary" memes which are counter-productive. If you can see how demonizing the entire muslim world based on the actions of terrorists is counter-productive, you can see how demonizing Trump's supporters based on the actions of a few is counter-productive too.

This may not be everyone's take, but we didn't win the gay rights battle by telling everyone who didn't like gay people they were haters, we won it by millions of brave LGBT people coming out of the closet and standing up for their rights, but, and this is very important, remaining in relationship with people who needed and maybe still need time to get used to the idea. People started to realize gays were okay when they got the chance to hang around them a bit and the world didn't end. Changing hearts and minds doesn't happen overnight, you can't just burn the ladder behind you once you've decided you have enough of a critical social mass to just tell the stragglers who haven't come around yet to go fuck themselves with no social repercussions. That shit's not only counter-productive, it's immoral.

It is your job, as an idealistic person who clearly has better morals than your opponent (as we all believe we do), to keep the high ground. This means you must do what your opponents seem unable or unwilling to do: respect their humanity, firmly reject bad ideas while not demonizing them for holding them, embrace a little humility about your own views, and listen to theirs while attempting to empathize as much as possible. 

As tempting as it is to believe the self-righteous mic-drop speak is the  most effective tool at effecting real change, it's just not. Quick, imagine a conservative giving you a mic-drop speech about gay marriage or something.  Imagine their condescending tone, their lack of interest in your viewpoint, their indignant lecture filled with confident self-righteousness. Imagine how much you will recoil from their body language and tone and presumptive attitude. Whether the argument is better or not is irrelevant when you deliver it like a complete asshole.

People don't believe peace works because few are every really brave to truly try it. When we get scared we reach for the gun or righteous violence in some form. And we lionize the armed warrior who deals the violence so righteously. But the bravest motherfucker in the room is always the one reaching out with an open hand, even though they might get shot or hurt for their trouble, because they believe if enough of us do that, the threat of violence goes away and the underlying humanity of our opponents begins to shine through. I strongly believe they are not wrong. We can't expect people to behave like kind human beings unless we give them the space to behave like kind human beings.

Making peace is always a risk. Always. If you believe you're better than they are, then prove it. Be the bravest motherfucker in the room.

Lordy, Lordy

I'm mulling over some thoughts on reaching 40. As it has coincided with some life events that have not been pleasant, so far they are not too positive. The current status report is I'm just sitting with some stuff and mulling it over and staying away from people in the meantime. People frustrate me immensely right now so I've been avoiding them, although that's more a stalling tactic than a solution.

I'm frustrated at myself. I'm frustrated at people. Currently in hiding. 40 is looking good so far!

endless construction

There is some kind of format/name change coming to this blog. I like this minimalist theme well enough for now, but I'm definitely changing the title. Something like Curiously Inert or Pointless Exile.

Or maybe not. Much like the rest of my life, this blog has never been quite what I want it to be. Getting the urge to change it up again. I may actually go the whole domain/heavily modified wordpress route. I could make one myself but it seems like the effort/reward ratio is not high.

Open and Closed

Today I want to talk about open relationships. I've been sitting on this post for a while, giving myself some time to cool down, and I think it's about time. It is not my intent to disparage anyone in open relationships, or even open relationships in general, but I was in one for a couple years and it didn't work out so well for me and I want to talk about it a bit.

Honestly, I think open relationships are a reasonable choice, and if you and your partner are doing well and you both find the idea exciting, then more power to you. I don't remotely think that people who practice polyamory or open relationships are some higher and more enlightened form of human being, but as preferences go it's fine. Consenting adults can make any old romantic arrangement that they wish as far as I'm concerned. It's just obnoxious  when people think their preferences are superior by virtue of the fact that they have them. In your life, you will be tempted many, many times to assume your personal preferences make you some kind of magic. It is vital you do not succumb.

Having said all that, I'm not sure I'd choose to do it again. It turned out to be a profoundly painful experience, and the fact that it was a situation I agreed to didn't ameliorate that too much. To be fair, I think me and the ex failed open relationships more than open relationships failed us. I mean we made two crucial errors right from the start. We were using open relationships to try and fix a flagging sex life, and we chose it even though only one of us was really excited by the idea (that person was not me). But I wanted to see if it was something I could do out of simple curiosity and I wanted him to be happy so we tried it. The main issues were he kept to the letter of the arrangement but not the spirit of it (he stuck to the rules but didn't make any particular effort to take care of me or put our relationship first.).  Once he started sleeping with other people he stopped initiating it with me almost entirely. The other was we both chose over and over to continue even though hearing about his exploits felt like being stabbed in the gut every time and we both knew that. So that wasn't optimal either.

So here's some lessons learned from bitter experience, in no particular order.

• If your relationship is in trouble, an open relationship won't fix it. It will just aggravate underlying problems as jealousy and other issues crop up. If you think you feel resentful now, just wait until your partner is out sleeping with someone else for the first time.
• If the thought of your partner sleeping with someone else isn't some kind of turn-on or at least genuinely neutral to you, it's not going to help your love life. Jealousy and low self-esteem will not do wonders for your libido.
• The partner with more success outside the relationship needs to take some effort to take care of the primary partner, not expect the opposite.
• If the issue is that you just don't want to sleep with you partner anymore, don't try an open relationship, just break-up. Insisting you still find them really attractive but just have a headache for two years will fuck them up more than a simple break-up would.
• If one of you really wants to open it up and the other is extremely reticent, just break-up. There's nothing intrinsic in the open relationship that makes it feel good for the reticent partner to stay at home while the other is out on dates. If you think that situation would make you feel bad, trust your instincts.
• If one of you is not really having a good time, either from lack of success or jealousy issues from what the other is getting up to, close up the relationship and see if you both want monogamy again, or just break-up. There's no reason to stay in an arrangement that is actively making you miserable unless you're indulging in your masochistic side for reasons even months later you don't understand. And you wonder if maybe growing up fundamentalist and coming out of the closet means you've been finding ways to punish yourself both in and out of relationships. And why do you do that? Why do you have to carry the judgement of other people for them? Why punish yourself for being human?
• If you've been cheated on (a lot) and didn't enjoy it, consciously allowing someone to sleep with someone else will still feel just as shitty as when past partners cheated on you. Especially if they don't show much interest in sleeping with you anymore. Especially if they insist you keep their feelings before yours even so, just like your cheating exes did.
• It's a little awkward to date in an open relationship. If you value honesty and like to be up front about being in an open relationship, you will have much fewer takers in the dating world. If you don't think "hi I'm in an open relationship would you like to go out with me?" is going to be a power position for you, don't bother. You have to have a certain amount of game to make it work and if you feel like you already struggle on the dating scene when you're single, it will make it that much harder.
• If he's not into you now, sleeping with other people will probably not make him more into you. Work on your relationship first, or just break up.
• If the situation is causing you lots of pain and you're getting nothing in particular in return for it from your partner, for the love of god, just break up.  What are you, some kind of masochist? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?
• If you've known in the back of your mind for sometime that marriage is not in the cards, and there's an expiration date on the relationship, don't open it up, just break up.

So would I recommend open relationships? Probably not, but maybe that's just because mine was ill-advised bullshit that caused me lots of pain for which not only did I not get anything back from my partner, even acknowledgement or appreciation of how big a sacrifice it was for me. Really, I would only ever recommend it if your relationship is in a good place, and you both think it would be lots of fun to take it to another level (not necessarily a higher level, just different). Even then, if it's causing one of you pain, close it down and work it out or consider breaking up.

Whatever you do, do not limp along for a couple years, in an open relationship that is not working for you, hoping these knives to the gut will magically turn into unicorns and candy. That way lies madness. Close it or just break up. You don't have to stay in a relationship that is no longer working for you and is probably never going to.

How it goes

I forgot today was a work holiday, but I've still been trying to pull my thoughts enough together to write. Between the break-up and getting sick and my 40th birthday I've been in a very introspective (or self-absorbed) kind of mood. I had thought my endless misanthropy towards the end of the relationship was simply the result of persevering in an arrangement that was no longer working for either of us, but it's become clear since the break-up that that wasn't entirely the case. I just genuinely no longer have a sense of who I am, or where I belong or what my purpose might be and I have retreated a bit to try and figure that out.

So to anyone who has been trying to reach out to me and received a lot of nothing for their trouble, my apologies. I'm just having trouble relating to people right now. This has been a frequent complaint in my relationships (romantic and otherwise), and more or less a problem I've been dealing with for decades now.  It's something all the men in my family seem to share and I've never entirely understood it. But it frustrates people and I understand that. Usually, I'm not dealing with it, and now that I'm single I think I'm finally trying to take a stab at it. I would like to be easier to form a relationship with. I would like to be happier instead of this constant little rain cloud. But I don't know myself or my place in the world anymore and since it takes two points to create a line of connection, it's hard, if not impossible, to form that connection when my locus is detached and drifting.

So I'm working on grounding my locus in something that makes sense to me, and right now very little  about the world makes sense to me. I think I can do it, I just need to actually work on it rather than avoid and dissociate which has been my predominant mental pattern since, oh, I don't know, sometime in my teenage years when I realized I was trapped in a religious culture I didn't actually buy into too much.

But, yeah.  It's going to be difficult to relate to people until I know who I am and what I want in the world. And it's going to be next to impossible to date until I have that, and a better self esteem and a life I find more interesting. I find myself boring and apathetic right now and that makes it hard enough to sustain existing friendships, let alone form new ones or go on dates. I can't feel good about sharing my life with someone until I feel good about my life, you know?

The good news is there's lots I can do to change that. The bad news is, there's lots I NEED to do to change that.  And to start, I'm working on forming some understanding of where I came from, where I am, and where I want to go. This is probably a life-long process, but one I need to actually get some momentum going on.

Wish me luck!

Boob Tube Round-up

I've been sick and depressed for the last couple months which means I've seen a lot of TV! Here's some thoughts for no apparent reason, in no apparent order:

Z-Nation: Zombies are a shallow genre that has nearly been strip-mined but this show manages to find some quality gems. Good characters, fast-paced, sense of humor, it's everything I miss in the Walking dead and better for it. Campy, heartfelt, fun, and recommended.

Nurse Jackie: I mainlined all 7 seasons of this show while trying to get over a sinus infection and a persistent fever over the course of a week and loved it. Kind of a sympathetic but brutal look at the effects of addiction on one nurse's life. It's weeds but for pill addiction instead of drug dealing. I felt like they chickened out on the strong gay themes of the first season in later seasons, but the arc is good, feels genuine, and the moments are earned. I wanted to go straight edge as far as substances go afterwards though.

Rick & Morty: I feel like I should be high while watching it (which I'm not because I just finished Nurse Jackie). Not sure I get the buzz surrounding the show. It gets one good laugh out of me an episode, which is not nothing, but it's not Community either. I really dig the SF nerdery throughout though.

Helix: I'm 4 or 5 episodes into this, and I like it, but I can see why it didn't make it past 2 seasons. It has a nice sense of style at times and some great establishing shots, but I feel like this plot has been done before and the mystery hooks could dig a little deeper. And 5 episodes in there are some plot threads already starting to dangle awkwardly. Hey, remember those 30 people you locked in a room on level R? What's going on with them? Just like BSG, it feels like writers charge really hard in one direction for an episode or two before changing their mind and switching gears, leaving plot debris all over the place.

Broadchurch: I really dug this show right from the beginning. Maybe it's just the mood I'm in but the pacing, the characters, the tone,  the murder mysteries all DO have a hook that makes me want to keep watching. I'm genuinely interested in all the little secrets everyone seems to have and how it's going to play out. I'm only a few episodes in, but it's the most compelling series I've seen in a while.

You, Me and the Apocalypse:  I really adore the cast of this show, meteor apocalypse shows are almost a no-brainer for me, and two episodes in I'm struggling to find a reason to keep watching. It just feels flat for some reason. The tone seems stuck in the no-mans-land between drama and comedy where neither comedy nor drama exist in any reasonable quantity to generate interest in the proceedings. I'm not sure where it's going and I'm not sure that I care. And the sad thing is that I WANT to. Help me NBC. Help me care.

The X-Files, season 10: This is the biggest bright spot in the TV line-up right now. The first episode felt odd, and flat, and incoherent while everyone got back into the swing of things. I couldn't tell if they were making fun of the UFO/government paranoia from the 90s or that it's just not the 90s anymore so the specific line of conspiracy seems a little dated, but still, it felt off. Episode 3 however, was a gem. The tongue-in-cheek stories always made for better episodes, and the Were-man is no exception. The writing and the moments are superb, especially those involving Rhys Darby, who plays a character as tragic as he is funny. The mid-episode twist was just delightful. I was sad when it was over. Also, Mulder in a red speedo was probably the highlight of my week. I missed you guys. Welcome back.

Armchair Omphaloskepsis

You know, being in the closet was an experience that was painful and terrible and no good but I don't think it's particularly unique. "Being in the closet" as a gay person is just another way of saying "living a lie," and the particular lie can be anything, not just sexual orientation. I keep re-learning this lesson over and over.

For instance, staying in a relationship you know is not for you, but trying to put a cheerful face on it and hope it gets better is one way of being in the closet. As is staying in a religious community and pretending belief when you really don't believe in the religion anymore. Basically, any time I've pretended to be something I'm not for any reason I've rationalized for myself has been a time of profound depression and unnecessary suffering. It's a heavy burden to live a lie and I think we should try to do that as little as possible. Indeed, any time I've decided to step out of any of these closets (ignoring for now that it was usually just to step into the closet across the hall), it's been with the relief of a weight lifted. I don't wish living a lie to anyone, least of all myself.

It's hard though, sometimes you're lying to yourself in the closet just as much as you're lying to everyone else. It took me years to admit to myself that I probably wanted to kiss on dudes, let alone actually try and meet guys. Like there's basically three phases to life in the closet:  denial (lying to everyone and yourself), coming to terms (admitting to yourself the truth of the matter and chewing on it a bit, while maintaining the fiction to everyone else), and finally revelation, where you feel safe enough to live your truth openly. Stage 1 is a misery, and that misery seeps out in myriad ways. I recommend it to no one. Stage 2, is better. It can be deeply uncomfortable to consciously pretend to be someone you're not, and indeed that discomfort is largely going to be the motivation for moving to stage 3, but depending on the situation, it may be preferably in terms of physical safety or security to stay in stage 2. Which is to say, sometimes you are ready to share your truth but the world is not ready to hear it. Stage 3 is, in my admittedly privileged experience, liberation. I recommend it to everyone who can possibly do it.

As some armchair omphaloskepsis, I was thinking today that maybe we go through these stages en masse sometimes. Like for a long time we were collectively in stage 1 about how the world was going. Things are fine, capitalism doesn't produce too much suffering, cops and politicians only abuse their power in movies, everything is fine, nothing to see here, please don't rock the boat. But with the emergence of the internet, there's just been a lot more visibility to the horrors of the world we've built, because we're all comparing notes and discovering some of these miseries are not, in fact, outliers that don't challenge the story of who we are, but staggeringly common miseries that, in fact, challenge fundamental assumptions of the story we tell ourselves about how the world is. Just like there was only so many times I could get a little flushed when meeting a hot guy before I had to admit "purely heterosexual" was maybe not the most accurate assessment of my sexual identity, there's only so many times that the news of the day can make us sick to our stomachs before we start to think, "you know, maybe we aren't who we think we are and it's time to re-evaluate and try new things."

Some people respond to this new knowledge by doubling down on the lying to themselves and others, doing metaphysical contortions to assure themselves and others that bombing weddings is okay and necessary, and killing unarmed kids is okay and necessary and the financial class stealing everyone's pensions is just a necessary end in capitalism and nobody needs to be punished and everything can just stay the same. This is misery. On some animal level we always recognize cruelty and misery when we see it, and lying about it ourselves and others is a good way to become a very unhappy person. It is misery upon misery.

Some people are tired of lying to themselves about it, but have no new story to tell the world yet. So the world is misery, but what can I as a single person do to change an entire system? Probably nothing! So we kind of sit with this new knowledge of the sorrows of the civilization we've built, but having no real clear alternative, and not wanting to find ourselves on the outskirts of our communities we continue to go along with the story of how things are, even though it's uncomfortable to live that lie. Because what else can we do?  What's the point of coming out with the truth when everyone else isn't ready to hear it?  When there are entire industries dedicated to undercutting the very idea of truth or "facts" or "science."  What's the point of telling your truth when everyone on earth has been primed to respond, "yeah, but that's just your opinion man" whether that truth is your own sexual identity or scientific research that conflicts with someone's gut feeling about how the results should look?

This is stage 2, and it is still kind of a misery, but it's also a relief. Everyone knows what it feels like to wake up, and waking up is not a decision, it's just the moment when you finally realize you are conscious.

I think it's stage 3 we live in fear of, bringing the truth out into the light and dealing with it directly.  There's such a thing as too much truth too fast. I think stage 3, if we ever get there, could look really ugly or really beautiful or maybe a big messy mixture of both. Dealing forthrightly with the misery of the world could result in a whole heap of new miseries, as decades of pent-up rage and pain get meted out on each other in some kind of bloody revolution. If the truth is that the authorities HAVE been abusing their power and having been committing terrible acts without any sort of oversight or accountability, if we all agreed that was true, there's the scary moment where we decide how we're going to hold them to account. Do we haul out the guillotines or throw them out of office or simply run them out of public life? Will we be thinking rationally in that moment, and abiding by deep-seated beliefs about who we are and how we like to treat people or will the bottled pressure be too much for sanity and lead to a cathartic bout of terrible behavior on our own part?

This is the fear of stage 2.  That telling our truths will just be too much. That it will spark violence, that it will destroy and hurt more than it helps. And that's true, telling your truth can cause more pain than the status quo ever did. There are many truths you could tell your ex during a break-up that only hurt everyone involved. But there is a way to tell at least some of those truths that maintains the dignity and humanity of both parties. And, as you might have noticed, maintaining the dignity and humanity of one's opponents is not something high on anyone's priority list these days.

But we could tell the truth. We could be firm but kind. We could talk about it. We could listen. We could recognize and respect our common humanity even in the face of difficult truths. We could see ourselves in the other. And it would be great.

Winter is Cold, children

There’s a certain subset of kids movies that seem to be run by deranged adults who want to make children weep as often as they possibly can. Like, there’s just some people who think it’s vitally important to remind every child every week that their beloved pet or parent or friend is going to die much sooner than they think. So it’s an hour and a half of a lovable dog hero, followed by it’s untimely demise, pause for weeping, then yay, puppies! 

Like, the occasional “mortality is coming children, and you are hopelessly naive” kind of ending is probably okay, but there’s just an astonishing amount of creative adults who think they need to be the Avatar of Sorrow to unsuspecting children. 

I don’t get it. I mean for adults, yeah, the winter is cold, life is brutal, people are jerks, etc. so of COURSE adult fiction is a dystopian tragedy. But man, there’s no need to pre-emptively embitter children like they’re a pair of jeans that needs to be artfully damaged because this is the fashion of the day. Time and the bitter, nihilistic society they will eventually be dropped into will do that just fine on it’s own, thank you very much.

Please don’t let any children read this.

Sorrow as Meditation

And now for something completely different.

I've been sobbing a lot recently, which seems somewhat appropriate for the end of a 4-ish year relationship that had long since passed it's expiration date. I don't need to talk about that here, but just mention it for context. I MAY have some things to say down the road about open relationships, among other things, but it's probably smarter not to burn my temporary personal distress into the internet forever. Of course, that's never stopped me before.

Where was I? Oh yes, in the middle of deep, gut-wrenching sobs on the floor of my shower. Or on my couch having just come home and unable to contain it any longer. It's very cathartic, necessary, helpful, etc. so please don't worry about that detail. I'm just being honest: I'm crying a lot right now as part of my process.

The interesting thing that's come up is the little golf announcer I've noticed narrating the session as it happens in the back of my mind. "Ah, stepping up to chest-wracking sob number 3 is existential dread. And next, deep personal self-doubt.  Ah, the pang of loneliness, a frequent dessert to self-doubt, is waiting in the wings. And, I'm waiting for confirmation, yes that is the deep personal pain of putting up with a distressing situation far longer than you had to, almost as a form of self-punishment there warming up in the heaving cages." And so on.

It really strikes me as a situation not unlike a general transcendental mediation practice. Where the goal is to be still with right now and gently reminding the analytical mind to let go of the constant dialogue over and over and over. Not that it's not been important to understand why I'm ugly crying on my couch on a lovely Tuesday evening, but this is information is known, and requires no high-powered intellectual analysis to make sense of. It's knowledge that emerges spontaneously, given a little stillness and space to breathe. Old habits, old doubts, old sorrows (as old friends), as well as whatever fresh hell I've been putting myself through just kind of emerge fully known. It doesn't take a lot to understand them, just a bit of patience to acknowledge them and give them a bit of time on center stage, after too many hours/days/years of waiting in the wings. So this is an opportunity to hush the golf announcer further. Muted just far enough to hear if something important inadvertently escapes his stream of consciousness, but down far enough not to distract from the proceedings.

Maybe the purpose of such a dramatic physiological display is simply to create a moment to acknowledge what should no longer be ignored. Sometimes the inner puppy just has to howl and the much-praised intellect needs to just sit the fuck down and listen.

My Star Wars Hot Take

I know we're all drowning in it right now, so I hate to add to the dangerous outgassing of hot air going on all over the world right now over the Force Awakens, but we obviously talk about Star Wars a lot because it's important to us. For some it's the "badassness" of the characters. For some it's the richly realized world and the art direction.  Increasingly, for me, I think it's the post-christian philosophical and religious structure that's hinted at in the soothing religious connotations that they don't dive too deeply into. And, just putting this out there, I think that's a big reason for it's enduring popularity in the rest of the world as well. Star Wars is the only philosophical framework we can all agree in the gap caused by the increasing failures of modern religion in kindness to the other. Partly because in Star Wars the philosophy is appealing, but it's shallow enough that there's not enough dogma to really fight over. Partly because it's something you can secretly like for it's philosophical appeal while pretending to like the badassness of it all. And finally, because it's a popular and well-known fictional philosophy seriously trying to pick up the important pieces Christianity keeps leaving on the ground in favor of deference to power and fear of change.

Speaking as a mildly bitter, very gay ex-christian who has lots of complaints with church culture these days, I think the anger partly comes from disappointment in Christianity's failure to defend some vitally important ideas that must stand in opposition to greed and power, because they're too focused on playing the persecution complex card over their right to discriminate against people they don't like for superficial reasons. Christianity has been a wildly transformative influence because it championed ideas that even today still feel like heresy: redemption, even for the worst of the worst, community for all, the transcendent power of relentless kindness and the pursuit of peace, even when violence and demonization are emotionally justified and cathartic. The more they drop the ball on a consistent pattern of behavior based on these core ideals (and probably a few I'm missing), the more people tend to dismiss them as more or less hypocritical and/or actively harmful to the communities they claim to love.

The thing is, and this has been my struggle since coming out of the closet and leaving my church structure, there has yet to be a transformative ideology that encompasses the strongest, most true and important aspects of christianity and then taken them a step further. And one thing I'm starting to realize is, even though we collectively eschew institutional ideological structure, I assume because we've been so damaged by the institutional failures of christianity and democracy, we cannot help but live by philosophies and ideologies. So if we're not choosing them consciously and carefully, ad-hoc structures will form to take their place, either based on our own unconscious needs, or as imposed by the opportunistic sith lords currently roaming the populace bellowing fear and promising security if we'll only give up a little more. For instance, we shouldn't bow to Mark Zuckerberg's idea that privacy is out-dated, simply because he has money and influence, and no compelling intellectual or philosophical credentials.  But we DO, because we don't think enough about what ideas are important to us and whether they're worth defending. This is an assumption, but one borne out by how passively people agree to the constant creep of privacy violations by Facebook and Google and other interested parties. Put another way, if you're not living by your own principles then you're living by someone else's.

And it's not that atheism or some variation of atheism can't embody and champion all the ideals christianity is so happy to drop, or at least only offer to the comfortably similar, but so far, in my experience, it does the opposite. Not only does modern atheism seem to reject the church, but they seem disdainful of people that even ask the questions christianity tries to answer. Do you wonder if there's life after death?  Well that's stupid, because there isn't. Do you even wish there was life after death? That's stupid, because you should be content with your total obliteration as a token of your commitment to realism. Do you wonder if there's a grander purpose to life on this planet than it appears? Well that's stupid because there's only the cold hard laws of the universe and so you have to make your own meaning, before your inevitable, meaningless annihilation, which you would embrace with no complicated emotions if you were as enlightened as THIS atheist. And so on. In too many situations, dogmatic and evangelical atheism offers little but nihilism in a fancy dress, which, I'm afraid offers little chance at a transformative cultural moment. Many of us step back from religion and say "well, I don't believe in invisible sky gods," but then have no compelling philosophical framework to latch onto that is well on it's way to subsuming and surpassing the institutional philosophies we're rejecting.

So we know what we don't believe in, but I'm not sure we know what we actually do believe in just yet. But we DO believe in star wars. It's nice in this post-christan idealogical hellscape to hear, just for a couple hours, that there are more important things binding us than fear and power. That it's important to know what you believe and fight for it. That redemption is possible, even for the worst of the worst. That community is possible, even if you get lost for a while. That we are connected more than we are separate. That it's not wrong to hope for a grander purpose to the universe that has yet to reveal itself. That your feelings are just as important as your reason. That your meditations are just as important as your action. That your humanity should not be crushed for the sake of expedience or fear or a really beautiful societal machine that craves your blood to grease its wheels.

I think we need a better post-christian framework than Star Wars. And that the longer we resist forming it consciously ourselves, the more space we leave for opportunistic demagogues to step in and carry us all off in the wrong direction. But while we're trying to untangle this mess we've made of things ideologically, Star Wars will have to do as the one thing we can agree on.

Sexistentialism

What do I cling to at my lowest anymore? Do I look up inspiration Carl Sagan quotes? Do I join a cult? Do I join a sex cult? A sex cult built around Carl Sagan quotes? Do I follow the Buddha? Do I find balance in the Tao? Do I run back into the crushing arms of Jesus? Do I flag down an alien spaceship and hope they've got more of it figured out than we do? Does anyone have it figured out or are we all just keeping busy? Is becoming a monk a good plan? Do they rent rockets to fly those seeking to eternal union with the Sun? How many roads must a man walk down? I wish I knew.

Not all who wander are lost. Not all who are lost wander. Sometimes they just sit there, not knowing where to go.

Born in a lost colony

Every now and then I tilt my head a little bit to the side and Christianity sounds like a science fiction story. A lost planet, originally under the rule of an alien empire with it's own laws, has gone it's own way, under the rule of a rebellious offshoot of the royal houses. An ambassador was sent to bring it back into the fold, a prince in fact, but was summarily murdered. One day, sooner or later, the emperor will arrive, crush the rebellion and reintroduce galactic law to this backwater planet. Christianity is the faction betting on the galactic emperor, and hoping adopting what it believes to be galactic law now will guarantee safe zones or evacuation when the emporer's battleships finally arrive in orbit.

Work harder, not smarter

Maybe the fucked-upedness of the world takes this shape:

Mind fuck #1:  The already rolling in it assert you too can be rolling in it if you just worked very, very hard for a while, as they assure you're they're likely to have done. Or their parents. Or their underlings. The point is, someone worked very hard to get them where they are now, so if you want to share in the wonder of rolling in it, you'd better get to working hard.

Mind fuck #2:  The typical american worker is generally NOT working hard, given the amount of time they spend on the internet when they should be working, and is too worried about being called out in their lack of productivity to put voice to the idea that plenty of people work hard and yet aren't rolling in it. Nor have they really tried working as hard as the rolling-in-its insist one should, to really confidently assert that the "work makes you rich" as a universal to truth to be empirically bullshit.

Mind fuck #3:  Everyone actually working hard enough to please the ones who roll but who, inexplicably to one who rolls, still do not have the money to afford people to tend to life for them so they too can spend their days rolling in it, are just too damn tired to deal with the nonsense inherent in mind fucks #1 and #2.

Dark Continuums

Canadian TV has blessed me with two out-of-the-blue SF shows on Netflix recently. Continuum, which I believe just wrapped up a final half-season that I have yet to watch, has been a pretty decent ride. I keep thinking the tech kid is Frankie Muniz though for some reason. But it's had some good material. I recommend it, for the most part.

Dark Matter I'm still a little on the fence about. Among the highlights are the FTL drive effect (and name).  If you're not shouting "launch all fighters!" in an SF show, I'll take "spin up the FTL!" Although they may have never actually shouted that. The android character is pretty interesting, although most plots involve her getting incapacitated because she's kinda the deus ex machina character and having her conscious trivializes most plots (which is a formula they may want to re-think for season 2). The CGI is spectacular for the most part, if infrequently used, presumably for budgetary reasons. And Stargate actors drop by once in a while!

The main downside is it has all the energy of a casual afternoon in the living room. I'm not sure what it is exactly but the tension is generally loose enough to play jump rope with and, especially in the first few chapters, boredom is a frequent problem, both ours and theirs. I don't know if it's that the hook really wasn't compelling enough to drive more than the first couple episodes or what, but the series drags frequently, until it gets to the episode with Stargate actors, and then it gets about 10 times better.

The last few episodes started to pull some kind of chemistry and momentum together, which it can hopefully roll into a solid second season, assuming it's getting one?  I don't know, I'm not a professional TV commentator so I don't really bother to look this stuff up before I talk about it.

Also, has anyone else noticed how much more violent TV has gotten in the last 10 years or so? I'm not complaining exactly, I always though television norms were a teensy bit too puritanical and over-obsessed with the possibility of some child somewhere seeing a boob or hearing a swear, but my god do action shows seem to be splatter-fests now.  Both in continuum and this people are getting shot in the head, sliced to pieces, burned to death, etc. I'm not sure what's driving it, but I find the change interesting.

Hey, what's this?

Oh my god, I totally forgot I changed the design of my blog. Was it a good idea? Hell if I know. I just like to re-arrange things every now and then. But truthfully, this blog has never quite been what I wanted. I either need to design a better one or find a better platform.

What I've learned about spacing between sentences

I have been getting the side-eye recently for using 2-spaces after the period that ends a sentence.  An inference, a subtle hint, that the cool kids don't do it this way anymore.  Here's the thing:  if you want to get me to change my habits, you need to give me a good reason why, and "it's not currently fashionable" is typically not a good reason why for me.

After my typically ignorant and unsubtle inquiries on twitter, @mattthomas gave me a link to this Slate article (which I recommend you read), which lead me to this rebuttal (which I also suggest you read). The comments in the Slate article were also helpful.

So what's my conclusion so far?  It's an aesthetic choice, a minor culture war blip amongst writing nerds, and it doesn't truly matter whether you use one or two spaces in your writing.  To hear it told from the Slate article, there is a conclave of typesetters who have determined the purity of the single space and there are rogue english teachers leading people astray due to a love of former teachers and a too-great attachment to mid-centure typewriter aesthetics. 

 Given the rebuttal and some other facts, I'm not sure this is an accurate assessment.  For one, I have not seen real compelling evidence that all typesetters believe in one space between sentences and for another there are plenty of style guides who ask for 2-spaces (the current APA style guides for instance) and others that don't have much to say on the matter.  I am sure there are typesetters and publications that prefer 1-space, but I see little proof that this is an industry-wide standard and I've seen little documentation to back up the insistence on 1-space as anything more than a fashionable aesthetic choice.  Even Manjoo admits that is exactly what it all boils down to, he's just arguing your aesthetic choice is bad because you aren't him and the typesetters he knows, whose opinion should be deferred to because of expertise. This is not the most compelling argument for an industry standard.

It may be possible that 1-space is more suitable for certain fonts and publications types and 2-spaces may be more appropriate for others.  This might be an okay scenario that we can all live with in harmony.

My advice, based on the evidence so far, is if you're looking to publish for a certain community or publication, simply look up and follow the style guides they have provided (and if they haven't provided a style guide they have no right to complain about style).  If it calls for one-space, use that.  If it calls for 2, use that.  CTRL-F (or command-F for you mac users) is your friend in either scenario.  Beyond that?  Use whichever spacing style seems most readable to you and doesn't get in the way of your writing flow. 

If advocates for either style want to enshrine either practice as a universal standard, they're going to need to make better arguments to more people (especially people who write style guides) than they have so far.

Starting to Take Stock

Careening out of coming out of the closet and the concomitant mid-life crisis, I have yet to right myself entirely. There has been progress, to be sure, but I still operate far too much on a fuzzy-headed  getting by in the day-to-day, rather than action with a clear purpose with even a short-term plan in mind. And frankly, I'm not quite where I want to be professionally and socially so simply getting by is increasingly intolerable.

So I'm entering the phase of feeling stuck in the mud when I'm sitting back, splashing a little, entering  a sort of radical acceptance of the situation.  "So, you're stuck.  What's this like then?" I'm asking myself. I'm taking stock in other words.

"So this is the situation you've created for yourself, what would you like to do now?"

I'm not sure.  I've been trying to organize myself with limited results, both professionally and personally.  I increasingly despise living in digital environments for so much of my day (work and then home and then eventually in my sleep once we have the technology I guess).  Plus, I just have a hard time of feeling attached and motivated by organizing file folders on a desktop or in an app?  So I bought a bunch of paper notebooks because writing with a pen, even if it's just kind of simple statements about the structure I want the day to have, has been very helpful to me.  Still, I haven't been able to devise a system on paper that feels sufficient to me. I have a "triage" journal where I go to write out what I need to do to salvage the day after generally procrastinating for the first half of it. I  have a work "to-do" to help me get through the priority work tasks for the day.  And I have a general journal for "I need some paper to write or draw some shit out so I can think about it more clearly."

For now these suffice, but ideally I'd have several notebooks organizing my work projects (because there are many happening simultaneously usually) and several organizing and detailing my writing projects, of which there are many ideas but few actualities.  Why I can't make the leap from my current system to a more organized system I can almost visualize, I don't know.

I want to blame ADD, but I feel like anyone willing to confirm that diagnosis is just going to throw pills at me like I should fuck with my brain chemistry as an ongoing experiment with a shrug and a "yes, thank you doctor."

I am currently very stubborn about reasoning and feeling my way to the psycho-emotional knot that holds me captive and unraveling it.  In other words I want to work through the source of my depression and dissociation and solve it rather than medicating the symptoms simply to function properly in capitalism. But sometimes, I feel like I'm just thinking myself in circles instead of accomplishing anything productive.  Is this madness?  Sometimes it feels like it.

To this end, group therapy has been an amazingly positive choice.  I can't recommend it highly enough. But there is more to do, especially with regards to exercise and some sort of disciplined mental/spiritual practice, which is a subject for a future post.

I definitely look back at where I was in Reno and where I am now and see progress I am happy with. But a side-effect about allowing yourself to know who you really want to be, is noticing you aren't quite there yet.

Ask your doctor is knowing yourself is right for you.

Template Changes

So this dynamic view is interesting.  I like the classic view a lot, but I'm not sure why it has a nav bar that's just looking at various modes of look at the same stuff?  Timeline is kind of interesting, but the rest, meh.  I might remove them manually.  I think I'd rather the nav bar be links to different kinds of content than different ways of looking at the same stuff.

This is approaching the simplicity I want though. Feels less like a geocities webpage and a little cleaner and less cluttered.  I like it so far, although I'm still planning to play around with wordpress and/or another blogging platform. Except Medium, because I'm not an earnest start-up entrepreneur in California.

Unbearably Vinyl

I started collecting records this year, against my better judgement. Not wanting to be another unbearable hipster in Portland, I had avoided it for some time. Of course, hating hipsters can be its own version of unbearable, and I eventually realized obnoxiousness is generally an attitude thing. I can enjoy records, and as long as I don't get all pretentious about the sound or otherwise be a dick to people who don't give a shit about records, it would probably be okay. As it turns out, giving less of a shit what people think about my hobbies is generally a good life choice.

The hobby has been more fun that I really could have possible imagined. Not because the sound is just so superior, although I quite like it. Not because the album artwork is large and pleasing. Not because the entire process, from bin searches, to handling the record to using the turntable is so pleasingly tactile in an age of touch screens (which are tactile, but only ever in one limited fashion as you're always just touching glowing glass).  Really, it's been fun just because I've discovered so much music I have never come across before.

Aside from a bunch of rock and roll favorites from the 70s and 80s, and re-buying Devin Townsend's stuff because I am a hopeless groupie as far as he is concerned, I've really been enjoying just browsing the large used record store distressingly near my apartment and finding gems from the past. Of particular note to me are Alan Parson's Project, Tomita, Electric Light Orchestra right now.  Although they are far from my only new favorites. I'm listening to full albums from old favorites I've never heard before (David Bowie and Elton John), I'm listening to albums I never got around to buying on itunes (Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here) and I'm finally diving into classical music and getting to know Bach, Strauss, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Mozart in ways I never really bothered to before.

So is this a passing phase? I don't know, I heard someone say that people who did vinyl the first time around are skipping this phase the second. I think for me a key to longevity will be letting go of records that I didn't end up enjoying that much or when I've simply listened to it as much as I'm going to. In other words, I don't want this to be just another pile of crap I lug around so maybe only keep the keepers.

In short, I've found a bunch of new music to love, I've found depth in artists I already loved, I listen to more of my music more often and I'm enjoying music overall much more than I was a year ago. What's not to love about vinyl?

thoughts in flux

I keep thinking about what I want to do with this blog. Well, about all my online presences really. I think my tumblr blog will be exclusively devoted to curating "things that are emotionally important to me for some reason." So not a lot of original content there, but a way to get a sense of the stuff that resonates with me.

 Twitter is where I'm most academic, although, notably, not about the things I'm professionally paid to be academic about. I tend to do most of my tech and anti-tech philosophy retweeting there. I try to stay away from the outrage of the day but occasionally get sucked in. More rarely over time I hope. I may conscious restrict the topics I talk about there in order to foster more conversational depth, but we'll see.

 This blog, I don't know. I could try and build a following but a) I'm a little embarrassed by the apparent age of the blogspot format, and b) I'm not sure my thoughts, such as they are, are really ready for prime time. I do like some of the new blog formats and I do want to create a new blog I maintain. The only question here is am I going to just switch to a more modern, flexible platform, or am I going to try and make one myself, for myself? The latter is less dubious, given my history of focus and discipline, but it's my ideal. The kind of blog I want to make, both in appearance and functionality is probably one I'd have to make myself. The existing social media platforms all have their strengths, but none are quite what I really want, and some are outright obnoxious. I just want and online presence that's not bullshit.

All that said, the writing topics have continued to pile up, overflow and fall down the memory hole. There is lots I want to write about but haven't been writing about. There's really only a limited window to do so before the thoughts that want to be expressed are stale and no longer emotionally resonant. So that sucks. I may try and knock out a few simple ones tonight. I am in the middle of another "taking stock" phase, which is important and usually leads to a big post, but which is also my least interesting writing as it is largely glorified navel-gazing. Although I suppose that's true of most of the internet right now.  I'm not sure the pizza rat topic from yesterday had much of deep importance about it but it still summoned a lot of words from people.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I ever want this blog to get "famous" unless I actually start producing some actually notable works of art or writing that would lead people to want to hear what I have to say. That seems like the proper route to me, in any case. And as always, I am all about proprietary.

In any case, dear reader who has no name, I hope you are well. And I sincerely hope to shape this blog, or something like it, into something worth reading in the near future.

Building Momentum

Three new, if short, book reviews on CMS today.  Which, by implication, means I've been developing a reading habit again! Yay, forward motion.

That's not funny

I remember being about 10-years-old and laughing my ass off at Bill Cosby. I had stumbled onto his bit about his kids thinking their names were "Damn It" and "Jesus Christ" because those were the two most common things he shouted at them.

"Damn it!  Get in here!"
"But dad, my name's Jesus Christ!"

Which, for all of Cosby's sins, is still one of the funniest comedy routines I've every heard. Even at 10 I couldn't stop laughing.  My mother, who came into the room just in time to hear the end of that, said only, "That's not funny, James."

And it wasn't, not to her. I doubt any modern lefty would care or agree, but Jesus Christ was a topic sacred to her and not only was it not funny, not only did she feel it was unfair mockery of her beliefs and lifestyle (what she might have called "punching down" today), but she didn't want to even hear the joke. I wasn't allowed to laugh at it, Cosby shouldn't have said it, she just wanted it to go away because she found it uncomfortable and hurtful.

This is the story that pops into my head every time I hear the endless "kids are too PC to get humor" thing that's still going around. It's a little different than what people are talking about. Cosby isn't intending to make fun of Christians, but himself, and while he is using my mom's sacred cow to do it, it's not with the intent to offend her, he just doesn't find taking the lord's name in vain to be much of a problem. There's definitely a difference between that and a humor intended to diminish, belittle and mock a given human stereotype or identity.  So should Cosby not be allowed to make that joke because people like my mother think it's punching down at them? I think a large part of the problem is we're conflating too much in this conversation. Not all humor comes from the same place, with the same effect and for the same purpose.

So is making fun of Christians punching down, even if they have privilege?  What is the clearly delineated hierarchy of suffering by which we can universally determine what humor is punching down and what is in good fun? Can we make fun of conservative christians with whatever unkind mockery we like because they have historically operated from a place of privilege? What if they report back that they don't feel that way, and that the humor feels unfair? Who gets to decide that? Can we unilaterally declare ourselves off limits to jokes because we have suffered?  If so, how much suffering do we need to endure before we are safe from ridicule?

I think rather than focus on making sure no one is ever uncomfortable, which is both unworkable and unwise (sometimes people may need to point things out about us that are uncomfortable but important to hear), it's better to focus on intent. Some jokes are intended to be absurd, and maybe play too carelessly with people's sacred ideas.  Some jokes are pointedly meant to shock and skewer sacred ideas because the teller feels it necessary. Some jokes are meant to simply uphold power and privilege and dehumanize the already demonized. Those scenarios all need to be handled differently.  If an absurd joke would still be funny if they characters all had their identities switched around or changed for others, it's hard to get too worked up about it. Irreverent sacred cow skewering will always be controversial, but there's room for disagreement when it's institutions and ideologies being attacked instead of people.  Humor meant to demonize and dehumanize can simply be met with a flat, "that's not funny."

The mistake generally seems to be declaring topics off-limits, regardless of intent.  Or, from the other end, trying to pretend jokes that were clearly intended to dehumanize and demonize were "just a joke" i.e. absurdist.  It's fair to point out the intent and quality of a joke can be critiqued. It's fair to  point out you don't get to declare yourself off-limits from criticism or critique, whether it comes in the form of humor or not.

I look forward to dissecting humor until it stops moving with all of you in the coming months.

College Humor and other oxy morons

I don't know why I'm bothering to wade in on the "college kids are too PC to understand humor anymore," pseudo-controlversy, but there are a couple things I want to parse.

First, the idea of humor as necessary counterweight to one's own pride and hubris seems to be a little bit dead on certain segments of the left. There is this sense, especially among lefty types who seem grimly determined to have a firmer grasp of "what's going on" than everyone else, that it is known who the villains are (them) and it is known what is punching up (punching away from them) and what is punching down (punching down towards them) and that comedy acts should then comfortably re-affirm what it is they already know to be true. The kind of people who love the Onion until it hits too close to home in other words. So I do agree that there is kind of a generally obnoxious sense that for the educated left, the court jester could not possibly point out something uncomfortable that they are already not keenly aware of and have formed all the opinions that everyone has all decided are correct. Leaving me to wonder if comedy on campus is supposed to be something not so much laughed at as nodded along with sagely.

Yes, those are the sins of corporations. Yes, those are the sins of patriarchs. Yes, those are the sins of the majority and a rigged system.  Well done comedy man, you checked all the right boxes.

Which is all to say, of course some members of the left are sometimes over-the-top in their preening self-regard, lack of personal humility and generally annoying "know-it-all" self-righteous attitude. Hey, it happens to the best of us. The good news is it's a nice reminder how much we have in common with the right sometimes!

That said, some caveats.

One, I'm not sure how much of a plague this really is.  While yes I think the left could use some kind of lessons in not repeating the sins attributed to conservatism without the slightest hint of self-awareness, this certainly isn't all leftists and may not even be enough people to warrant the press coverage.  There are lots of very nice liberal types who are willing to entertain a comedian who doesn't 100% line up with their values.  The left contains multitudes. My "sense of things" written out above is just that, "a sense of things" and should not be considered worth more than the paper it's printed on. But I certainly don't think it's a dire emergency, I just want some people to tone it down with the self-righteousness and the un-ending purity crusades from time to time.

Two, it's not really true that kids these days hate comedy. Louis C. K. is filthy and pushes all kinds of boundaries and college kids love him.  True, he generally seems to punch in the direction they want to see comedians punching, but that doesn't make his work sometimes very challenging (see his most recent SNL monologue for some of that! Ooph, that was hard to sit through). But, "comedians" contains multitudes too. And it IS true that some comedians are hacks who rely on tired stereotypes that more and more people don't find too funny anymore. There is a growing sense of extreme exhaustion with the traditional lack of accountability for sexist, racist, and seemingly unaccountable patriarchs who all remain firmly at the helm of so much of our civilization and so comedy that just seems to reinforce the idea that "boys will be boys" (i.e. unaccountable to anyone else) is getting less and less play. And I can't say I blame anyone for being tired of a lot of those tropes.

I don't know if I have the wherewithal to parse this much further tonight, but there does seem to some mic grabbing going on, as who gets to define what is and isn't funny. And I get it, there is power in humor. There is power in who gets to decide who and what is worthy of ridicule and therefore who it is acceptable to treat poorly. Humor is a powerful tool in normalizing cultural stories about who the heroes and villains are in a given age. True power is exposed in who and what are considered beyond the pale to joke about. So while I understand the urge to keep comedians from punching towards oneself and one's allies who are perceived as vulnerable, and therefore to be protected, a movement that can't laugh at it's own foibles is in really dangerous territory.

Maybe we should focus less about laughing at other people, and focus more on laughing at ourselves.

A Festivus for the rest of us!

My thoughts on Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists are here. Short version: I loved it. The questions he asks are important.

Do You Even Lift?

I’m kinda at this point where I need to embrace some body positivity about myself, but also kind of want to start exercising again because it helps me stay sane and evens out the peaks and valleys of my emotional roller-coaster.

And it’s weird to phrase it this way, but if I get fit, it won’t be so much a warm embrace of fitness culture so much as hate-fucking it with a “yuck” face.  Which is a phrase or idea I’ve never liked, and I kind of hate to use it, but it’s the closest I can come to describing my sense of unease with the fitness industry.  There’s just something cult-ish and unbearably smug about fitness culture as a whole.

For one, there’s kind of this constant mind fuck around attitude that I understand is just an attempt to push me past my bullshit and do the thing, but still, the kind of single-minded zealousness people work themselves into around the gym is very off-putting, especially if you grew up in fundamentalism and are now currently allergic to anything remotely resembling it.  And I think there might be such a thing as fitness fundamentalists.  I can barely go to yoga, even though I like the basic experience of it, because they so rarely seem to be able to leave well enough alone without bringing in some new agey bullshit around the whole endeavor, especially the yoga gurus, who conveniently have a book I can buy.

The other thing that bothers me about “the fit” is this bizarre protestant/capitalist work ethic angle where if you put in the time and the work into shaping your body into something generally regarded as pleasing by modern tastes, you shall be rewarded, and indeed perhaps owed, a relationship with someone possessing a body of equal or better well-shaped pleasingness. On some level, I understand, this is just how humans mate, typically by selecting someone a lot like them, but …. still.  It just makes the whole thing seem so superficial and a little yucky. 

If the over-whelming takeaway message was, “we want you to be healthy and live a long, happy life” I might be able to swallow it better.  But, I don’t know, that’s just not the over-whelming message that seems to shine through the brightest.

Post-trip realization

I have no idea where i fit in the world anymore, nor the faintest idea what I'm doing.

I've basically found no place that makes sense to me since leaving my religion and I'm not going back.  My religion was structured and purpose-filled but dystopian in its fundamentaist authoritarianism. The secular world is freer, but chaos, with an anti-pathy to purpose beyond capitalism and self-interest.

 Who do you think you are to struggle with existential questions and doubt in any way other that alone, in quiet desperation?

So everyone scavenges for purpose and community as best they can.

I don't understand it.  I don't understand my place in it. I don't like the sense of helplessness that inspires.

I don't like how much I don't try to change things.

I'd walk the earth, but I don't know Kung Fu.

So there's that awkward fact about me.

Defining Adventure Down

I think I'm finally narrowing down my strong antipathy to "must love adventure" crowd on dating sites and, uh, almost everywhere else (I know this is a weird thing to obsess over, but here I am).  It comes down to a couple things for me.

First, it seems like a completely mindless capitulation to the current advertising push in all sectors. It's an adventure to buy a coke, it's an adventure to buy a car, it's an adventure to choose your brand, etc. Every ad now is that ubiquitous stadium anthem music dreck and free spirits waving their arms about while they buy shit they don't need. I understand our bland, consumer-driven lives might need some punch, this does not mean going to the mall is now an epic of homerian proportions. We don't have to accept "participating in the economy" as the definition of "adventure" just because the soulless and sad Don Draper wannabes tell us to.  For god's sake have some pride.

Second, it defines adventure away to mean everything and nothing.  Much like the Louis C.K.'s bit on "everything's amazing and nobody's happy.", once you use adventure to describe going to the mall with your friends, or going on an easy hike 30 min out of town, what' s left to describe reporting in a war zone?  Hacking your way through the amazonian jungle in search of new species?  Going to space in a rocket? If adventure is a glorified "leaving the house" then adventure is the definition of normalcy and tedium.

Third, has it really come to this?  Has modern life beaten us down so much that having the bravery to leave the house is now adventure-level status?  Do we need it to be such an epic to even summon the motivation? I'd like to think we can make it a norm again, and not the extraordinary act of extraordinary people. Like maybe it's possible to perform the basic responsibilities of adult life without creating a grossly inflated and narcissistic mythology around how wonderful and meaningful everything we do is simply by virtue of it being us that's doing it, you know? It's delusional, and it's the kind of delusion that only benefits advertisers who want everyone to share in the delusion that brand engagement and an obscene focus on brand preference is an important and meaningful part of life.  It isn't.  It never will be.

It's an adventure for a toddler to leave the house.  It's an adventure for an adult to leave the country, or in a few notable cases, the planet.  You don't like adventure, you just like leaving the house.