Month: April 2017

Maturity

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Sooner or later, we end up being someone we’re not – and in the long self-deceptions held together by circumstances, we forget who we are and what we are.

Sometimes we’re not too far from it and we appreciate who we have become, and sometimes when the mirror reflects us we see someone so different that they seem alien. Either way, we look back on how we got where we are and we fork – we either decide to continue down the paths, or we decide to regress, or we decide to do something completely different.

Until you’ve done all 3 at least twice, you’re not mature.

A Stitch In Time Saves Mind.

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A Heart Sewn Back TogetherWe are bits and pieces, sewn together across time all the while unraveling. Life is a calculus, a rate of change where we are sewn together faster than we unravel.

It’s odd that we pull our own threads just as we pick at scabs. We know not to do it, but it’s as if we want to see what’s inside. We’re uncomfortable with healing, the fresh stitches itch.

Maybe we worry about infection, and in doing so sometimes we cause it.

However it ends up, we’re constantly fixing ourselves as we unravel. Time always wins, in the backs of our minds we know this. No amount of new medical advances take that away, and can we possibly live longer than we’re supposed to? But, we’ll say, we can’t possibly live longer than we’re supposed to – a circular logic. An attempt at perpetual motion with logic.

I’m stitched together across time. Across geography. Across worlds that people isolate themselves in with their groups, their cultures, and I watch those worlds and wonder how long they can exist – and when I think that these worlds will converge. There is leakage here and there, but the bubbled worlds remain – their surface tension defying everything.

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquiring of knowledge, and that much happier than man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”  – Mary Shelly, Frankenstein (1918).

And these worlds, stitched together, form my world, which, stitched to other worlds… and at some point, the calculus of Life will unravel them too.

And there are days when I’m not sure whether I should pull on a thread or man the needle.

Today has been such a day.

Beneath The Wheel

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The Old Town Astronomical ClockWe are all beneath the wheel, the crush of time, the prolapse of our minds and souls as things change around us.

A Snapshot

The teenager man-boy, a quotient of a fractured home, tries to find his way to manhood in an alien environment where someone who cared enough gave him a roof with conditions, walls with rules, and a freedom to be responsible where before he had none.

He works in the yard under the mock disdain of an elderly gentleman who did not invite the project, but who in his own way wants the best for the young man, suffering the indifference of the teenager to his words.

I am a visitor in this realm, as with most other realms, and I’m supposed to have some purpose here – which, of course, is to find my purpose there, as it is anywhere.

Time is not on the side of anyone.

The elderly man, who we’ll call grandfather, thinks of his downhill slope to the grave. It sits behind his eyes as he looks over the world in front of him – as if it were a story he has seen before, worn, lucid, tired.

The boy – let’s call him the nephew – does not understand that when I look at him, I think of this quotation and ponder:

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer it’s roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of it’s beginnings and it’s promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree. – Hermann Hesse, Beneath The Wheel

He is young and yet he has catching up to do, having missed the starting gun that society fires too often too early for the children it creates.

He is a child in puberty, not yet a young man in mind or spirit. His childhood has not been misplaced, it has been stunted and his misfortune is that given his abilities, he must cast away the slivers of childhood he was left with all the while reshaping into a man before his time. While society creates the children like him, it does not tolerate adults like him.

He feels the crush of the pressure and, being stubborn, pushes back or not at all. He is like a plant that atrophies at the sunlight it needs.

At some point he will bend or he will break, it is the way of the world – a way that is not couched in the anthropomorphized visions  of well intentioned people, but rather the way that is couched in the grand bureaucracies and cultures we use to govern our kind. The same grand bureaucracies and cultures that creates children like him.

And then there I am, an observer and not – an Uncle of sorts, new to his world, young to the older man, trying to have a positive effect all the while considering, thinking about how difficult he was at that age, and how everything that was tried on me didn’t work – and through my own muddlings, I found my answers that became questions of answers, to questions of those, to stand there and not have answers and simply more questions. I see the time short for both, the grandfather and the nephew, and in the reflections of their clocks I see a parallax of my own.

I have no great wisdom to cross the voids, only the knowledge to avoid the cliched mistakes. For self-preservation, I wear the visage of the observer and say things that I hope might make it through in time for the nephew, for he has little time before he too is beneath the crush of the wheel that will only bend him if he learns, but will break him if he does not.

The crush of the world as time ticks onward, and it does not care if you slouch or stand straight. It has no care for what bends or breaks, no empathy, no sympathy. It is the machine, the product of millenia of human generations, an antique as easily found in the basement of humanity as on a museum walls of academia and governance.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEsTCTuajE&w=560&h=315]

Timing Anger

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Mr Good and EvilThere was a time when my anger floated just below the surface, where I could draw on it as easily as a child with a sippy-cup. Years ago, I had a friend tell me that I was the angriest person that they knew – and I heeded that, as I never thought of myself that way.

But anger has it’s place. I’d spent a lot of time dealing with anger, both mine and that of others, and I’ve come to understand that the anger was never the issue, it was the rage that was. There’s a beautiful, powerful thing in rage, dressed in the tatters of a personality it runs amok like any other force of nature. Yet when it drives the personality, it destroys itself.

We’re told anger is bad, and it is not. There is not only a place for anger, there is a need for it at times. There is a time to rage, too, but they don’t talk about that either.

The real trouble is knowing those times, and to know those times you have to know how to express it in a way that will change things for the better lest they change you for the worse.

 

The Wait (Customer Service)

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Anatomy of a Pit StopI found myself waiting again. It’s as popular pastime in Trinidad and Tobago as liming, though it is not as fun for anyone. It’s an odd thing in that you would think that since people typically don’t like waiting, they might assure that others don’t have to. It’s an empathy dissonance I can’t comprehend, but it seems a cultural fact for the layman anthropologist.

As it happened, I had the good sene to bring a book – Beneath The Wheel by Hermann Hesse, a book which was simply laying on top as I walked by. As I waited for my pickup to be worked on, I finished a few chapters, observing as I did. People don’t notice the readers that much, so you get to observe people in their natural habitat.

I’d come in so that the pickup could get new parts installed – upper ball joints and the upper cradle arm bushings. This sort of job should take about 2 hours, but I was already an hour and 3 odd chapters into the book before they got to me.

The shop is understaffed, this I knew coming in. It was quite possible that it would take longer than I expected, but not too much longer I thought. I played with the ideas of why the shop was truly understaffed, since I had been offered many opinions by people who worked there and who had known me over the years, when I brought the old B2500 there. It was puzzling in it’s own way. The boss was upstairs, and I have no doubt he was watching things through the monitors that his questionably mounted cameras were mounted to.

An examination of the cameras showed that the cameras weren’t really for security but monitoring the employees and what was being done – or not. An elderly woman showed up with a car that seemed to qualify more as a glorified go-kart to me, but she was happy with it and only wanted them to redo her rear brakes. We struck up a conversation. She had taught at Naparima Girls High School for about 40 years. She noticed I was reading Hesse.

We talked about all manner of things, but toward the end of her 3 hour stay, we talked about the inefficiencies of the shop. That despite there being 3 people on the floor, they were busy hopping from one job to another and largely being ineffective on the cars throughout the garage. Strangely, a young woman came for a job application, and the woman in the office came out to confide that she thought she shouldn’t be hired because of poor communication skills. Meanwhile, the teacher, confined to watching inefficiency for 3 hours, grew restless. At one point there were 3 people chatting away around her car.

I found myself growing vicariously upset about that. If it were just me, I might have simply read my book, but she did not have one and regretted not bringing one. She eventually was granted a late pardon by the mechanics, who were really a salesperson, a driver, and the overburdened mechanic.

My pickup hung on two jacks, the upper cradle arms removed. Her 3 hours had also been my 3 hours, and more vehicles were pulling in. One came in with the alternator pulley destroyed- an  interesting thing – and they would have to send out to get that fixed for lack of the right spline tool. Others were there for tires, an oil change… I read the rest of my book, got lunch nearby, and sat and thought for a while as I watched the inefficiencies piling to a courageously absurd level.

And my patience was going at the 5th hour, seeing other vehicles come and go as my pickup sat there. I motioned to the woman giving everyone directions, a proxy for the boss observing through cameras upstairs, and I gave the universal signal for, “What’s going on with my vehicle?”

She motioned for me to wait. I gave her ‘the look’. It’s become effective over the years, and by her eyes she got the point – but now, at 1 p.m, it was lunch time and I would not be That Guy ™. So I wrote a while. Lunch finished soon enough, and the mechanic – finally permitted to get back to my vehicle – told me that their press couldn’t handle my cradle arm bushings another hour later.

I know a thing or two about presses, so I went in and looked at it as well – probably to the chagrin of the All Seeing Eye of Mordor upstairs. The press could do it, I was certain, but the press lacked the right attachments. And I started in on the woman who, poor lady, was the lightning rod for Sauron upstairs. Shed’d been doing this job for years; I’ve known her for those years and she and I never had come to this, but I made my points on how the floor was run in a way that was calm, sensible, and unable to be argued.

She took the company line, as she should – Sauron pays them, and when things are going well, he comes downstairs and makes his presence felt for seemingly no real reason, as his people simply make sure that they look busy – as they had all morning today. Being busy and being productive are two different things.

And this is why I bothered writing all of this: No single person on that floor was a bad employee. All of them were unhappy about how things went today, and I imagine on other days, and they had to bear the brunt of it – but they are not in charge. They are being told what to do. And that’s the main problem I see when people complain about service in Trinidad and Tobago.

Certainly, this country was not built on great customer service at the retail level. Tourism is ever an afterthought because oil has been supreme for about 50 years, and the money flowed like – well, like the oil did. And I often hear business owners complain about employees, though almost few of these business owners have actually been employees for a significant period.

In Trinidad and Tobago, poor customer service is often blamed on the employee. An employee is not necessarily without sin, that is not my point.

My point is that proper management assures proper customer service.

Outlier Dilemma

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OutlierAmid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to the fearful risk of losing his place forever.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Wakefield“, Twice-Told Tales(1837).

There is truth in that, and for those of us who have been uprooted from places place and dropped in others, the comfort of having a place and belonging didn’t go where we did. It got left behind, losing it’s place forever as well.

I caught myself thinking about that today, throughout the day. I have something I’m writing for another site that, when I paused to think about it, I realized that by saying some things about what others have done, I would be putting them on the defensive without intending to. So I’ve been trying to reconcile that in my mind, to find a way to get them past that hurdle in what I will be writing, an annoying by-product of knowing the audience.

In doing that, I ended up thinking about why I look at the data that has been collected so differently and see things that, apparently, the great cogs of an ‘academic bureaucracy meets government bureaucracy’  do not see in their love child, ‘dysfunctional data’. Truth be told, the data was collected for a purpose, but without a plan for the future.

And so, here I’ll be, the outsider – a role I know well – explaining why the work done over a 10 year period sucks. Of course, I’ll need to couch it better, but the reality is that with a little more planning and thought, it wouldn’t.

But as I thought about all of this, I knew it was deeper, and it’s something that as an individual who has dealt with it my whole life and I’m comfortable with, it’s something I’ve constantly had to wrestle with when communicating just so that people don’t stop reading, or listening. It’s amazingly easy to come across as a jerk, even unintentionally.

Granted, there are times when being a jerk has benefits and is a wonderful thing to be – really – it’s more of a sledgehammer in the toolbox of a communicator, and if it’s a default tool, people won’t listen – which defeats the reason for communicating.

So you get back to the basics and you muddle along writing for a deadline you announced to someone so that you would actually do it in time. And that’s that.

But even as I made my rounds on my land today, reconnecting with people, I knew that given different circumstances, I could have been any one of these people just as given different circumstances and opportunities I could be so well entrenched in academia I’d have the same thoughts as everyone else there. Or so well entrenched in other things that I would have the relatively mundane thoughts on things that they do – something I touched on in The Gentle Art of Self Deception.

I didn’t have those circumstances or opportunities. Later, I would make decisions so that I could retain that. I am an individual, but not like in the video, and that has value.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY&w=560&h=315]

Being an individual is dangerous, because it’s easy to think you’re right and everyone else is wrong. It’s dangerous because it’s easy to go off of metaphorical cliffs that the crowd doesn’t, and yet it has it’s own value as well in that if the crowd is heading for the metaphorical cliff, you can shout at them from the side and get absolutely no satisfaction if people don’t listen to you.

I suppose it would be easier to just fall into the crowd and lose one’s self, if only I could do that. If only I could have done that. There was a time in my life when I wanted that, but it was not to be.

And further, how could the status quo be properly challenged from within it?

Losing one’s place forever, as Hawthorne wrote, can be initially frightful – I don’t remember if I was frightened, to be honest – but it is most certainly not the end of the individual.

It’s the beginning of a dance with crowds, of the art of appearing to belong while not actually belonging, of being the chameleon, and figuring out how to use it in a way that adds value.

The Gentle Art of Self-Deception

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Riverside Park HDRsWhen we write our memories to our brains we write them twice. Yet we remember as we see the event, and how we see that event is subject to all sorts of biases.

First, we lie to ourselves – and we do it for a variety of reasons, most notably self-enhancement. And then we are lied to by our biases and how we receive information, and our biases are based on like-mindedness, on whether we as individuals are in the in-group or the out-group – even when we perceive ourselves to always be in the in-group.

Critical thought is supposed to be a part of all of this, guarding us from biased inputs or at least letting us stamp them as being potentially biased. In the broad strokes it doesn’t seem to, in the broad strokes it seems to fail even when individuals and groups experience cognitive dissonance. In individuals it’s part of life, but in groups it can be downright frightful.

We not only lie to ourselves, we allow ourselves to be lied to. We even encourage it, seeking out things that prop up our biases. This is why many reformed addicts talk about ‘hitting rock bottom’ – where they reach a point that self-deception can no longer be done, when facts rip away the armor of self-deception. Some trade one self-deception with another so that they don’t feel alone.

This is the foundation upon which we build our institutions. Democracy, as great as it is in theory, fails here (as do all other ideologies) not because of some sinister agenda of a group but because of self-deception. Where there could be dissenting opinion from dissenting perspective, we label the ‘other side’ as wrong and paint them with a broad brush. This is why committees rarely come up with anything innovative and are great ways to waste time – because of the commonality required to be a part of the group.

And this is why we fail to live up to the standards we give ourselves. We’re crappy witnesses to our own deeds.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf8e3gpgmr0]

A Morning Wasted (The Tonka Bean)

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In Search Of...I hadn’t seen him since 2010, this gentleman who had turned 72 yesterday, but in a few short years as I took control of my land he had been a staple visit on my rounds. And since I landed on the land again today, and because I was in no hurry, I visited and spent the morning with him.

“Aye! Taran! That’s you?”
“In the flesh!”

He went on to talk about people who wanted to see me, and I walked up to him slowly, waving my hand. “Let’s not talk about that.”

He continued.

“None of that is important. I was sorry to hear about Mama.”

He stopped. His wife. He looked at me, and we embraced as old friends, “It was her time and she had to go.” We talked about life, about what had transpired in our lives since last I had visited him all those years ago. I was not here with him, in the present, to talk about things about my land or the surrounding areas, or whatever the latest drama was in the village. We would get to that. We had both felt loss, we had seen people come and go in our lives, and we had seen the world change in our own ways.

We now studied each other to see how the other had changed, and to take our new measures. It is the way of men. We saw that the world had not changed us but had changed how we saw it in some ways – cracks of meaning here and there we found in our own realities.

We had coffee – him making it, insisting on adding honey – he used to keep bees, and he had given them away to someone who now gave him honey at a reasonable price. His daughters had returned – one was selling punches, the other doing other work. He had maintained the business of his life, staying active, and we discussed the plunder by OAS, the plunders of OAS and the blunders of OAS.

We talked about common relationships, the people in between. How this one never heeded advice, how that one never returned, and we filled in blanks for each other. Hours passed as two old friends chatted. We spoke of the dead and how they had fought for things that they did not take with them, and we spoke of those fighting now for things that ultimately do not matter.

Then, he decided we should look for Tonka beans, and so he had me drive his old tractor with him coaching. I’d not driven one before, but it was a manual transmission and once I found the clutch, accelerator and brake, it was a simple matter. He knew the path, and we went to the very edge of his land to find the tonka tree. We kicked around, finding no seeds, but enjoying being outdoors. Outside. We were like two children with grey hair until adulthood set in. We went about finding his boundary picket – something people sometimes pull out, something that benefits a neighbor who wants a road there, but something not easily proven.

We look at each other knowingly. There is always someone testing a boundary, seeing if you lack vigilance enough for them to take something. It’s the way of the world, be it with land, or money, or anything of perceived value.

I drove us back down, now more comfortable with the tractor, kicking it into 4th gear as we navigated the wayward materials left from the highway. I parked the tractor almost as we found it, and he went inside – bringing some fried roti, and curried baigan with aloo. We sat and ate as if no time had passed away from each other, as if nothing had happened.

We had searched for something and not found it, we had searched for something and found it, and we had found each other once more.

Some would call it a wasted morning. We were two men who wanted nothing from each other, and a lot of people see no value in such relationships.

And yet, those are the best relationships, built not on need or want but on common respect.

The Lost Art of Waiting

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The WaitingIn the rush of things, people hate waiting – they task themselves with so many things to do within a period of time so that they can do other things. Pathways to the future light up like dendrites as we achieve small ‘victories’ in getting things done.

We are awash in these little victories so often, yet feel like we’re sliding backwards at time – we become stressed and frustrated. Our frail bodies react, increasing blood pressure even as we’re forced to sit still and wait, a primal instinct from the Serengeti1.

There is an art to waiting. Because one is waiting to do something does not mean that you cannot do other things. On my return to Trinidad and Tobago, I find more waiting than I had grown accustomed to in the United States, where the smiles flaccid keep the customers placid.

The art is to not waste time. Yesterday, at a place I get my pickup worked on, I was told by the owner that I should not stay, that I make the mechanics nervous, that I should drop it off and come back for it. I laughed at him, something he’s not used to. I don’t mind waiting on my vehicle; I depend on my vehicle and am used to doing things myself or watching them be done so that when I take my vehicle into the diminishing areas around civilization that I am not without understanding of what has been done, and what can happen.

The Brake PadA perfect example were the brake pads that needed to be replaced as the mechanic went through my front end.  Had I not been there, had this been done in my absence, there would be a doubt about whether I was being scammed. Sure, it is good to trust people, but it is more important to be able to trust your tools. My vehicle is a tool with a purpose that requires the functionality I demand. And for that, I wait.

But it’s more than that. When waiting, one encounters others who are also waiting. This morning as I had something else checked out on the vehicle elsewhere, I spoke with a few rally drivers about their upcoming rally, and how they were setting the camber of their wheels, as well as whether they were going for toe in or toe out. I ran into the groundsmen from my alma mater next door and got a free bottle of water for the encounter.

And I got to see how someone I had been referred to was trying to show how an employee didn’t do his job to those around him using my vehicle as an example, whereas I had to stand there and correct him that the employee had done what was right and only partially diagnosed some issues – as he should2. After all, staged diagnoses are how one gets things done a lot of the time. There are no silver bullets, just were-elephants that we eat piece by piece.

I watch people fidgeting with their phones, texting away or messaging with people that they know, ignoring what is happening right in front of them. I saw the floor supervisor have to slap the hood of a company’s vehicle – the driver, as he fidgeted on his phone, completely unaware of his surroundings3.

There is an art to waiting, a way of not wasting the time but investing the time being spent while waiting for some small victory. It varies, but it’s there.

It’s a matter of what you invest the time in.

1Those that disagree and wish to say that we appeared because of a superior being are asked to check their blood pressure at this time and explain why the fight or flight response has been activated in their bodies, and give a reasonable explanation. Leave it in the comments. I promise to give any explanation the attention I believe it deserves. Honest.

2Staged diagnoses are something that confuse people, particularly in management. I’ve seen it in every discipline, from mechanical to electrical to software, and even to medicine. It’s the scientific method practically applied. More on this in another post. 

3 Being in the present means something else for some people. Connecting with others elsewhere means disconnecting from those directly around. Situational awareness. Fodder for yet another post.

Suddenly, She Was There

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I’d been avoiding smartphones, using a basic phone for a while, partly because of a self-imposed exile from noise. But I got another smartphone because I had found a half decent reason to and a way to make it work for me without subjecting me to too much noise. I’d thought this through, as I always do – cool, rational. I’d pay for data when I wanted it, subsisting instead on WiFi so I wouldn’t get charged for WhatsApp jokes I’d seen and even posted years ago.

It’s a sound plan that allows me a discrete camera for street shots, so I can blend with the writing. It’s not a great camera, but I let that lay for the price. The price of freedom is sometimes compromise.

And so, despite the work of the helpful young woman who set basic things up on the store, I went through the Android device and configured it as I wanted it.

I logged into my Google account, set up email, pulled my contacts, etc.

And today, as I was about to send a text to someone, the SMS app helpfully showed those I messaged the most and… after all of this time… her name was there.

Her name. Hers. That name. The name I don’t speak often for fear of it all boiling over. The conversations late at night, the text messages flying back and forth, our secret codes. Her name.

That conversation at 2 a.m. about whether she should have that surgery to have her other ovary removed. The hopeless conversations about endometriosis, a sinister condition for her. The idiocy at her job, hew she had invested so much of her life into the company to see it being pulled in a direction that diminished her.

It wasn’t all bad or it wouldn’t have been. We had well matched quills, and for two people who were noted for being stubborn we had an odd habit of listening to each other and of being able to communicate with a word or a glance. We had the crazy nights where she sang country songs I hated, or where she put up with my own insanity as I bubbled up from the other world I visit as often as I can. The way we pushed against each other to allow us to be more ourselves, the way our backs immediately came together when we were surrounded by the idiots.

Then there was the shock of her suicide that wasn’t as much of a shock as a painful finality for me. She’d told me what she would do when the pain was too much for her and I thought it was… not as soon. That there was time.

There wasn’t.

We wonder about those things even when we understand them.

And after all these months, she’s the one I message the most according to Google.

And she’s gone, but still pulled a final ‘gotcha’ on me.

Brat. I do miss her.