Month: April 2017

The Whale

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The Silver MoonThere are days where I think I am diving into the depths from the mundane seeking some form of sustenance, some form of meaning from an original thought that may be straying through the depths of this continuum. It’s as if I were a solitude whale, diving into the depths to find… something.

And every now and then whale song resonates, if only for a moment. A harrumph in the distance of someone doing something similar, an echo of an echo, and you wonder if it’s you’re own echo. In the depths, you are alone, the silence interrupted by your movements as you interact with the outside world.

It’s pleasant. Serene. Quiet. People go to classes for such things, twist their limbs into positions that someone else teaches them. That was forced on me as a teenager, and people pay for it now. But then, people pay to be spanked and have hot wax dripped on them, too. The world is strange among those that live in the air. They chatter among themselves about things that largely do not matter, only so that they don’t feel…

Alone.

Alone scares people, the depths of who we are a scary place for those who believe that they are something that they are not. Validation. Existence. Emptiness does not give those things, the depths where the pressure is greatest force against the self, hardening what at the surface is so soft. Things flit around down there. Things about yourself. Things about the world, the detritus of above always finds the depths. The depths, the dark depths with the deep currents that run to and fro say more about what is important than the practicing karaoke choirs above – busy singing the songs of others, poorly.

And there it is. And there it went. A roll, a twist, a push toward the surface where the noise is… a glance backward.

Soon.

Beluga Whale's Tail

Photography vs. Writing

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I’m still muddling through a perplexing problem at times where I wonder whether a picture is what I want to take, or whether writing the scene is better. It’s hard to judge; I’m a published semi-pro amateur photographer, I’m a published writer (one eBook, if that really counts, but through a publishing company). I can do both reasonably well, or at least I would like to think so.

Here’s an example. I was wasting time on Independence Square (South) in Port of Spain, Trinidad, waiting for the next water taxi.

I came across a burnt out building- the marks on the walls through all where there had once been glass. Welded BRC wire framed on steel, painted with a reddish primer kept people out of… a burnt building… and a new sign in the lower right proclaimed it to be the Ministry of Social Development and Family Services. A promise, perhaps, like so many others in Trinidad and Tobago by politicians seemingly paid by the quantity of what comes out of their mouths rather than the quality.

In front of this armored concrete husk lay a vagrant, facing the building, his red t-shirt contrasting with cardboard he was laying on. And oh, how I wish I had my camera with me at that moment. It was as critical a social criticism as any. It was, in fact, a perfect shot.

But I didn’t have the camera, and I simply wrote about it – taking 3 paragraphs.

In this, the picture would have been better, I think. Yet I wrote about it and described the highlights of the scene pretty well, too.

So what this taught me is that it’s not a versus. It’s a matter of combining the two, and really, I still need to work on that.

On Physical Writing

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WritingWe live in an age where the pitter-patter of little keyboards has made way for the silent agony of typing on touchscreens, little QWERTYish keyboards on small surfaces that leave one looking like a monkey trying to solve a puzzle.

Truth be told, I don’t get release from tapping away at a keyboard. There’s no physicality to it. I carry a Moleskine reporter notebook with me almost everywhere I go, and for a years I went without – going instead with the ‘smartphones’, pads, etc – things that are supposed to ‘boost productivity’ and ‘blah blah blah marketingspeak marketingspeak!’ in ‘new and improved’ ways.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m becoming a dinosaur. Maybe I appreciate the relative privacy of my notebook – where it’s not encrypted and yet more private than using a smartphone, where the only people I need to worry about prying into my written thoughts being the ones physically close to me.

What I do know is, after getting back to writing in my Moleskines after these years, is that a good pen and a good Moleskine is like sex for me – the feel of the pen as it presses on the pages, cushioned as you break in a notebook, is simply a pleasure – the ink flowing properly, drying quickly, and flipping pages to write more. It’s sex.

And keyboards are like masturbation. Sure, you get some release, but it’s lacking that something.

That physicality.

That… sex.

The History Rhythm.

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Dance!The cliché, “History repeats itself”, is a dull echo of a George Santayana quote and is in itself, timeless – but it has a rhythm of usage throughout history, I’m sure.

I’m sure of this because the study of history is simply the study of mankind dancing to it’s own rhythm.

It’s apparently a really great beat to dance to, so mankind dances.

A culture repeats things, and all around the world, cultures repeated things. As the world began to change, bureaucracies were formed – largely to govern – but bureaucracies were to keep things from changing quickly1. And so they did, and so they do, and so they will. They govern the rhythm of a society, the rhythm the society dances too.

Maybe if we got better DJs we’d have better choreography.

1 Gleick, James Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon Books, 1999.

You Can’t Do Anything You Want

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The BaitOne of the phrases I hate the most in the world is the one you thought of when you read the title. Aside from ‘You can do anything you want’ being absolutely horrible career advice that is administered from childhood, it’s misleading in many other ways.

It creates false hope.

You can accuse me of being jaded and rightfully so. I am. From a young age, I was accused of being intelligent, a great communicator (there is some irony there), able to do some things with ease where I saw others struggle with under the threat of a belt as they did their work. What happened? Well, the first problem is that I didn’t work on things.

“I can always catch up”, I would think to myself – and to my credit, I did, but in doing anything I wanted while growing up, I often didn’t do what was needed. What was required. I have no regrets about that, it made me the person I am today, but I didn’t get where I am by doing anything I wanted.

And ‘here’ isn’t exactly where I want to be. But I can’t do anything I want. I live in a world that I used to blame for being poorly designed. It is not poorly designed, it’s just a world that doesn’t allow me to – say it with me, aloud if you must – do anything I want.  At some point in life, you go out on your own. Like a sculptor, life shapes that, ‘anything you want’ into, ‘anything you want while you pay your bills’.

The sculptor chips away again it becomes, “anything you want while you pay your bills – and that you have the time for, and can afford.”

Maybe you go to college and you can’t take the courses you want because it’s hidden behind prerequisites, or worse, it’s not going to be something your financial aid would cover since it’s not attached to your major. Maybe your employer offers to pay for your courses but decides not to when you come back with great grades in oceanography but they thought, implicitly, you were going to study what they are already paying you to do.

Yeah, been there, done that.

Maybe the economy is crap and you end up doing jobs you hate to make ends meet. Maybe you watch idiocy around you that you cannot stop because you are shiny and new, or worse, you’re pigeonholed into doing something you hate because you happened to do it better than anyone else.

Yeah, been there, done that.

No, you can’t do anything you want. It’s silly to think that you could, and it’s irresponsible to tell people that they can do anything that they want. Disappointments pile up like landfill until people figure it out.

No, you can’t do anything you want.

You can’t do anything you want – but you can do the best you can under your circumstances, and you can prepare for doing the things that you want. Maybe you’ll get lucky and it will happen. Maybe not.

Just be the best you can be and prepare.

The Search for Meaning.

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Playmobile pottyI’m not sure we really matter.

No, this is not some existential issue I’m having. There have been enough of those, all without epiphanies. No, I’m writing about our species.

If, by some chance, I were to encounter a life form from another planet – or even a life form from this planet – I’m hard pressed to think of anything we do, as a whole, that is worth mentioning in a meeting where first impressions matter. Sure, we have technology, science, spirituality… the list goes on, but that’s all self-referential. If we actually look at what we do from outside of our species, it would make a very thin blog post. A colony of bees has a use. A planet of humans – we change everything to our own benefit even while changing things against our benefit. It’s wonky.

What is our purpose? Ask anyone and you’ll get a different answer. We’re convinced that our species is immortal when generations of us live and die under the light of dead stars. In a way we are immortal, somehow managing procreate faster than we die to the point where we’ve pretty much run out of space on a planet because of our own constructs. Governments pay farmers not to grow food in some countries while others starve. We have weapons in our arsenals that no one on the planet can run away from unless they have a ticket to get into space, and we haven’t quite figured out where we would want to go other than, ‘not here’.

It’s easy to imagine how our species got scattered around the planet. There was a lot of ‘not here’ involved. In fact, every country I have been to – those socioeconomic geopolitical divides cartographers note – has a fair number of people who want to go somewhere else simply because it’s ‘not here’. As a species, maybe that means we’re nomadic.

As individuals, we are defined and usually define ourselves by our role and status in society, but we would never admit to being drones serving queens in a hive. Or would we? And should we? I think so. We haven’t figured out a system that isn’t like indentureship – people work for a company, pay other companies, but really we work in a system and pay the system to live in the system simply because we were… born in the system. That’s pretty unimaginative.

We all agree to some extent on what life is. Our shared illusion, perhaps. We all know that death is a certainty and joke that taxes are too, when death is not of our creation and taxes are. We could, if we wanted, abolish taxes – but instead we fight to abolish death. And we’re getting better at that since in that way, the drones can pay more taxes before their deaths. That’s peculiar.

Let’s say that we abolish death. Does that mean we get to play life longer? How is that a benefit? I’m hard pressed to explain how that is a benefit.

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

Technology, science? Pretty self-referential so far. A bunch of primates staring at small screens while bumping into each other at varying speeds hardly seems like progress, particularly when meaningful conversation is lost amid the noise. It’s brownian motion. We’re as entertaining as a cup of tea.

Religion? Self-referential as well, and while Pascal’s Wager is worth exploring, people get indoctrinated into religion before they are allowed to make big decisions in society. It’s a child marriage of sorts. But beyond that, religion doesn’t say too much about what our species is supposed to do, just about how people should behave. Again, self-referential. Imagine the leaps the space programs of the world would have if religions dictated that prayers had to be made in space to be effective.

The very idea that we don’t matter eats at us. It devours us because we desperately, from within our place as cogs of society and the weight that comes with, want to think that all of this means something. That despite our species own demonstrated self-destruction while proliferating at a greater rate, that despite what we feel during those dark parts of our lives that we hide from, we matter.

Is not mattering such a problem?

So, here’s the fun part. If we don’t matter, it doesn’t matter if we think we do. We have a blank slate if we don’t matter, where we can define as a species who we really are… or we have the fingerpainted hieroglyphics of our past to define ourselves by.

Are we really defined by what we have done instead of what we could do? That’s how they measure the value of person in HR and in society – or more would be done for children in society.

Speaking for myself, I like the idea of defining ourselves by what we could do. 

But then, I don’t matter.