I live a somewhat undisturbed life, as I designed, so I can think about other things. It’s what we all do to an extent for work, that thing that many of us do because we need to get paid so that we can pretend we have some value in these artificial systems we were born into.
It wasn’t as if we gave permission, and it’s not as if when we are considered adults we could reconsider our positions. We end up doing what we do and become part of the machinations of bureaucracy we are born into.
Today, I had to deal with a few things, and I found my day just getting physically sucked out of my head.
Go here. Do this. Sign this. Do that. Email this. Can’t receive that by email, have to to go to the office strategically located where there’s traffic and poor parking. Sit. Wait. Get a letter. Give someone else the letter. They email, messages fly back and forth, and that piece of business should be done in the morning by parties unknown who will do it because their company is presently unpaid.
Weird how that works.
Another order of business required me to write this, hand this to someone with a photocopy of my ID (really) so that they could go about doing something, but I was not feeling well enough this morning to risk spreading whatever macabre disease I potentially had. No, it’s not Covid (tested), it seems like it was just a headache and sore throat and I have neither now.
I don’t run around much outside where it’s peopley, so the odds are good it’s just my body telling me to slow down and rest a bit today – which I haven’t done yet because I’ve been dealing with moving information around between companies in inefficient ways. Well, one company. The newer company has suffered as well because of the previous company.
At times I wonder how it is that people don’t go crazy.
I look around and realize that they do, but in acceptable ways for the most part.
At times I wonder if crazy people didn’t design the systems, and I think not as much as we would like to think. If you ever want to ruin something you’re designing, get a committee together. They’ll beat out an unworkable solution over budget in as much time as they can possibly get – it won’t be finished, they’ll move on, and the broken system will flop around, punishing all who come into contact with it for the rest of it’s unnatural life.
A few weeks ago, some neighbors asked me to hold the keys to their place while they went and checked the weather on another part of the planet.
We say, ‘vacation’, but what that really means seems to be coming back and telling everyone what the weather was like. In this case, it was hot.
The planet is hot, so that fits. I don’t know why going from one hot place to another when they’re both hot is a good idea, but some people think so. I’d go somewhere cool myself, but I suppose I’m strange. Or am I?
Anyway, I held the keys, they came back and they were sick when they came back – they went to a hot place and got sick, which doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s what they did. They didn’t want me to catch what they had, and so I didn’t get to hand back the keys.
It weighed on me. I don’t like holding other people’s things for longer than I have to. It’s something I have in a part of my mind that I could have occupied by other things. Out of friendship, I rent space out to people on occasion, but I just don’t like being responsible for other people’s stuff because if something goes wrong, I’ll do what I think is right and that doesn’t always coincide with what people say they wanted after the fact. It’s different when you’re thinking about someone else’s stuff because you have to factor in what they would want.
It’s so annoying and annoyingly complicated. So I don’t like holding other people’s stuff.
This past weekend, I handed them the keys and gave an internal sigh of relief.
They had brought me a t-shirt. They’d mentioned it prior to and I thought nothing of it; I do not house-sit for t-shirts. Bad business model. I do it out of friendship. So I expected a friendship t-shirt, which generally would be a, “My friend went to check the weather in *insert city here* and got me this shirt” shirt.
When presented, I was pleasantly surprised it was a light grey, of the wicking material you find in athletic shirts that breaths so much better. The right color – you can never go wrong with light grey for me. Right material. Right size, which I have to downsize, but the shoulders will fit fine. Plus, it came with a story of 4 different people involved with selecting the shirt.
It has a story! It’s a pretty mundane story, but it was a good story.
All gifts should have stories.
There I was, very sincerely grateful over a simple t-shirt. Gifts are rare for me, they always have been. I grew up for the first 9 years of my life not celebrating birthdays, Christmas, etc. To me, gifts have always been things that appear unscheduled and unasked for, are what a person needs or wants or is something that you saw and the person reminded you of.
I would not mind being remembered as the guy in the grey t-shirt.
In wandering around and reading some other people’s blogs this morning over a crisp tasting apple macchiato this morning, the common thread seemed to be about why people write, or blog, and/or what they hope comes from it.
Yeah, I know, an apple macchiato? Did I mention the oat milk? I wondered myself and found it to be like caffeinated apple oatmeal.
See, right there I conveyed something to you and, without having had it, you have an idea of how I experienced it. What may surprise many people is that it’s not how I actually experienced it, but it’s the best way I could think of to convey it to you. We’re on, as they say, the same page.
Now you may not have fond memories of oatmeal, which is where we may diverge. I did. So when I tasted this apple macchiato, I did not think of how to explain it to you or the people around me.
I simply experienced it. It made me think of happy days of my childhood in Wisconsin and Ohio, when it was cold outside and hot cocoa and oatmeal were staples of happy warmth. It reminded me of the smile in the kitchen of my mother who, for either, simply had to boil water and mix it in to give her son something that would keep him quiet for a while and that he wouldn’t fuss over eating.
It made me smile.
Now, from an apple macchiato, I have now shared a part of myself, soft and exposed until it becomes calloused from imaginary wear. I have not told you what you should expect of an apple macchiato with oat milk, but instead what it meant to me, a character in your mind who you only know through what he shares.
It also made me sad, because those fleeting moments of childhood are long gone, never to be had again. In fact, they were lost not long after they were made for reasons I chased down and interrogated with devices that would make the CIA ask with a blush about where I got them.
All of this flashed through my mind in milliseconds. Maybe even microseconds. I flash through life like that at times, time traveling through memories that are about as dependable as a witness in court – and yet, the feelings, the emotions, those do not lie, they do not misrepresent even though what I may have experienced was not what actually was. It was just a perception of it.
This is why I write. I have fought with language for decades to share what my inner thoughts are and they are independent of language, they weave, they feel, they are visualized, but most of the concepts out there we share as words and experiences are just ways for us to convey to the outer world what is going on in our inner world.
When you cannot do that, the world drowns your inner world. When you do not master language to a degree, language masters you and you become the voice of the outer world, a voice of what the outer world demands even if it costs all of your inner world.
I write to save myself in that regard because I have found strength in the inner world, of how I experience the world, of experiencing through observation and inquiry about how this world around us works, from the flower to computing systems to the copyright licensing of code to artificial intelligences.
I write so I do not drown in the world others created.
One of the things that has boggled my mind over the decades is how other people automatically think that you have the same motivations or fit the stereotypes they have about you for whatever reason.
I’m not talking about atheists eating babies, though I have heard that one before. I’m talking about problem-solving discussions, where my standpoint has always been what is best to solve the problem. Granted, I can be very opinionated, but people like attacking the messenger rather than the message.
Over time I have learned that these people are the ones with agendas and who tend to throw fits when they don’t get their way, even if and especially if they’re wrong.
The article goes on to list these 9 things and is well worth the read for expanding on them.
Are generally full of themselves.
Are manipulative and judgmental.
Don’t express their emotions freely and clearly.
Aren’t interested in learning from their mistakes.
Have unrealistic perceptions.
Are attention getters and people pleasers.
Have a hostile sense of humor.
Lack consistency.
Insulate themselves in their own clique.
What’s peculiar is that I have been accused of the same things – by the same people. It’s gaslighting, because I’m generally not these things though I recognize my capacity to be. I spend a lot of time grounding myself.
In fact, this article has a list regarding authentic people that I think is close enough to who I am. Granted, writing might fall under seeking attention or wanting to be liked, but I don’t think I go overboard in these regards and I do tend to write what’s on my mind rather than what is popular.
Maybe that’s why my writing isn’t all that popular, or maybe it’s why it’s popular among some and not others. I don’t know.
Yet all of this I wish I had known so many years ago because I spent a lot of time thinking the world is populated by authentic people.
Spoiler alert: The planet has more than it’s fair share of inauthentic people.
Nobody told me how to sleep. Sleep was just something I did, generally when exhausted. The mantra of, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” was the anthem of my youth.
Sleep, as it happens, is pretty important. People say that, but they don’t always communicate why sleep is important. Getting older has forced me to come to terms with these things – things which I wouldn’t have paid attention to while I was younger and worked hours that were not as structured as the companies I worked for were.
They tell you you should sleep, but not at the price of their productivity.
Lately, I’ve been taking sleep more seriously, but as a side sleeper I am very particular about pillows. Most pillows I encounter don’t support my head properly, much less comfortably. At one point I had a pillow made at a custom pillow store somewhere in the U.S., and when I moved down I brought it with me. I spent $100 on that pillow, and when I returned to the U.S. I let an aunt have it because she was a particularly nice aunt. She loved it. She died, and the pillow disappeared.
Lately, I’ve been trying to sleep better – not necessarily more – and so I have had this pillow dilemma.
I was at a local store just some days ago and they were having a sale on some Sealy pillows which I couldn’t find on Amazon to link. I’ve spent decades buying crappy pillows in the hope that they would be good, and they are generally not even passable unless folded in half. They were having some special on Sealy memory foam cooling pillows…
But they were in boxes. I couldn’t poke them or press down on them. I’m not buying a pillow based on promises, and Sealy apparently thought that their name on the box would be sufficient to get people to buy a pillow.
No.
So I told the guy who was handling the sale that if he wanted to sell me a pillow, one of them had to come out of the box. Another man, about my age, backed me up. Before you knew it, we had a revolution on our hands to unbox the pillow, the salesperson relented – and as it happened, he sold me a pillow.
We had to free the pillow from the box, which should seem ridiculous because it is ridiculous. There are some things you simply don’t buy online unless you know what you’re ordering and they are much the same as buying something off the shelf that requires the same knowledge.
You’d think marketing and sales folks would understand this. They generally don’t. Clothing, beds, pillows… it’s so much better to buy in person so that you know what you’re getting.
I like the pillow. I’ll write more about my adventures with sleep in the near future.
Amusingly, there’s an Amazon affiliate link in here to Sealy pillows for the people who don’t understand this. 🙂
I’ve been thinking a lot as the world has begun to intrude on my thoughts again, the pragmatisms of life and the never-ending bureaucracy run by idiots. For example, tomorrow I will go have to deal with a government office which, on paper, put houses on my land that weren’t there.
When bureaucracy gets that much imagination, we should worry – but really, it was not very creatively sweeping something under the rug that I was made aware of a decade ago, and did try to straighten out. That will likely be a post on KnowProSE.com soon enough.
We get wrapped up in these paper cuts that modern society gives us and we bleed, and some of us lose that strength to climb the ladder to look above the nonsense. There’s a lot of nonsense in modern society we put up with. One person has called it soft slavery, but I think of it as a soft indentureship.
…Soft slavery, on the other hand, is covert. It is neither apparent nor self-evident. Everything is hidden behind comfort, apathy, security, convenience, indifference, and the illusion of freedom. It’s not clear who the slave is. It’s not clear who the master is. And the power dynamic is obscured by an unhealthy hierarchy that leads to public confusion within a chain of obedience that’s based on fear and violence.
Statists, living in a world ruled by nation states and deceived by the illusion of freedom, are more akin to the house slave from the times of hard slavery than to free human beings. The house slave of today is the typical state citizen just going through the motions, unaware of their own slavery. So caught up are they in the “rules” and the “laws” of the land that they cannot see how desperate their situation really is. To the extent that they can see, cognitive dissonance kicks in to squash the uncomfortable feeling to keep their comforting worldview intact…
I choose indentureship, perhaps because I understand the distinction between slavery and indentureship. In slavery, they offer you no light at the end of the tunnel and have to pay for your ‘wellbeing’, whereas with indentureship they give you a light off in the distance that might be the end of the tunnel and you pay your own bills.
Even imagination becomes limited by these indentureships, because when there’s enough complexity there’s almost no way to see above it.
Some people find religion helps with that, and I take no issue with it. Marx is often misquoted as saying, “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, when in fact the full quote is much more interesting.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Marx, Karl. [1843] 1970. “Introduction.” A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, translated by A. Jolin and J. O’Malley, edited by J. O’Malley. Cambridge University Press. – via Marxists.org.
I’m no Marxist by any stretch – communism is a failure in so many ways, but that failure is built of truths that it’s own philosophy despised. Communism ignores it’s flaws and comes to an unfortunate end. Socialism is the same thing, Capitalism, Democracy, Anarchy… the list is as complete as our renditions of ignoring the flaws of systems we create. I’m not saying democracy is a failure, but it’s the best we’ve gotten so far we think and we’re definitely seeing some flaws around the world.
One of the interesting things about all of these systems is that fundamentally, they are thought of because of flaws in the preceding systems. Marx thought life should be more fair, as an example, and what he laid out was a framework built around fixing that flaw and what he was willing to sacrifice to do so. Like every other system.
We don’t imagine systems because we’re stuck in them, and when we do dare imagine a new system it’s defined largely by the old system. The more complex the old system, the more flaws to deal with, and… we get a paralysis as the complex systems fail. We have invested so much into them we don’t want to see them fail, and yet we see it around the world how systems are failing.
Where a baby horse first begins walking we are amazed. It happens within hours. To live in modern society, it takes about 18 years maybe to start ‘walking’ for we in a civilized society, and even then there are those that don’t get it right and end up outside the boundaries of what is acceptable, or right, or just.
When we see good people on the wrong side of those boundaries in our every day lives, when we take off our societal blinders, we need to realize that maybe something is wrong. If we believe something is worth keeping, we should keep it. That’s how bees end up with influencing flowers. Over thousands of years, they have defined the flowers they visit.
Too often we get lost in the busy work of the bee and forget that we’re also defining the flowers of the future, themselves living things.
It’s hard to think of systems of government as flowers, isn’t it? We do need some core system, and maybe what we’re looking at just doesn’t fit that anymore.
Clearly, we’ve been focusing on the manure. The plant is grown, set, and ready for us to look beyond to what we really want to drag out of the future.
There was a time when we were not so caught up in ourselves and thought of the generations to come. Maybe it’s time to smell the roses.
Do I have answers? No. But I have a lot of questions.
One of the Barbados Cherry bonsai projects I have has begun flowering today. It’s a simple enough thing, something maybe we take for granted, but it offered me something that my life doesn’t always get me: tangible results.
I suspect I’m not alone in that. Writing software rarely got me tangible results. Blogging doesn’t give immediate tangible results. Writing, even less so. We take what we can get in this regard.
The week has been an interesting one altogether as the ficus retusa cuttings have taken root and I have given some away. I think they’re ficus retusa. It was labeled as ‘Asian Ficus’. That, I have found, is not that helpful and people who label plants vaguely should be drawn and quartered by an artist – since to do it as it used to be done seems to be frowned upon in modern society.
I went to see a psychiatrist who assured me I wasn’t on the autism spectrum. That put to rest many things said to me over the decades by well-intentioned non-psychiatrists. I can now say I’m not. I’m just weird in my own way. That didn’t take long, so we had time to kill and we discussed some other things.
Of course, he asked me who I was. That’s a standard question. My answer, which I won’t share with you because it’s an important question in understanding people and the answer should be authentic, seemed to surprise him a little since it wasn’t a standard response, as he said. All in all that was an interesting thing to do, and worthwhile I think. It gave me, in it’s own way, a tangible result.
The butterfly was in the reception area of the office. It seemed like a nice lighting fixture.
I think I finally found a way to tell the story I want to tell in the book. The first chapter has confounded me, so I just started writing and will chop off things as I need. I think much of this book will be looking at different parts of a tree, metaphorically, but not seeing the full tree. Like the picture of the flower above.
Hopefully we all get some tangible results this week.
My father, about about 5 years before he died, began feeding birds. He did this for the pleasure of hearing them sing, I suppose. In a way I suppose it was one of his ways of controlling his environment. He also found it amusing that passing birds would make a mess on passing cars.
They never really did.
He liked to think one day they would. In some ways he wasn’t all that nice, but his distaste for people using their horn around the corner was so tangible that you could see a bird feeder floating above the road.
After he died, I continued the practice a bit, but rather than hang it over the road, I brought it to a more natural setting at that old house on San Fernando Hill. I tried it near the avocado tree, and it still wasn’t too good there. Birds like places where they feel safe.
Don’t we all?
And so the feeder ended up at the back of the house, in view of the kitchen sink. As a bachelor, this was convenient for coffee and food, and as someone who seems to have taken way too many pictures (you’re seeing some of the good ones), it was a blind that the birds were used to.
The history here is that for a while the City of San Fernando would spray malathion all over to deal with mosquito issues. Anecdotally, after they did that in the 1990s, there were less birds in the area as well as less bird pepper trees, named after their planters. Whether directly or indirectly, I believe the spraying caused a decrease in the birds.
When my father started feeding the birds, I filled in when he wasn’t home to do it for very different reasons. They had stopped spraying malathion, and there was still enough wild land on the hill to allow for re-population.
The palm tanagers( thraupis palmarum), in the top picture, were the first to the feeder. They had seemed to survive the best, and so they happily fed. In time, their cacophony brought out other birds to the feeder. The Great Kiskadee was omnipresent, but they are hardy and will eat anything – including Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Within a few days, the blue-grey tanagers (thraupis episcopus) showed up in much fewer numbers. They behaved much like the palm tanagers but in their own little clique. They sounded all alike to me, but they only really fed with their own clique.
The bare eyed thrush (big eyed grieve, tardis nudigenus) came along next. Shy yet bold at the same time, they seemed on the constant lookout for predators but had no issues putting the other birds in place on the feeder. The Great Kiskadees, always looking for opportunity, would back off when they saw a bare eyed thrush nearby. This brought out the tropical mockingbirds (mimus gilvus), too, though there are plenty of pictures of them. If there was a pecking order, I’d put the tropical mockingbirds at top.
Male white lined tanager (tachyphonus rufus), with a Great Kiskadee(Pitangus Sulphuratus) in the background on the feeder.
In time, other birds showed up, like the white-lined tanagers (tachyphonus rufus), barred antshrikes, tropical kingbirds, and so on.
It became quite lively. In fact, if I did not restock the feeder by sunrise, palm tanagers would make their way to my room through the open window and act as alarm clocks. None of the other birds did that, but the palm tanagers for some reason had no trouble making a ruckus to get fed. This I considered a problem, not because I minded the palm tanagers, but because it made me aware that we had formed a relationship I didn’t intend.
I wanted to get the bird population back, I enjoyed them, but they shouldn’t depend on me. By this time, the barred antshrikes were nesting in the yard. White lined tanagers (tachyphonus rufus) had fresh hatchlings, and I had planted some fruit trees in the yard as well as let the mango tree thrive. There was food there, they could ‘plant’ more plants – I had hoped for bird pepper trees, but none popped up, likely because all the bird pepper trees in the area had died.
Bare eyed thrush (Turdus Nudigenis), locally called the Big eyed grieve.
At the same time, one of the arms of the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago developed a road up the other side of San Fernando Hill, which on it’s face seemed a good idea. It’s a definite landmark, there is a lot of flora and fauna that is worth appreciating.
But instead they just had fetes, where loud music was played throughout the night, and when they decided to light fireworks, the debris landed on the galvanized roof above me and those around me.
The peace and quiet was to be no more on the Hill, as we called it, and it was no longer a nice place to live for the birds. For the other wildlife. And, I might add, for me.
I had been outmatched by drunken revelry and fireworks.
This is why when one of my father’s sisters challenged me for the house and demanded I move out, I didn’t bother fighting about it. Within a week, I handed her the keys and didn’t look back. The house did not have good memories over the years and my attempt to create some had failed.
I drove by the place last week, being in San Fernando for some other reason, and just shook my head as I drove by, looking at the disrepair of the place. My father’s sister had died not long after I had handed her the keys, nobody thought to inform me of her funeral and I probably would not have gone had I known. In the stack of bad memories, she was just another one.
Yet I remembered watching those birds thrive for that period. How very interesting they were with their social standings, their bickerings. Their families grew, and hopefully they migrated away from that horrible place as well. It could have been a good place.
I found myself revisiting a thought from yesterday when I was in conversation with someone who was challenging me on my lack of belief. I had pointed at a flower that happened to be nearby and said, “Most people would just say, ‘Oh, that’s a pretty flower'”, but when I look at it, I know I’m staring at thousands of years of evolution of that flower that it didn’t pick, but the pollinators chose. That there were plants didn’t make it because they were off a shade of color or shape from what we see now.
The conversation moved on and I didn’t get to finish the thought. I finished it earlier.
Flowers are pretty because pollinators made them so and because we said, “oh, these are pretty” and cultivated them further. So when I’m looking at a flower, I’m looking at seemingly infinite amount of chances to be something else. But these changes to make the flower what it is now came from choices made by more than one species.
Each of those species are affected by seemingly countless factors. Seasons, temperatures, food sources, oxygen levels, rainfall, and species evolution for all of those.
It’s amazing. It’s beautiful to consider, all those little things that made that flower a flower that is appealing to us, and why would it be appealing to us? There’s an interesting question too, maybe that’s how we found the bees to get at their honey. I don’t know.
Yes, that is a beautiful flower, and now maybe you’ll see how beautiful they are. They are the survivors our world picked.
One of the anthems we had when in our teenage years was ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ by Twisted Sister, written by Dee Snider. And he didn’t when it came to many things, including testifying in a Senate hearing against censorship. He’s been a pretty interesting figure throughout the years, and it’s pretty clear that if there were two piles, he would probably be more in the “We’re not gonna take it” pile.
My generation, coming of age, well… we kinda took it. It’s not that we had many options, the world was changing faster and faster, corporations were buying each other out and axing human resources like Aztec priests, all with the best of intentions.
Like the Aztec priests.
DeepAI representation of Reagan as an Aztec priest. Economic disparity sold separately. 🙂
There is this thought of intentionality when we look at things about trickle-down economics, where those ‘temporarily inconvenienced millionaires’ will defend it in the hope that one day they will be on the right side of it, while on the other side of it you have those who think it was done to their groups personally.
Whether there was intentionality or not is silly to debate. When we look at the facts, economic disparity has increased. Not much has trickled down no matter how hard one works, and what’s worse is we find that where it trickles the least, the costs go up the most.
We were told if we worked hard, things would succeed, but this we have pretty much found to be a way to keep people busy doing things to make other people money. Technology promising productivity enhancements is much the same thing.
When we factor in population growth with medical advances, we have more people living longer. As I joked with a young pharmacist last week, “I pay you for my medications so that I can live longer so I can pay you more for my medications.” It was a quip, but the thought of that recursion can be a little dispiriting. We live longer, yet to what end? My generation shoved quite a few elderly into nursing homes, and government generational ponzi schemes of retirement have become burdened.
I think even though we GenX folk have had our own challenges, lived very different lives than generations before and after, even being called the leaded generation, we need to remember the song that even now is on the lips of Ukrainians.
Maybe we need to revisit it. Dee Snider did. Still does. I don’t want to be a part of a generation sung about.
