metaphor

Restaurant Types

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The beauty of the restaurant metaphor for how we become who we are is that it has some built-in biases.

Every culture, every geography, comes with it’s own sort of restaurant. There’s the ubiquitous Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Thai and Indian restaurants, to name only a few. There are even American restaurants, with their various shades of American ranging from steakhouses to Vegan spots. You’re unlikely to find avocado toast in a steakhouse, but it’s possible.

Go anywhere on the planet, the food is different. Why? Well, there are different ingredients, different seasonings, and differing people.

Tourism of the palate isn’t for everyone, though. We gravitate to the restaurants we like, and we avoid those we don’t.

What it doesn’t cover – what isn’t covered – are the increasing number of people who don’t fit. Sushi tacos are (hopefully) not a thing. You’d be hard pressed to find a pork biryani in the Middle East. You’d probably be hard pressed to find a beef biryani in India. That’s just ingredients, not their balance and how they are prepared.

There are fusion restaurants – I’m not sure if they’re still trendy or not – and there are changes that happen to foods in different countries.

You might hear about the best ‘Chinese food’ in an area, but is it really Chinese? Probably not. The same holds true of every type of restaurant, and this is an important thing to consider when we reverse that metaphor back to people.

Beyond Star Stuff.

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Brown Dwarf. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

I’ve been lost in thought for a few days because I’ve been reading a lot and putting some things together to try to make sense of a lot of… well, what we consider reality.

Everyone needs a hobby.

It’s matured a bit since ‘Who Are We?” as I’ve pulled and tugged on it.

Not long ago, my psychologist asked me to describe anger in my own words. I puzzled on it and decided to describe a planet with a molten core, and when that core got too hot or when the crust on the surface had weak points, the molten core would pop up through the surface – except you don’t know exactly where that will happen. She pointed out that most people simply described a volcano, and I responded.

“Then they rob themselves of being a planet.”

The point I was trying to make – and maybe I made it, I’m not sure – is that while we describe the feeling of anger as a volcano, a volcano doesn’t exist without a planet. In fact, if you talk to people who know about planets and stuff, they’ll tell you a certain set of circumstances causes volcanoes and not all planets have them, and some might have them more, and some might have them less.

Like us.

My point was also that when angry, I didn’t know where that anger would have impacts on my surface – and how much of an impact. When dealing with your sex of choice, it’s a lot like having a dreaded pimple in the middle of your forehead suddenly appear and distract from the rest of you.

“He was a nice guy, but that pimple made him look like a cyclops!”

You get the points, hopefully. You might get angry at work and, because you can’t vent there, you might vent at home, and that may impact your home relationships even down to the goldfish. It goes the other way as well. And when you can’t vent in either place, it builds until it vents somewhere.

I thought this was a good description of anger.

It’s also a good description of how our worlds interact, these planets rolling around the galaxy – but planets don’t really do that outside of star systems, so it’s more like stars.

Suddenly, we’re not just made of stardust. We are stars ourselves. Figuratively, anyway. Anger becomes flares, flares that can travel across or even burn relationships completely – or both. And before you know it, you’re in this world of stellar flame that affects more than just you and even gets reflected back even after your flare is long gone.

We all don’t burn the same way or the same rate, so it can get really awkward fast. So maybe you dodge out of that area of influence and find yourself elsewhere. You start over, but if you carry the same problem, you create the same problem and the cycle repeats. No matter where you go, there you are.

And that’s just anger. There’s so much in the way of dynamics that fits. Maybe we’re all spherical gears held together by society aggregately impacting each individual like a driving module – but it’s really about the closest people who are also the same spherical gear, but with different ratios – spots where things don’t push against each other the same way. Someone who doesn’t mesh then doesn’t fit in and is either broken by society or causes society to grind to a halt when made of exponentially sterner materials.

Let’s dive deeper.

What if the ‘gearing’ on the surface of each of those spheroids was the topography of our inner skies – how we perceive the world, the topography our limits – those with different experiences again don’t fit in because they don’t mesh.

This has a fun depth to it. It’s making sense so far.

The Spreadsheet(s) of Life

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empty sheetThe world is full of interesting interactions that we are only beginning to understand as the technology enhancement of our senses increases. Using Sir Isaac Newton as an example, one day he was sitting under an apple tree and got hit with one. Some say it was in the head, but I prefer the alternate storyline of it hitting him in the crotch while he was sitting down.

Either way, he figured out the basics of gravity because of an apple interrupting Newton’s moment,  and also because Newton was lacking in common sense. I imagine most people of his period knew not to sit under a bearing fruit tree. Gravity was implicit in a lot of things back then, but what Newton did through his cerebral or testicular fortitude was formalize it so the rest of us could talk about it, write about it, and yes, even complain about it. Gravity suddenly became a factor in what we now call ‘Science’ today.

So we stuck it in our spreadsheet of life as one of the things we had to account for. Really, the ‘spreadsheet’ is just a good metaphor for this sort of thing because most people know them, even if they are baffled by how to use them. Things are in tidy rows and columns, something we inherited from our perception of the world. The world, though, is not tidy, and is full of things we don’t know.

The Unstable Hill

landslipRecently, there was a landslip behind where I live. It was a sudden thing it seemed, yet it was the culmination of years – perhaps even decades. Of course, some people wanted to attribute it to one single thing, but there are a whole lot of factors involved. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time studying it as I wait for more for it to come down.
First, there’s the underlying rock which could have been fractured by quarrying decades ago. Then, there’s the flora – the trees dropping deep roots into wherever they can fit, seeking nutrients and water for the trees. Then there’s the rainfall, which was pretty high when it happened. It’s not a simple thing with a singular simple cause. It’s a spreadsheet of factors which I’ve only teased at here.

And why hasn’t the rest fallen yet? The elasticity of the interwoven roots of the flora at the top, possibly some tap roots further in, maybe it hasn’t been windy enough, maybe there hasn’t been enough rain – but anyone who looks at it can see it’s pretty unstable.

When we get into the human side of things, with land ownership and who is responsibility, insurance claims and trying to rebuild a fence there, all of that has to be taken into account. There are so many factors that even if one had a spreadsheet to stick it all in, there would be things missing, things that mattered more than other things… and yet, one of the more important factors would be time, because factors vary with time. We could keep track of that on different worksheets and say each worksheet represented a slice of time, or we could throw time in the worksheet with all the data at intervals in it.

The worksheet representing an interval in time I find most helpful in visualizing. You can imagine this huge matrix of information changing in the worksheets stacked on each other, and more worksheets being added all the time. This landslip, a relatively simple thing, suddenly becomes a study in complexity, of data purposed to become information.

We’re More Complicated.
Our bodies are these organic machinations powered by grey matter that we’re still only really beginning to understand. We break it up into specialties so that Doctors can specialize in different parts of our bodies, since to know them all and be good at it would take a lifetime at least. By the time you learn it all, you’d plop down dead and the next generation would have to start all over again. This may change with technology, but for now this is the way it is.

Our psychology, which sits somewhere on top of this mass of physiology, is something we’re still trying to figure out as well. Ask about the number of psychological attributes a single person has, we get answers ranging from 4,000 to 3, with the present popular view being 5. Then we get into the really messy stuff when all these attributes interact with another person with the same number of attributes. Imagine two spreadsheets having a fistfight. Or making love. Or just trying to get by understanding all of this while being driven by narratives.

It seems impossible to track all of this data. But we cheat. When we see someone who demonstrates some factors we’re familiar with, we draw upon previous experience – for better or worse. This has become the dirty word we call prejudice. It is also why cats are not pleased by cucumbers. Some say it’s a fear of snakes, but given that the reaction time of the average cat is 20 milliseconds faster than that of a snake, I think the idea that they see the snake as a threat to their food supply and, like most creatures, they don’t like being startled.

The point being – even the household feline has prejudices that are shortcuts based on evolution. If you don’t jump when startled, something might eat you. And that’s just one factor.

So Much More.
I’ll be referring back to this since I’ve found the spreadsheet such an easy way to explain the idea to people, it’s easy for most to visualize, and it’s not as intimidating as what I started thinking about decades ago. A spreadsheet is a user friendly matrix whose math isn’t defined by mathematicians.

Seas of Humanity

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_JMB6699LoIf I had been born a few hundred years ago, I would likely have been on a ship staring out into the horizon, my body rolling to the waves, heading to places not on known maps if only to get away from all that traps us.

Some people are comfortable in what society dictated before we were born, where it is all well defined by those who came before, a world which worked for those that defined it and their descendants. So much of our world works that way, and as humanity grows older the clay of systems becomes brick, hardened, inflexible, immobile.

A child born today will find in adulthood that they pay taxes that were agreed upon by others long ago, that they may worship in a religion that while they may be faithful is an accident of geography, that they have more or less opportunity due to a socioeconomic status that they had nothing to do with. Even our bodies conspire against us in this way, subject to genetics that some deny even as they breed animals. Few, if any, break out of these shells, and as time goes by it becomes harder and harder to break out of them.

In fact, simply traveling without permission from authorities we didn’t create across borders we didn’t draw to see things in other places is illegal, something I myself was born into, but which I have watched become more and more harsh. The nomadic roots of our human past find themselves in shrinking containers and, when the container cracks under the pressure, someone dutifully comes along and mends the cracks with gold to make the container that much more attractive to those outside, but less bearable for those within.

We live lives where we dig coal, and for those few of us fortunate, we dig coal in ways that we enjoy, and at points when we look up from our task and dare to look to the horizon, someone or something cracks the whip to keep our noses down. And so we go, nose to the coal grindstone of ‘life’, in the hope that the light at the end of the tunnel will draw nearer as someone long ago promised.

A lifetime of slaving at something or the other, or many things, to be rewarded later when we are old. The 50 year old in the convertible corvette, what’s left of his hair blowing in the wind, the tired and empty joke of decades ago.

Nature reclaimsI’ve been left in this life rediscovering elder things, repurposing that which came before, exploring the abandoned as if it were new only because it was new to me, sharing it with others who found it new for themselves. Photographing things, writing about things, and watching parts of a past we romanticize only because it is abandoned, maybe because inside we feel abandoned by the gilded cages we live in – some more gilded than others.

I do not know. I do feel.

There is little rationality we find in such feelings in systems that tell us even how to feel – if we’re a bit too different, if you rebel just a bit too much against the system, we are either criminal or someone with some form of mental or emotional disorder, rarely both, and based on… things we find we are unable to control a few steps beyond the facade.

Any port in a stormWith all of this mind, I close my eyes at time and escape into the view of a bay with my gear packed, thinking of a world where I can sail away from what is established and able to push into the unknown, where the laws of nature outweigh the rules of the land, where it is unsafe and where one’s worth is gauged not by artificial structures but instead whether or not you are a good person in a storm.

And I open my eyes and find myself sailing through the artificial structures of society, dancing on the waves of what people have been taught to think and believe and how to think and believe, and realize I am sailing across the most dangerous waters we could create on maps that shift even as we cross latitudes and longitudes, having lost members of the steadfast crew as we moved to the horizon of humanity, and I find some comfort in that.

The Bananaquit And The Hummingbird.

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Bananaquit from above
The Bananaquit

I sat one afternoon after lunch and sat, listening to the surf. A bold bananaquit had grown used to me and would come within arms reach, whistling and studying me – unafraid even when I moved. He whistled loudly, either happily or voicing a complaint. After much song and the little hopping two-step dance of the bananaquit, he would go for the hummingbird feeder.

The ever-present hummingbird watched from it’s regular roost in a shrub in front of me, and would dart at the bananaquit – the bananaquit that was unafraid of me would fly off quickly to avoid the humming bird, looking for it, but unable to see it.

I watched the hummingbird hover in the shade of a nearby tree, watching the feeder it had claimed. As the bananaquit would sing and dance toward it again, the hummingbird would dart at it again,so fast and precise.

The bananaquit would again fly off.

Photo
The Hummingbird

This process repeated itself in so many different ways – different directions, different starting points and ending points for both of them. The bananaquit could simply not get to the feeder, afraid of a bird even smaller than itself as I quietly chuckled at it’s many failures when trying to sneak into the hummingbird’s territory.

I watched – they had been at it for an hour, and in heartbeats that must be the equivalent of days of their lives, perhaps even weeks.

A thought occurred to me.

It might be nice to have a hummingbird to deal with all the noisy bananaquits in my life.

Context

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Crystal sparksWe miss things.

We look away. Sometimes it’s a matter of time, which is a matter of prejudice in the full meaning – not the popular usage.

Take for example The Wall, by Pink Floyd. I introduced the album to my father circa 2001, and he liked it. In 2004, I got a copy of the video for The Wall. The video is something that Tarantino probably looks up to, really, but it tells the story as they wished to represent it.

My father hated it, and would not listen to Pink Floyd after it. In his words, “They’re fucking sick!”.

Now, we could get into the metaphors, etc, but the video – is biographical to an extent, as is the music. It’s about tearing down metaphorical walls, something of a theme in every sentient human I know and have known. To me, it’s soul food.

That’s not what my father saw at all – in it’s own way a tribute of our differences. To him it was sick and disturbing. To me, in a way, that was sort of the point – because inside of ourselves, when we’re honest with ourselves, I think – there always lurks something sick and disturbing. Some might say that there is a darkness in all of us. My father was taught, oddly enough, to maintain The Wall, whereas I embraced that darkness early on.

Was he wrong? No, he was not, he was absolutely right in what he saw – in his context, in the context of his own life and what he thought the world should look like. Was I wrong? No, I saw in my context that it all fell into place. That he was a cornerstone of some of my Walls was a bit poetic in his reaction. Pink Floyd was also a tool for me to help work my way around things, and he believed in brute force – which is not to say that he wasn’t intelligent, but that he was forged of the same materials in a different furnace.

That’s one example of context. Others abound. We all prejudge things to at least a small degree, and some of us – a few, it would seem – take the time to get to understand the contexts better. To see things from different perspectives, to appreciate these perspectives for what we are. It’s important for creating lasting solutions in a world that doesn’t really care about context – it doesn’t care about our prejudices, it doesn’t care about any of what we care about.

The Laws of Nature, which we’ve started figuring out, don’t care about what you think of the next person.

Society, on the other hand, does. We live in both, and we live where contexts are always in conflict – and the big ugly ones remain unresolved because they fester, they are not allowed to heal, and they remains bricks of the wall in our society.