Christmas Present.

For the past few years Christina and I have donated to charity on behalf of our friends and family at Christmas. This first started through Heifer International when in a moment of interesting cultural zeitgeist various family members bought each other goats, ducks, oxen and such in third world countries. The reasons for this are pretty simple, we haven't lived within a thousand miles of any family members in years, everyone in our family has enough money to buy themselves what they want up to the level that they would get in a present, it feels at least as good to give charitably than to a relative somewhere else, and it takes a lot less effort.

We've taken this seriously over the years, generally increasing what we give (although perhaps not this year, which has been financially very poor for us) and thinking about it more than whether to give a goat or or a water buffalo. It's quite a good way to think about what is the greatest good that can be done, the most efficient use of resources to improve the human condition. Heifer International was very good because animals reproduce, and can be spread around the village, continuously increasing wealth. But this year I wanted to get deeper than that.

It seemed to me that the biggest problems in the world derive largely from two factors, too many people, and wealth not spread around evenly. Now, to reduce the problem of over-population we can either kill large numbers of people off, or stop producing them at the same rate. To spread the wealth around evenly we can either take it from the rich and give it to the poor, or enable the poor to become more wealthy. I know that the greater the educational level of women the lower the birth rate, the more educated the children, and the greater hopes for improved economy as a result. This is a feedback-loop, the best sort of change as it is self-reinforcing. The more women are educated, the more their offspring are educated. Increasing the education level of women in third world countries seems to me to be the most cost-effective method of solving problems because it has a knock-on effect in so many areas. Worried about Global Warming? Reducing the population is a solution requiring zero technological advancement. Worried about poverty? Increased skills for third world people diversifies their methods of getting wealth and improves their chances of competing in the global economy. Worried about war and hatred? Educating people to truly understand heir neighbors is the most effective method of preventing violence between groups.

It turns out that a cousin of Christina's is runs a non-governmental organization (NGO) in India. Named Video Volunteers, its' aim is to provide a voice to the poorest of the poor in India, to provide information, resources, opportunity to the Dalit (which has been known as the "Untouchable caste") and particularly women. We believe that such grass root organizations, directed by the people concerned, working for the goals of those concerned, and self-reinforcing, are the most effective methods for improving the world as a whole. We think through our Christmas present to them, on your behalf, the lives of dozens of people will be dramatically improved, and this improvement will be self-sustaining, a good deed that will live on for generation after generation.

We hope you like your present, and if you don't already give presents like this we hope you will consider doing so in the future.

Sunshine On The Water Looks So Lovely.

The weather in Houston has been unseasonably cold and grey, for winter. We've had about three weeks of grey skies, rain and temperatures in the forties and fifties. According to meterologists the average high in December in these parts is 74 degrees fahrenheit. But today the sun is out, although it is still a bit chilly, and I had the opportunity to see sunshine reflected off the bayou. It really is lovely. While I was happy to see the grey skies and feel the chill, wearing a sweater is quite pleasant, it doesn't take long before sunshine is welcome again.

* * *

I think I post more often when things aren't going so well, thus the gap between posts. We now own a lovely new house, and are extravagantly buying furniture for it, mostly a new bedroom set. It is very nice to see my darling wife be excited by something, it was touch and go last week, but we went for a long bicycle ride and that helped us both. December is the difficult month for her at work, just a case of survival. Just a little stretch until we're sitting by the pool with a cocktail in the warm sunshine.

* * *

The very first post on this blog was about language, about how so much of what people say doesn't make sense. In Houston at the moment you can find many vehicles with a bumper sticker saying, "Keep Christ in Christmas." I find this both amusing and alarming. Amusing because how would you take Christ out of Christmas? If there isn't Christ it's just a festival of lights, giving and celebration, just like there was when the fesival was appropriate by Christians. By definition, Christmas has Christ in it. Alarmed because what they really mean is keeping the omnipresence of their beliefs intact. So that every store, every house on every street, all the music that you hear, on every radio station, on signs on the street, literally everywhere is a reinforcement of Christianity. It is by its very nature, intolerant. The funny thing is that I have never been anywhere that could compare for the amount of Christmas stuff as here.

Amalgam.

The last few posts have been a discussion of last minute lethargy, fighting a cold and depression, a recurring fantasy plan for when I become disillusioned and hope for the next stage. My present mood is an amalgam of all these different issues, except the urge to purchase a gun and wild west it through the USA.

The cold is subsiding, but the last dregs are hanging on. The sad thing is that now my wife is sick so that I've gone from feeling crappy and mopey to spending my time with someone who feels crappy. It feels a bit as though the hits keep coming, none of them big enough to really give me an excuse to give up, just enough to keep knocking me down. The weather has been perfect for all of this, grey and wintry, we even had snow over the weekend.

The lessening of the grippe of the cold has meant (as I expected) a certain lightening of mood. This is excellent, a far more important aspect than fatigue and a sore throat. The death of the band that came about last week has resulted in me having no social interaction upon which I can depend (other than my wife, and she wants to lie under blankets with a book). I shall have to start again from scratch on my social life.

The new era is approaching rapidly. We close on the house on Thursday, and get the keys for Sunday. I will get to experience the totally surreal moment of having a piece of paper worth tens of thousands of dollars in my hand. The times that these have happened have always felt ludicrous, as though people must realize that all I have is a piece of paper with some words and numbers written on it. exchanging that for a house is extremely silly. As the close approaches the Lethargy intensifies, today's job was to switch over the utilities, a task requiring half-an-hour of phone calls that felt similar to the labours of Hercules.

Ah, but next week my major task will have been completed. I will have bought us a house. All that remains after that will be all the chores from one house, doubled, with the need to transport all the stuff from one house to the other.

A Cold

I have a cold. I am very lucky with my colds in that I rarely get much more in the way of symptoms than fatigue, and a tendency to get cold. This means that I feel just fine when lying under warm blankets. Having an excuse to lie under warm blankets for extended periods is a good thing.

The problem I have with colds is that the fatigue reduces my energy level, and my energy level is related to my mood. I become prone to depression. In fact, the beginning of this blog post was going to be that great lyric from Paul Simon's Sound of Silence,

Hello Darkness my old friend,
I've come to talk to you again.

However, I find myself looking at this from a distance. While I can feel almost an urge for sadness, a tendency towards tears, I can also see exactly why it is and designate this as "Unreal." It's as if I'm sitting in a room reading a nice book and there's someone sobbing in the next room. I know that in a couple of days these feelings will be gone and I'll feel better, it's just a cold.

Overall, what I am dealing with is the realization that I am in Texas for a semi-permanent period. We've signed papers to buy a house, there's no escaping this now. My reaction has been very interesting, I feel more like I felt when I was a teenager than I have in decades. I have a sense of powerlessness, but a knowledge that it is temporary. I have a sense of being very much alone, but I have reliable things to retreat into when alone. I fully expect that once we have moved into a our new home a new era will start, or at least an excuse to look for a new era.

Death of the Band

Today I made the decision to dissolve the band which I had started. The band had been an attempt to recreate the marvelous experience that I had with a Sam's Cross in Portland, Oregon. The music would be the same, the instruments similar, but within the understanding that a band is a construction made from the material of the people within it. I had hoped to gather together weekly with some nice people, play some music, and make some friends. After several months, most probably on St. Patrick's Day we could play our first show, and I could have that wonderful moment of making people happy by doing something I love.

So, what happened? Essentially what happened is that those who answered my ads could not sustain their interest or availability. A group of four of us had begun to play regularly on a Wednesday evening, and had got to the point where we could play a dozen songs, and were just beginning to be able to play two or three of them at a level that I would be happy for others to hear. Just at this point there started to be reasons for people to miss a practice, in fact a complete line-up has only been available once in the last two months. Then our whistle player announced she would be leaving town for several months in January (then December) for a job. Yesterday the guitar player decided that he didn't have the time for the band anymore.

A month ago I had put out an ad for more musicians, an attempt to fill out the sound of the band. A guy had answered, but he plays the guitar. In fact, only one person who did not play guitar or bass answered any of the ads. It seems as though music in Houston is formulaic, drums, bass and guitar, rock or country instruments. The chances of finding someone willing to learn something else, or playing something else with interest in this music seems slim. An Irish folk band with a bass and two guitars is not an Irish folk band.

The lack of knowledge of the music, the scarcity of musicians playing something not in the mainstream, the sheer distances that people have to drive in order to meet means the pickings are slim, and the rate at which people quit is high. Even in Portland I believe the band went through nearly twenty musicians before a steady group was formed. When faced with the choice of going through a series of people joining and quitting, playing the same songs with people learning them for the first time, for another year I decided that I simply wasn't adequately interested to do it.

Things might have been different if I had been making friends, but no great connection had been made. There hadn't been much discussion about anything other than the next song.

This doesn't mean that I am quitting music, I shall instead be concentrating on furthering my ability with the mandolin, pushing on through my book of Irish mandolin tunes, I'm about half way through. The plan is to be able to play all these tunes from memory, and then to take some lessons on theory and improvisation. Through this plan, at some point in the next two or three years I would hope to be someone who can walk into a pub and play a few tunes with irish folk musicians without embarrassment.

Perhaps next year I will try again with a band, but the way I feel at the moment I am emphasizing the temporary nature of my time in Texas. I have dreams and visions of living near a college town in the Carolinas sitting on a porch and playing wonderful folk music with good people.

Comfortable Grey.

Today is day for those things that can always be relied upon, the pleasure of a full stomach, the comfort of blankets, the distraction of a good book. The sky is low and leaden, and a wet wind blows. As a child I was fond of long walks in solitude, and the blustery conditions kept the Texans away.

The essence of days like this I always think of as a time I stood upon the summit of an iron age hill fort, the unbelievably lush grass bending beneath the force of an Atlantic gale. My anorak played a tattoo with raindrops, while I remained warm and musty in a sweater. There was no-one in sight and I felt so perfectly right, a full sense of belonging, time not passing and myself a thousand years old.

I have antipathy for people today, and I strongly suspect that people have antipathy for myself, not just now, but in general. A bed, a bath, a book and a blanket, all can be relied upon but people will always disappoint. People will also amaze, amuse and astonish, but they also always disappoint.

I have a whimsy of building with my own hands a tiny one room cottage of field stone and turf roof, out in the damp depths of nowhere. It is just a whimsy, I flutter from one mood to the next, but this mood is about hiding, and such a place seems a fitting place to hide.

Plan B.

1. Get a check for disposable income. Don't ask for anything that would require a lawyer but get some money. You can't live without it.
2. Purchase a used 9mm semi-automatic and a number of rounds of ammunition. In Houston this should be relatively cheap and will be much harder to get when you are poor and filthy-looking.
3. Get the Subaru included and don't take the dog.
4. Camping equipment. Costs will be dramatically decreased by sleeping in the back of the Subaru. I see no downside here.
5. Don't pick a destination. Trying for a future is what you got you here. Blow all your money. Shoot at people. Have sex with anyone. Why not?
6. Remember who your friends are. This may be tricky, but you can do it. There has to be one of them, right?
7. See what happens.
8. Remember 2.
   

The "Nearly There" Lethargy

I am a lazy person. But a practical lazy person. This means that while I strongly dislike doing things, I understand that things have to be done. Furthermore, often if you don't do something you will have to do more later. As a result I tend to get to things done quite quickly, I don't like the weight of things undone hanging around. I'd much rather be lying around, free as a bird. One of the modifiers on this is my mood. Since my mood changes quite a lot, or more accurately my energy level changes, there are times when I really don't want to do anything at all, and other times when I am extremely productive. I tend to do a weeks' worth of projects in a day.

The other modifier to this principle is when there is a sustained project, something that takes months or years, just when the end is in sight all motivation evaporates. This happens at the point where I become certain that I can fulfill the final tasks. Once the final portion of a long and difficult task becomes something which provides little challenge it becomes extraordinarily difficult for me to get over the finish line. I tend to waffle, prevaricate, procrastinate and avoid the last little bit. Well, the end of our Annus Difficilis is at hand and all that was needed was the collection of about twenty pieces of paper. Ten days went by with me wandering and waffling, but yesterday I spent a full eight hour day of mad scrambling to finish everything. Before closing on our house I need to send one e-mail and then wait for three weeks before the ridiculous signing event.

The "Nearly there lethargy" is a fascinating thing about myself that I don't really understand. I also don't really understand whether I like having things about myself that I don't understand, or not.

Dreams.

This week has been characterized for me by a series of extremely vivid dreams. Usually I awake with little or no memory of any dreams. This week I have had a number of dreams that I have remembered. Last night I remembered two dreams, the first with me in the role of a young boy who had joined the Liverpool Football Team. There was distance and distrust from the established stars of the team, but I felt confident in my abilities.

The second dream from last night seemed to be my own brain mocking my tendency for existentialist angst. In the role of a James Bond like spy I attempted to suavely wander through a series of high end back-drops (including the Grand Canal in Venice). As I attempted to flee from mysterious characters, who were going to find me out as a fraud, ridiculous problems would stop this. Traffic stopped me from crossing a street, the welds on a metal ladder would pop open one after the other, my beautiful white tuxedo was constantly being soaked in one way or other. But the entire feeling of the dream, which I think is really the essence of dreaming, was one of a slapstick comedy.

Earlier on in the week was the really good dream. This started off with myself and my friend Dade needing to get back to his apartment in an industrial area because I had left two sandwiches in the oven to warm. I became separated from him in attempting to get there and found myself running to try and get to the apartment, and then up through multiple security doors in a barren and depressing urban setting.
Once in the apartment there was a sudden change in which I was arrested because of mistaken identity, and then at the same time I assumed the persona of Michael Hasselhof within a film. With a large, black guard as my accomplice Hasselhof was transferred to a different section of the jail under the less than watchful eyes of a female guard. Changing into military fatigues he slides down a chute and out into the snow-draped industrial area in which ROTC students are marching. Assuming his best faux military posture he marches past them until he sees a group of school children on a field trip. One of the children sees him, the child who accused him of pedophilia, the child gives a wicked smile and goes to tell the teacher something. The dream ends with The Hoff desperately scrambling over the remains of a decrepit shed, fleeing in horror from the child.

A $2,500 Semi-Bluff

I think for my darling wife and myself the last year is not going to be remembered as a calendar year but from the point this time last year to this moment. Last year at this time Christina's work gave her the stark choice, lose your job at the beginning of what was then predicted to be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression or move to suburban Houston, Texas. We took the full time possible to make that choice and the process had everything from anger to depression, worry about our marriage, worry about simply living.

The year is now over with the acceptance of our offer for a house in Houston. The end of this process is finally in sight, a home of our own with our planning requiring simply enough effort for Christina to remain employed and for myself to ensure that we are fed, clothed, sheltered and happy. We have agreed to not even think about further planning for another year. We're just going to move into this place and gently vegetate in the sunshine. You know those all-inclusive resorts with a pool, cocktails and island music? We're going to go with the approach of a year long resort.

In the last year there's been a lot to do. I have never sold a house before, and that, with multiple contractors and painters and documents was an enormous stress. Christina and I spent several weeks apart for the first time in our relationship, I drove 3000 miles with a "Check engine" light on. We both have had bouts of depression, times of anger. We had to buy a car and rent a house in two days in an unfamiliar city. I've been bitten by a snake, seen the Grand Canyon, felt the disappointment of a nearly-failed vacation (Puerto Vallarta) when a vacation was really necessarily. I've said goodbye to too many people, and hello to not nearly enough. Our dog Larry is recovering from his second surgery this year. I've spent time with family in enormously different circumstances and experienced everything from being swamped in social interaction to feeling utterly alone in the world. It's been a tough year for me, and there are billions of people in the world who would love to have a year like mine. I am a lucky man. My marriage is as strong as ever after having been tested, the sun is shining, and I have enough money in my pocket to celebrate with a nice beer.

The title of this post comes from the circumstances of the negotiations today. The house was listed at $189,500, we offered $180,000. This afternoon we learned that there was a counter-offer at $182,500. In the scheme of things that $2.500 was not really going to change our minds about buying the house. It was a very clever counter-offer in that it was small enough that it could be reasonably expected that someone who wanted to buy the house wouldn't balk at it. But Christina and myself decided that we thought no-one else had an offer on the table. With such a small difference in the counter-offer it seemed very likely that he would take the original offer but was just trying to get a little extra cash out of it. We thought we were in the stronger position and stuck to our offer,which was accepted. A semi-bluff worth an hour of thought, and a little nervousness. I've never made a gamble like that before with that amount of money, looking at the odds and making a read on a person's position and taking a risk. $2500 wasn't worth not getting the house, but we have the house and the money. I feel like a proper grown-up.

Home.

Oh My Fucking Lord!

Excuse my french, but it's nothing you haven't heard before. The following is to a link about happiness, and apparently I am happier than all of the wise who opined upon the subject.

Hello Everybody.

I hope that if you are here for interesting insight into philosophical matters you will scroll down. I particularly recommend the Death vs. Cheney post, I feel it has been under-appreciated.

This one is just a little insight into the wonderful world of me. I got up today at 6:45 am after going to bed about 11pm. Generally I need about 9 hours of sleep. It is now 1:45am in the morning, and I can feel my brain racing like a dedicated marathon runner trying to break through the wall.

I have debated religion and philosophy for several hours. I am so clever right now that my tomorrow self would simply admit defeat. That's not a joke.

You know when in movies they show the montage to explain a series of activities (good Ween song by the way)? That's me in regular time right now. It's lucky I don't have the access or desire for cocaine.

We Are The Music Makers, And We Are The Dreamers Of The Dreams

"Snozberries? Who ever heard of a snozberry?"
"We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of the dreams"

This is probably the only instance of a line from a film that I have consistently remembered through my life. It is from the great Willy Wonka, a film that also was part of the reason for one of the great moves in my life, out to Portland. While visiting Portland I saw this at the Bagdad Theatre with home crafted beer and pizza on a flawless April day. I felt that Portland was a place of music makers and dreamers of dreams, and Michigan (my home at the time) was a place of toilers and doers.

This dichotomy is exactly what the words are about, in the face of doubt and suspicion Willy Wonka responds with the core of his character, that because something isn't, it does not mean that it can't be. The words are actually from an ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy which makes the point more clearly with each ensuing line.

I have been meaning to write a post based on this line over the last few weeks as it has reappeared to me over and over again. While walking in bright sunshine in the shadow of a volcano, while playing croquet on an English lawn, while walking maniacally under the shadow of enormous boulders. Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living, but I think this is not true. I think for most people their character is such that acting from reflex, doing what is expected, doing your work and loving your family is indeed a worthwhile life. In truth, without such people nothing would ever get done, famine would ensue, buildings would collapse. These are the watchers of sit-coms, the ones who listen to pop music, the ones who sneer at thinking.

Those who do not need to examine their lives are in the majority, and seem to dominate life. The unthinking hordes who can hold George Bush up as the most and least popular president in history as a result of madmen committing mass-murder rather than anything he did. I remember my teenage years as a grey, oppressive time in which dull and serious people tried to force the necessary information into me so that I could become productive. The methods they used were fear and a lack of alternatives. Listen to the first third of Pink Floyd's The Wall to get the basic idea.

In this sort of situation the statement that "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams" is an enormous comfort. The most important word of the phrase is "We." Gene Wilder plays it perfectly in the film, a tiny little whispered message to all the children with dreams and the knowledge of magic that they are not alone. In fact, there is a great chain throughout history that you can feel a part of from Homer to Tim Burton. There have been thousands of great geniuses, and millions of lesser lights, throughout every culture in all times. All these people have been told to cut out their strange ideas, to do something productive, to stop wasting their lives.

This is essentially a childish way of being. The emphasis is on exploring, finding out, inventing, playing. The antithesis of being a dreamer is to settle down and start acting your age. But the whole origin of humanity as a unique species is down to the extension of childhood, neoteny. I am indeed quite childish, a typical teenager with my angst and my anger, my dreams and my fairytales, my railing against the oppression that others think is nothing. I think that's just the way I am, a bright, middle-aged child.

I am a part of a special group, without whom life would be a drab and pointless activity. Without those who understand what I am talking about, whose essential nature is to think what might be rather than what is, to create something new, and that a thought or dream isn't just a dream, humanity would be just beasts digging in the dirt. While I am not a particularly special part of this group, no star or leading light, I am indisputably a member of this group. This gives me great comfort when being stared at with horror and incomprehension because I am mad (and at those times I am probably mad.) When I rant about the emotion that pours from a song to someone who's just not into that sort of music I can feel part of a long history. When I feel my skin crawl with the need to do, to experience, to feel, it is a comfort to know I am not alone. When I feel the tears come to my eyes at something deeply sad, but still marvel in the pure beauty of the sadness, I can know that I am not the only one who has felt such things.

It is not better to be part of this group, just different. But I know for sure that I am one of the music makers, one of the dreamers of the dream.

Electric Society - Why All The Negativity?

Much of my interaction with people now is through the internet, particularly on forums. The most surprising thing to me about this format is how well it does at providing the necessary social interaction to feel pretty good. Before the internet I have had a couple of periods in which I had a similar number of friends as I do now that I could actually meet and talk to, that is none. During those times it was extremely lonely for me, which seemed a bit strange because two of my favorite activities have always been walking alone and reading a book, entirely solitary activities. However, while I feel the absence of something most people think is vital to a happy life, a group of friends to meet and talk to, this doesn't bear down on me in the way it has in the past.

Apparently typing to someone and getting a response, even if you don't know their real name, or even gender, fulfills something in the human psyche. I don't think it matters actually what the topic of conversation consists of, just that there is an interaction. Making a blog post doesn't have the same effect, because it is a one way process. It's interesting that playing music is similarly interactive, I can play the same thing by myself in a room or in front of a crowd, and it is the applause that really is the most enjoyable thing.

The forums that I visit are mostly sports forums. This is a result of the 2004 US Presidential elections. Before that point I was mostly interested in discussing the things that really matter, politics and philosophy and what we should do with the world. Upon the re-election of President Bush I found that all too depressing, the gulf between what we should be doing and what was actually happening was too vast, and immersed myself in the completely trivial world of sport.

One of the interesting things about the internet is what it tells you about people. For example, the major use of the internet is for pornography, this pornography is more popular in politically conservative areas than politically liberal areas, and that the rate of rapes decreases noticeably in areas that receive high speed internet. What this tells us is that basically everybody is really interested in sex, that this sex interest cannot be altered one bit by culture or religion, that denying this just makes the situation worse, and that when given a safe, private option people will take it over the dangerous, public option. In other words the best way to deal with sex is to give people all the legal access to it they want in a private place. The same is almost certainly true for drugs. I'm sure it's true for religion.

Second to pornography on the internet is the sport of arguing with people, and arguing with people about sport is probably close to the top of this area of interest. Don't believe me? At this Portland TrailBlazer Forum there have been about 625,000 topic postings in its' history, which is about ten years. That's 170 topic postings a day about one basketball team, and these are just the topic starters, without the replies. So, at this one site there has been an average of something like 1,000 opinions posted a day. NBA basketball has an eight month season, that's four months without any basketball played, and there are only games every three days during the season. I know of four other forums dedicated solely to this one team. If I had to guess I would say that there are 10,000 posted opinions per game on the internet. This is clearly a preposterous number of opinions about a basketball game.

Looking at the postings what you find is that it is precisely the arguing that makes up most of the posting. The level of viciousness that goes on is only matched by the level of arrogant stupidity that also take place. People who have never played an officiated game of basketball will consistently claim that the coach of the team, a person who has played professionally for more than a decade, coached multiple teams at the highest level, and been selected for a key management position in a several hundred million dollar operation by successful business people, is an idiot in some way with regards to his job. This a preposterous position to take, but I would say it is the largest single category of opinion expressed.

The overwhelming number of posts are in fact negative. This has been extremely interesting to me as the Portland Trailblazers have risen from being a bad team to a good team, and yet the proportion of negativity has not changed. It seems to me that the posting on the internet has almost nothing to do with the purported subject matter, but is actually an expression of personality. Just like hardcore pornography relieving the sexual tensions of people regardless of culture and religion and therefore cutting down on the rape numbers, I think online, anonymous arguing regardless of the subject is fulfilling a need for people.

One of the things to realize is that on these forums the overwhelming majority are men. Men communicate in order to solve problems. One of the basic function of men, what they have evolved to be, are solvers of problems. Without having an opinion on a problem, being able to express that opinion, men are shadows of themselves. This is why men are so much more pompous than women. But so much of modern life is about sublimating these opinions and conforming. At work if you are a low ranking employee your opinion doesn't matter. I'm sure we've all had the experience where we know how to improve a working situation but simply don't get listened to because of our job title. At church you are told what to think. At home the pressure is there not to upset your loved ones. Men just want to say what they really think sometimes, and the internet is an almost consequence free way of doing that.

The result is a deeply uncivil conversation with those of a differing point of view. It makes much of the discussion on the internet distasteful, but I think it is serving a purpose. Internet forums give people an outlet that has enough if a social stimulation to ward off loneliness, to feel more important, and to express their opinions, but also no-one really gets hurt as a result. Just like we'd all prefer weird uncle Tommy to be jacking off in a vinyl suit to disgusting pornography to him raping young women in the park, we'd actually all prefer ignorant, opinionated blowhards yelling on the internet to yelling at their loved ones.

Halloween.

Bookends. The first and the last day of the night.

The month has been dominated by difference, difference in attitude, experience, process. This post will be subject to the restrictions in information that my life entails. This is a good thing as most of the hurt that I have produced has been as a result of my honesty. A trait I share with my mother and mother in law. I commented to my wife that I was without doubt the mother in the relationship. I love the doggy even when he makes me miserable.

I have been sober for about three weeks this month, through a combination of gout, free will, arrogance and circumstances. The general result was six hours of sleep a night, an increase of musical ability, a surprisingly low interest in alcohol, blisters on my feet, a fascination with romance, unharnessed rage, inadequacy. But that was subjective, I was an excellent servant. I felt very young, an absolute teenager. This is not a good thing. But I did learn that I have learned to be that very earnest nature and still be kind. I am good at caring. But I am very bad at submitting.

I have not posted during this time, because I censor myself. I think that's a shame, but it's an act of love. I have, however thought of novels and essays, and short stories, and pieces of art, and shadows, and science and beauty and loss, and culture. I have written a thousand posts and several novels, I wish I could connect you directly with my brain. It's the sort of thing that frightens other people but I embrace.

I would like people to e-mail me. I feel a little lonely. But I am happy as I post that.

Dick Cheney or Death?

I do much of my thinking that ends up in this blog while walking with the dog. I've always loved walking essentially alone, wandering and thinking. I was walking on a 95 degree, muggy day along side a dirty bayou while being slowly eaten alive by insects. The result was two possible blog topics, Death or Dick Cheney, and I've debated which to discuss since.

I thought about Dick Cheney because he has been a figure that fascinated me. The guy looks like a caricature of a villain, he is a curmudgeon, grumpy and surly. He has consistently searched for power and wealth throughout his life despite this clearly having a negative effect on his health. He clearly considers himself above the law, and someone who feels confident in making life and death decisions foe people. It is tempting to simply dismiss him as evil, but I think one of the great evils in humanity is the dismissing of other people with whom you disagree with such contemptuous terms. I think almost everyone in all of history sincerely thought they were on the side of good, but with their own definition of good.

I thought about death as a result of a series of recent events. One is the upcoming fortieth birthday that I will have his year, a benchmark date when I was growing up. Forty meant middle-aged, the start of the physical decline, but also the gravitas of adulthood, the end of creativity but also the peak time of authority. Forty when I was growing up was past halfway through your life, a time to start thinking about what you need to accomplish before you die. I also spent time with my parents, who are approaching their own milestones of seventy and retirement. They left me some inspiring words, said with real conviction, 'Who cares what anyone else thinks?" I also recently had a physical, which was generally pretty good for a fat, middle-aged guy, but still made me think about lifestyle and health. Then there was The Plan, mentioned in the previous blog post, that got me to thinking about life, and therefore to death.

Dick Cheney has dedicated his life to the accumulation of wealth and power, and then the application of that wealth and power to the advancement of the interests of people with a similar position. I thought that was the limit of his motivation, that he was largely amoral and used government as a tool rather than as the objective. But then he didn't go away once his term was over. Over the last few months he has campaigned for his controversial positions, and rather than taking his money and running, he has jeopardized his position by going against tradition and actively working against the present President (unlike George Bush). This seems to be part of a family effort as his daughter has been everywhere following a similar path. It seems that Dick Cheney was not using the fear of foreigners like Goebbels to amass power, he genuinely believes in this stuff.

It is not too long since I listened to the book The Things You Must Learn Before You Die. I outlined the points of that book in this blog, and it can be summed up as basically to just go do the things you feel you are supposed to do, even if it's risky. When thinking about The Plan, seeing my parents in their beautiful home thirty years older than I, having a physical I wondered about what I should do before I die, the big question. The result was that there was not anything that I felt I should do that I hadn't done in terms of type (travel, start a business, learn to paint, work with children etc.) that I needed to do before I die. If I got the six months to live news there wouldn't be anything new that I would have to do. I feel that I've had the experiences I should have, and it's just a question of spending the rest of my life stringing pleasant moments together one after the other.

To modern progressive liberals Dick Cheney seems evil, a guy prepared to do anything to amass dictatorial power. But I think what Dick Cheney is best described as is medieval. He believes that the general public, or the mob, is too stupid and ignorant to be allowed to run things for themselves (a position for which I have sympathy). He essentially believes in the aristocracy and the peasantry, that there are those who are fit to lead and those who will be ground down in their service. Cheney accumulates wealth for his family, and for families of people in similar positions, his friends (like the Bushes). In order to keep and enhance that position he is willing to fight wars, torture, imprison, misinform, and keep secret his activities. I think he believes his power is given to him by the same source as European royalty, by God.

I am not afraid of death, and I am not afraid of facing the fact of death and judging my life. Throughout most of history most people would not have reached the age I am now. Those who reached forty and beyond were the wise elders, those useful to humanity through their wisdom, experience and skills, rather than through their abilities to get things done or lead their tribe. I think the reason for the mid-life crisis is that the system in which human life evolved required a change of role at about this age. No longer is a man useful for his bravery, strength, virility and toil, but useful for what he can say, for his information. Anything from this point on is a bonus, and the quality of that bonus is as important as the quantity of that bonus. If I live as debauched a life as I presently do the odds are that I will enjoy my life and live until I'm eighty or older. If I change my life to one of health and purity the odds are that I will feel like I am missing out on things in life, but I will live until I'm a hundred or so. The pain of a body breaking down will be the same length in either case, perhaps shorter in the first. When faced with death at the mid-point of my life I can say I am content, as long as I don't care what anybody else thinks.

The mystery of what makes Dick Cheney is actually an encouraging story of the change in perception of large portions of humanity. Throughout all of history to within perhaps three hundred years there would have been no wonder at the actions of Dick Cheney. Every lord, lady, king, prince or doge, would have been recognizable in the actions of a man who accumulates power for himself and those like himself. There would have been no wonder in the dismissal in those with different beliefs as sub-human, evil people with demonic motivations. There would have been no confusion as to why he acted with suspicion and fear towards others, to why he would bend the rules to protect his position, why he obsessed on secret attacks and thought others were dedicated to ending the positions of him, his family, and his nation. That's the default position of rulers throughout all of history. Dick Cheney is simply a modern day Borgia, a relic of a past that is losing, slowly but surely disappearing.

The Plan

The best thing that my darling wife and I do is come up with a plan. While we have had our difficulties, lots of luck, and lots of help from others, we have still managed to get to this point through a recession richer, more secure as a couple, in love, and with greater opportunity than when we met. This is largely due to a process in which we talk to each other about what each of us wants, how we can combine these desires, what dreams we might have, and what practical steps we can take. At any time we will probably have a plan with various contingencies, and subject to change if some recognized criteria are met. In Houston we are getting to the point of making a future plan more concrete.

To start we are agreed that suburban Houston is not our ideal spot to live. We are not going to set up in the area and live out our next thirty years. Houston is a temporary spot, and is here to be milked for what it can give us. What Houston can give us is warmth and sunshine, a ridiculous house with a pool and palm trees, big cash money and titles on Christina's resume. The signs point towards Christina being able to be promoted perhaps a couple of times in the next 2-3 years to a position whereby her skills are so portable and valued that we can select a place to live pretty much anywhere in the country and she can get a job there. There's even a good chance as technology improves and becomes more familiar to managers that Christina could do her job remotely.

So the point of the plan is to acquire the maximum flexibility in location for the future. We believe we have yet to live in the place that would suit us best. Portland is an extraordinary town, but with one person in a relationship suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder for five months a year (improved with medication but not fixed) and the other with a random chance of being depressed at any given time, when they happen in combination it can get very brutal. Depressed people are not good at relationships, but they need support from relationships. In the long run we are looking for a place in the country with a nice climate (we are basing our perfect climate to look for on Tuscany, which apparently is the same as Chattanooga, Tennessee).

Another part of the plan is to acquire funds for the future. The more money you have available to you means the less money you need to live. The secret of our relative financial success has been to live below our means while the rest of the country was livng above there's. The more funds you have the more flexible it is possible to be. One of the goals for us as a couple is for Christina to live for an extended period (six months or more) somewhere other than the USA. This will probably mean living without income for a while, which requires funds (and more than people think unless you are my brother Peter.) The more liquid funds you have, the more free you are as a person.

But now we get to the downsides, because life is not just a bowl of cherries. We are still going to live in Houston, which is not a place we like very much. I've gone into this before, but basically the place has no sense of community, is decades behind the much of the rest of the world in terms of progressive thinking and actions. The place is packed full of red-neck hillbillies with medieval brains. I am more at home in a rastafarian-influenced, spanish-speaking village in Central America, or an atheist coffee house in Denmark than in suburban Houston. My darling wife feels similarly.
There is also the matter of Christina being at work for much of her life. Now, while Christina has the unfathomable (to me) quality of being interested in work and being OK with working hard on a regular basis, she can also be made miserable with an unpleasant work environment. The reason why a plan is being developed now is that her being unhappy in her job is simply a veto on any plan of sticking it out here. Recent developments look good in this regard from a shaky start in Houston, competence and civility look to triumph in the end, but this isn't certain to last.
We also both believe that while life is not necessarily short, it is finite, and that happiness matters more than being rich. So in order for our plan to work we must organize things in such a way that being in Houston can be pleasant enough that when combined with the goals I have mentioned above the overall result is an increase in happiness.

This means that I must have an interest shared with actual live humans. I have started a band in Houston, in the same manner that I did in Portland. By the way, we are both looking forward to seeing all of those from the band in Portland again at The Pogues in a couple of weeks. While the new band has a long way to go to even come close to being the wonderful experience that I had with those of Sam's Cross (what I miss most about Portland) there are some good signs.
It also means that our home environment has to be something extra-special because the public environment is not good if it exists at all (yesterday Christina and I went out in the area to keep ourselves occupied and after fifteen minutes I even seriously suggested the mall, it is that bad). As a result part of our plan is to put our money into a nice house with gardeners, pool boy and maids and live like aristocrats for only a little more money than we are paying for rent right now. We are talking something like this.

The key thing is to make sure we know when to quit, to not let the local culture, the expectations, the habits of ourselves and those around us tempt us into a life that doesn't work for us.

The Weather

I'm very impressed by the title of this one. A more foreboding subject in a blog it would be difficult to imagine. This is particularly true of the weather in question, that being today's weather in Houston, Texas.

Today was grey and overcast, substantially cooler than usual, with lots of rain and a mild breeze. I absolutely loved it. Until this week I believe the temperature in Houston had not dropped below 70 degrees Fahrenheit, 21 degrees Celcius (pet peeve, both of those scales are centigrade scales, saying 20 degrees centigrade is a meaningless statement) since some time in May. Going outside meant shorts, sandals and a t-shirt and sweating. Today I got to put on trousers and a sweatshirt, socks and boots, and slosh off into the muck, lovely.

Clearly there is some nostalgia for places past in this joy, and also the happy knowledge that this is a temporary situation. I would be far less happy in more northern climes with the knowledge that a day like today is just a precursor to months of grey, depressing, dark dampness. But today I can think of sweaters, a peat fire, a tankard of ale, the scratch of the bow upon a fiddle, conviviality and polished brass without being a complete numpty.

Amazing Incompetence

Through most of my life I have had a feeling that I'm not quite doing things as well as I should, and that I'm going to get in trouble as a result. This was particularly true in my last couple of jobs where the workload was not very large. My character is such that I dislike pointless working, busy work, or just doing stuff to look like you are working. Allied with my mood changes so that I sometimes I have loads of energy and other times very little my working style has been bursts of efficient activity interspersed with periods of loafing. Because I am lazy I like to get things done and out of the way, to remove the power of this guilt and because it requires the least amount of work to simply do things efficiently, right away.

So I often feel as though I am not particularly hard-working or competent in getting things done (in contrast I very rarely feel incompetent or ill-equipped in terms of thinking about or understanding things). This is close to my default position, and I have learned to identify how useful this can be. However, from time-to-time my default position is challenged by the activity in the world around me. The actual amount of stuff that gets done by apparently busy people is revealed, the person in the business suit with a brusque attitude and a go-getter vibe turns out to have no clue what they are supposed to be doing, and professionals simply cannot perform basic functions. My reaction then turns to bafflement at the number of people who simply cannot do things who remain employed.

The last few months have revealed a particularly heinous example of the pervasiveness of incompetence. This is our experience with our local post office. I have mentioned this before here but the depth of idiocy continues to the extent that I am beginning to suspect malice. I will try to keep this as short as possible.

When we first moved in we were receiving lots of mail from previous tenants. I went to the post office to make clear that we were the only residents in our house. Over the next couple of months the amount of mail we received dropped dramatically (while the previous residents' mail continued to arrive) and we started getting reports of mail being returned as undeliverable. I returned to the post office and explained the situation, but the situation continued to worsen until I returned a third time and was given a phone number of those who were in charge of forwarding mail. it turns out that when I said we were the only residents this was reported as us having moved with no forwarding address. I asked for this to be changed and waited. There was no change and I returned to the post office and met with Laura, a supervisor who promised to make the change herself and send out a letter from the post office to check that it had been successful. In the week following we received no letter from the post office and four times as much mail for previous tenants than for ourselves. I called Laura yesterday and she asked me to call today at 8:30am so that I could talk to her and the carrier simultaneously. I called today and Laura won't be in until 11am.

My point is that this is a level of incompetence of a mind-boggling level, the inability of a post office to deliver mail with my name on it to my address despite multiple complaints, and yet everyone there is still working. This is a government job, but I have seen excellent work by government employees and have had arguments with those working in big business who claim it would be impossible for government workers to be any more incompetent than big business.

When I compare my life to the general public I start with the knowledge that I have been luckier than the vast majority, but that I have also made far fewer deeply dumb decisions than many. That my present situation is easier and more pleasant than most, that I have an enviable life in many respects is not simply a case of me being lucky but also me being very competent at life. Today I need to go and be angry at strangers, which is some distance from my favorite thing to do, but pleasantness has not worked.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

My darling wife and I just spent a week in Britain, almost all of it on the Welsh/English border. The weather was spectacularly beautiful, 70 degree highs with skies of the purest and deepest blue I have ever seen. The place is simply gorgeous. All the beauty of the United States is wilderness, but the beauty of Wales is the beauty of a well-tended garden as far as the eye can see. My family were particularly gracious and my goal of showing my darling wife the beauty and pleasure of where I'm from was achieved. It was a true vacation.

There was one thing that I discovered while I was there, that is that I no longer have a home, a place that seems particularly natural for me, a place to return to. England is lovely, I feel confident in finding my way around and dealing with people. It isn't an alien place, and I enjoy being there, but it no longer has that feeling to me of being right. But nowhere else do I have a greater feeling of being right. I think I may have reached the point that regular travelers reach, in which they are supremely competent and confident in how to deal with hotels, can feel comfortable in almost any place, but have no sense of home.

A part of this is the globalization of the world, I can have a pint of english bitter in Houston, I watch english football teams and read an english paper. Part of this is the amount of time I have spent living in different environments, and part of it is that home is now a person, where my wife is.

However, the loveliness of spending time at my parents' place in Wales,


has led me to contemplating what a home for me would look like. A smallholding in the Smokey Mountains, shabby but comfortable, a small menagerie for effect, and a folk music bar in the barn seems just about ideal at the moment. A few years to milk the wealth of Houston and then off to bucolic paradise, I hope.

The End of Interest?

As I sit here on my couch, wired up to the greatest source of information humanity has ever known, I find myself returning to the same places on the internet and being less interested in them. I feel as though I am approaching the end of the intellectual interest that my personality can sustain. This is troubling because I haven't been someone who just does the things they like and doesn't wonder, question, or think. On the other hand, I am not someone who becomes obsessed with an area of knowledge and delves deeper and deeper into that area. If I was such a person I would be a successful professional at something.

I am a generalist, someone who is interested in many things at a medium level. I am interested enough in physics to have a basic idea of how the Universe is structured, interested in chemistry to have a basic knowledge of the building blocks of the Universe. I'm interested in history to see if there are common themes, to see if people have changed over time, to have some working knowledge on what effects the modern world. I'm interested in literature in that I like to read good books, I'm interested in art in that I like to look at beautiful things and to find out what is beautiful.

I am not interested in determining whether the logistics of the supply train for Assyrians limited the expansion of their empire, or whether the best guess for M-Theory is 13 or 26 dimensions, or what is the precise nature of covalent bonding in organic chemicals.

The problem arises when a certain amount of knowledge is attained that serves a functional purposes and that further knowledge requires unnecessary effort for diminishing returns. I have a physical worldview, a position on religion, a belief about human nature, a strong opinion on what makes sense as a political structure, I know what I like in art and literature, I have a decent understanding of cultures around the world (probably better than anyone who lived before the 18th century). I'm probably less than halfway through my life and I've answered pretty much all the questions I've had up until now.

I have also found that I am pretty good at predicting what I find interesting or pleasant. That is that it seems quite unlikely that should I just really try to examine Shakespeare in great depth that I will like it more than when I read Shakespeare now. It is unlikely that I will find great satisfaction from examining the bonding structure of the Yanamamo in greater detail.

I find myself really in a position where I am interested in having skills, but not in the process to get there. I wish to be able to speak spanish, to have written a novel, to be an accomplished musician, to be a PhD. in Philosophy, but not very interested in what it takes to get there. I am faced with the edge of what is natural for me to learn, and what comes next requires effort.

I think what I need is stimulation, intelligent people who say something new and interesting. Or a place that I have not been and know little about. Or some new field of interest of which I was unaware. Time to travel, explore, learn.

Stupidity and Ignorance

This is just something that has bothered me personally, and I will hope to broaden the scope of it. There are grown, educated, professional people in the world who believe that scientists are close-minded people who dogmatically stick to current opinion and won't even consider viable alternatives. One viable alternative suggested to me recently was the paranormal, that the anecdotal evidence for the afterlife and other paranormal events is so high that scientists should be putting their time and efforts into extensive research in the area. The guy says that for him the evidence is convincing enough that it is his opinion that there is an afterlife. The evidence he gave was from here and I urge you to take just a little time to look around.

The author of the site in question is a retired worker's compensation lawyer from Australia. Those are his qualifications. Some of the stuff is mind-bogglingly stupid and yet a number of people who can read, write, hold down jobs, engage in theological and philosophical debate, feel that his position is stronger than scientists who dismiss his claims. Here's an example of why this is stupid and ignorant,

They argue that Einstein's formula E=mc² — energy equals mass to the speed of light, shows that mass 'm' is equivalent to energy 'E'.

This explains how materialization and dematerialization operate by matter being transformed into energy. When people try to argue that this equation is all theory but cannot be demonstrated they should be reminded that less than one ounce of matter was transformed into energy to destroy Hiroshima.

The vortex is the actual swirling of the atoms and molecules. Ash and Hewitt argue from Einstein's equation that since matter and light share a common movement, the actual speed of the swirling of the vortex, must be the speed of light. They claim that this is the only possible sense to be made of Einstein's equation and that it is because of the vortex swirling at the speed of light that you can read this page or see another person the trees and the sky and see everything else with physical eyes.

So, people, and dead people in particular, materialize and de-materalize by converting their matter into energy, moving that energy at beyond the speed of light, and then slowing down the movement and converting back to energy moving at the speed of light which converts into matter. This is said to be the only possible sense to be made of Einstein's equation. The thing is that Einstein's theories require all their assertions to be false. If all the mass in a person's body became energy it would destroy the earth. Energy cannot move faster than the speed of light. If matter was moving at the speed of light it would be hotter than the core of the sun. From my perspective, anyone with a basic high school physics class should know all that. That is that to believe this stuff you need to be ignorant about science at a really deep level.

The reason that scientists don't put much effort into finding out about paranormal activity is that if paranormal activity is true, basically all of physics (laws of conservation of mass and energy, momentum, laws of thermodynamics and so on) would all have to be false, and they have been tested to an incredible level. On the other hand people seeing things that aren't there, being mistaken about phenomena, being hoodwinked by charlatans, having odd sensations caused by events in the brain are all proven facts, replicated time and again. There are scientific explanations for these events that fit with tested science. While scientists are enormously motivated by finding out new things they are not motivated by proving stuff that seems nonsense according to accepted fact is nonsense.

So why do people believe this stuff? It's a combination of enormous ignorance, personal arrogance, and selfish desire.
Science is simply not taught in the USA to most people at any reasonable level at all. I have had a number of conversations with people who believe in evolution who don't know how it works. I've had conversations with adults who don't believe in evolution because no-one has ever seen a dog give birth to a cat. People don't know what dimensions are or how equations work. I would say that the overwhelming majority of Americans simply don't know even the basics of what science has worked out about their world.
Personal arrogance comes through in the belief that what an individual has felt or seen is more likely to be true than all the controlled experiments in the world. A particular experience that a person has, that they feel that they prayed for their friends and their friends got better, is more true than the repeated double-blind experiments that show that prayer doesn't heal to that person. People think that if they saw something their perception of that event is more correct than all the work of all the scientists throughout time. In the USA it is common to find people who think that scientists are a world-wide cabal bent on defeating God, and who lie, cheat and steal, and can't be trusted. These people tend to write this stuff on computers and go to their doctors.
Selfish desire is really the crux of the matter. People don't believe in non-scientific things that make their lives, hopes and dreams worse off. People don't believe that the afterlife is where they will go to live lives of drudgery under Hitler's lash. They don't believe that we are simply pawns of demons, or that the Universe is pointless, random and arbitrary. People believe that they will live eternally, that those who they loved and have died are still around, that they might have special magic powers of prophecy and insight.

Mostly I'm just sick of having conversations with people who have no idea of what is going on and describe my position (that what science has established to be true is our best guess as to what is actually true) as a close-minded, dogmatic religion.

Age.

Today I went to a dermatologist to see if my back was growing evil tumors. The results were that I have Seborrheic Keratoses and that I am going to die, but not from benign skin growths, and not for decades to come. However, these are the blotches of age. I am getting older.

I think people do not age in a steady progression. People age in sudden jumps. For example, in my late twenties I managed 90% of my total balding in the course of about two years. Since then, relatively little change.

I believe I have just lurched into middle age. Sometimes my knees hurt. I find myself hitching up my britches. I don't get freaked out by being called, "Sir" anymore. I have a dodgy back. I think I know the right way to do everything (previously the last moment that I knew everything was as a teenager.) My cholesterol is high and having shaved off my beard I am growing a new one because I look better furry. Not more attractive, just more right somehow.

The Government You Deserve?

Texas is interesting. It's rich, huge, expansive. But it's also tacky, cheap, tawdry. The roads are broad, the houses large, the portions vast. But the roads don't have sidewalks, shoulders or gutters and flood easily. The houses are built from chipboard and cardboard. The meals are large and varied but bland and derivative.

Texas is a society built on tiny units, separated and divided. The family home is a giant building distanced from the road by a large lawn, without a sidewalk for neighbors to pass by, with all the roads destinations rather than places to pass by. The back yard will be large, fenced, and equipped with pools, bars, patios, tables, chairs, hot tubs, cabanas, hammocks. The house will have fireplaces, dens, his and hers whatevers, fans, air conditioning, giant tv's, high ceilings, spiral staircases. The owners will leave this lavish shelter in huge shiny carriages, windows sealed and tinted agains intrusion, air cooled and conditioned, sounds perfectly controlled The journeys will be to designated places for designated purposes, there is not meandering, wandering, hanging out. It is pod living, almost like living in Star Trek. The house is the ship which supples almost everything but is surrounded by the harsh vacuum of space. An SUV exiting and entering the powered door of a garage looks like nothing more than the shuttle leaving the bay.


A culture that is based on the individual, living in pods, only leaving to accomplish specific goals produces individuals who are motivated by getting and kepping their own things. Such a culture is based on the individual filling their own needs, rather than a community filling the needs of the individuals in the community. As such there are no town squares, no promenades, no town centers, no village greens, many more golf courses than parks. While there are roads to get places these are designed simply as surfaces to drive along, no bike lanes, no sidewalks, no boulevardes. Such a culture tries to keep its money and therefore avoids taxes. Lower taxes mean fewer services, cheaper services, poorer services. Crappy services for your tax dollars produces a belief that government services are automatically poor, and in Texas that's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In Texas the streets flood regularly. The power goes out in a strong rainfall. The crime rate is very high and I rarely see a policeman and never outside of a car. Our mail delivery has been sporadic, to the point where we found out that upon going to the post office to tell them that we weren't getting all our mail they recorded us as having moved ot. It is only that their incompetence was so high that we still received any mail at all. To get your driving license you line up for several hours and then wait eight weeks to possibly get it mailed to you, there is no telephone number for enquiries. Education levels are low, health is poor/ The government services in Texas are terrible and Texans think that governments are literally incapable of doing anything well. The result is a feedback loop, self-interest above community interest leads to fewer resources for community resources, which leads to poorer services, which leads to a lower regard for community services, which leads to a greater regard for self-interest.

In places where people think, expect and demand that governments can achieve things, the resulting government services overwhelmingly are of high quality. In Texas, where people think and expect that governments are incompetent, crooked, evil entities the government they receive is woeful. As my darling wife says, Texas is like living in the richest third world country in the world.

Random Blather

The Face of Evil's back legs don't work. He ruptured one ligament in a back knee, has received surgery and is recovering. While recovering he "tweaked" the same ligament in the other knee. This means he has to stay home and get almost no exercise, making him a sad puppy. Him being a sad puppy is a little sad, but on the other hand it does make him less work and I have been particularly cheerful for the last couple of days.

At the moment in the south there is much terror about President Obama's plans to turn the USA in a socialist country. People are literally afraid of what is happening to their beloved homeland, but when I comment that the worst case scenario is Denmark for the USA they stop commenting on their terror and talk about other things. It turns out that Americans really are a nation of ideologues, supporting theories regardless of the facts. The Cold War was a battle about ideologies, and the USA version won, but meanwhile a compromise snuck into being in Europe taking the best bits of one thought and the best bits of other thoughts. It's going to be hard for some Americans to have won the ideological war of the twentieth century and then have to change their system a little almost immediately after.

It's odd writing these blog posts. The last comment was over a month ago so it's almost as though I'm talking to myself. I hear through third party information that people sometimes read these things, but maybe that is lessening over time. I do know I've told my own mother at least five times about this blog, but I think she hasn't noticed me telling her. People pay attention to what interests them, and me being thousands of miles away from anyone I knew lessens my interest to people. Last weekend I went back to Portland for a wedding and was struck by the very few numbers of people I had known in Portland who were there. I was more worried going into the event of awkward moments and people avoiding me, but what I found was that apart from the married couple I knew two people, who were both very pleasant and both had been living lives apart from mine for years.

Guilt versus Regret

I'm a big fan of guilt and a detester of regret. What is the difference between these two things? In my mind guilt is the feeling that you get when you know you should be doing something. Regret is the feeling that comes about when you wish you had done something differently.

Guilt is the major driving force in my doing things that are not immediately pleasurable or cannot be pictured as being pleasurable. Guilt is the immediate reason I pay bills or mow the lawn as I don't enjoy doing either, and don't expect to enjoy the result. Guilt comes about from me imagining the future and deciding that I will feel badly about a situation if I don't do something not quite as bad as the consequences of not doing it. For a long time I disliked the feeling of guilt, the nagging sensation, the squirming tension, but now I don't mind it. I now know that guilt is something akin to hunger, just a sensation that tells you that you need to do something. I am developing the ability to feel the cessation of guilt in the same manner as the cessation of hunger, a sort of moral satiety. Now, from time-to-time I feel a satisfaction in the process from guilt through action to relaxation. The path from boredom to guilt to action to contented relaxation is a nice cyclical story to participate in.

Regret is the enemy. It is a negative feeling about something that you cannot fix. I tend to feel regret most often when I have said something that was hurtful to others, as I am wont to do. It's not as though I am not already aware that there are things I should not say (even if they are true and honest) but I make many mistakes, and so I don't really learn from regret. Regret tends to happen in a recurring cringe of memory, repeatedly bashing away at my consciousness, from which I mentally recoil and go somewhere else. But how does one deliberately forget? Perhaps the method is to experience the memory but draw away from it the emotion that corresponds to it, to have a memory as one remembers facts rather than as having lived it.

I am having a good day.

Music.

Sometimes I come across a piece of information, or an article, or a documentary that attempts to delve deeply into a subject of great mystery which to me seems not to be such a mystery. The most recent of these is the nature of music, how did it come into being and why is it so prevalent, and why does it mean so much to us. There was a documentary that went into this subject, it seemed to be interviewing all the right people, with brain scans and genius musicians, and evolutionary biologists and so on. However, at the end of it there seemed to be largely the same amount of mystery as at the beginning. So here is my explanation of what music is, how it developed and why it means so much to people.

Music is the combination of rhythm and tone. A single tone with the simplest rhythm is the simplest music. beep beep beep beep is music. Music is a universal in all cultures showing that at least the components of music in humanity are genetically rather than culturally based. To illustrate what that means marriage is universal in all cultures, which doesn't mean a marriage ceremony is genetically based, just that male/female long-term relationships are genetically based. Human beings pair off because of their biology. Human beings understand music and react to it because of their biology.

So, lets take rhythm first. Why is there a human reaction to rhythm. The documentary focused pretty much exclusively on how people and animals react to a rhythmic sound. They found out that some parrots have rhythm in this way but most animals do not. My thought on hearing this is that pretty much all animals have rhythm, just not connected to hearing. Any animal that uses legs to walk or wins to fly or a tail to swim or a heart to beat must have the capacity to regularly perform an action, what I feel is the basis of rhythm. A dog must have the capacity to move legs in a regular time pattern in order to walk across the ground. Imagine a dog that had random time intervals attributed to the movement of its legs, it would fall over. The movement of a body to a regular time period is inherent in almost all animals. This is the origin of rhythm. It turns out that when human beings hear rhythm a very primitive portion of the brain connected to some of the most basic physical actions is activated, which suits this hypothesis very closely.

Parrotdancing

The next portion is tone. A human being listening to an unfamiliar mammal vocalizing for the first time in certain situations will be able to understand some of the meaning of that vocalizing. When we hear a wolf whimper when trying to beg for food from a higher ranked pack mate we understand what this means at a fundamental level. We know what babies who cannot speak mean through various vocalizations. These vocalizations have commonality across species. There is something in our make-up that can distinguish aggression and pain in animals even at the same volume, even if we have not met those animals before. This is due to tone (as a simplified concept). In our genetic make-up is a set of basic emotions or communications based on tone. Everyone in the world laughs, and the noises have the same meaning, even rats laugh. Tone communicates emotion at an instinctive level throughout mammals at the least. The documentary discovered that throughout different cultures the emotional content of music was the same. A guy in the Amazon rain forest identifies which classical pieces are happy, sad, angry and so on, just as a European does. The depth to which the connection between tonal arrangements (chords) and changes (melodies) is beneath culture, it is biological in nature.

Tone

So we have rhythm being a fundamental and primitive part of animals in the world. We have tone being a biologically fundamental part of emotional communication. The next part is simply the human brain putting different parts of the brain together, which is the most striking characteristic of humanity. It is actually how most new ideas are produced and is basic to the concept of thinking.

A human being walks with a rhythm. He hears the sound of his feet hitting the ground. He tries doing the same thing by clapping his hands. He tries doing clapping when one foot lands rather than the other. he notices that when he claps his hands he and other people walk to that rhythm. He speeds it up and people walk faster, become more active, make more noise. He slows it down and people slow down, become more calm.

People naturally make noises to communicate emotion, they try to cheer people up, or calm them down. While clapping their hands people make happy noises. These become regulated by the beat. The rhythm slows down and people experiment with different noises. People remember these experiments, build on them, make them into ritual.

Music is everywhere because the three components that make music possible, rhythm, emotional reaction to tone, and the brain capacity to make new connections between experiences and parts of the brain are within everyone. Music moves you so completely because it connects several parts of your brain that are deeply fundamental to who you are. The rhythm is the feel of your own body in action. The melody is the primal sense of emotion deeper even than language. The combination results in you feeling an emotion directly within your body.

Secret #5 and Summary

The final "Secret" is to give more than you receive. Giving makes you happier than taking, serving makes you happier than being served, helping makes you feel better than being helped. Not too complicated really is it? The author connected this with a sense of being part of something greater, being part of the great web of being, connecting to something beyond ourselves. I'm not sure this is necessarily true, and I'm not sure how it is connected to giving. I'm sure that feeling like there is something bigger than yourself that is intimately connected with yourself helps significantly in providing a sense of purpose, a sense that there is a reason for existence, that what you do matters. However, I think giving makes you happy because there is nothing more pleasant, more significant, more purposeful than to know that you can make other people happy.

Happiness is a socially transmitted virus. Just being around happy people makes you happy, and you being happy makes those around you happy. If anyone's been at a happy event they know that after a while pretty much everyone is happy even if there isn't anything to be particularly happy about. One of the greatest pleasures is simply to be present in a crowd of happy people.

What I have learned from this book is that there are not actually any secrets to happiness. You and I know what are the attitudes and behaviors of happy people. You and I know what we do that makes us happy to the extent that we can be happy, and what makes us tired and miserable and bored. The key is to find the way to transform our lives in such a way to bring about the situation we already know would make us happy. The last two chapters i this book address this point, and they do it in a marvelously simple way. Basically, we do what we think about. If we think about the things that make us happy we are far more likely to do those things. If we think about smiling to people, being generous, appreciating the beauty of what is around us, we are more likely to be people who smile, are generous, and appreciate things. That will make us more happy. If we worry, or have regrets, or tell ourselves we have failed, we are likely to be miserable. If we think about what is lacking we will notice what we lack. If we think about what we have we will be more appreciative of this.

Habits are the key to happiness. I think this might be the wisest thing I have learned from a book about wisdom, that happiness is a habit. To make something a habit you just need to keep focusing on something until you don't notice that you do it. An example in my life is that I used to dislike going grocery shopping, it was a chore. But I have learned to deliberately smile at everyone in the store. Not only does smiling make you feel good, it cheers up the other people at their chores and they smile back at you. Now after perhaps a year of this I find myself automatically smiling when I head into a grocery store. I have a similar response to doing the dishes, warm water and dish soap and an empty mind is really quite a nice combination. For me I will be better off the more of these habits that I develop over time.

The other thing that this book has given me is the opportunity to think about where I belong. Christina and I have moved to Houston, and to this point neither of us feel like we belong here. We aren't really suburban people, we are country or city people. We need a place that is organized around people rather than tasks, places where someone can walk with no particular purpose other than being alive. A place where things of interest appear rather than have to be studiously sought after. I need a place with friends, and friends with whom I can share a common purpose. I have really missed my band probably more than anything because not only were they my friends, but they were my friends with whom I shared a common goal, and that common goal made us happy and was a gift to others.

Secret #4 Live the Moment.

Mindfulnes, being present in the moment, being awake, noticing what is going on, being rather than thinking.
I've talked a lot about this in the blog, instead of thinking everything will be fine once you've done whatever, notice that everything is fine now. You can't do anything about the past so worrying about it is useless. You can't do anything about the future that isn't happening now, so concentrate on now and the future will take care of itself.
This is the only part of the book that has a practical suggestion on how to put these secrets into your life, and in this case it is meditation, which certainly does work to become less worried about the past and future and more peacefully aware of the present.

Secret #3, Become Love

This is a continuing effort to provide to my readers the secrets to a happy, fulfilled life as outlined in the book Five Secrets You Must Learn Before You Die. This is secret number three, and like the other "Secrets" it's not really a secret. This one is to Become Love. It should be no surprise to anyone that love is connected to fulfillment and happiness, however, I think this secret as put forward in the book is more interesting than I had expected.

The message is that it isn't feeling love that is important, but choosing to be love. The emphasis is on the choice to be a loving person, the day to day voluntary decision to act in a way that is loving. This is put forward in a three stage process, choosing to love yourself, loving those close to yourself, and then loving everyone.
Loving yourself is essentially a self-esteem issue as put forward here, thinking of yourself as worthy of being love, and someone who is capable of giving love to others. The method for getting there is altering your self-talk, consciously being aware of the thoughts and feelings towards yourself that are negative, and then consciously deciding to have more positive thoughts.
Loving those close to you is essentially a suggestion to make the relationships you have a greater priority in your life. Essentially that very, very few people wish they had spent less time with their loved ones or wish they had been less kind and loving to those close to themselves. However, many people wish they had put more into a loving relationship and less into their career or material things. If you consistently make decisions to work rather than spend time with your family, or consistently spend money on nice things rather than on experiences with those you love, you are probably making a mistake.
Loving everyone is as it sounds, being kind, forgiving, loving to all the people you meet. Consciously deciding to think the best of people, to help them out, to forgive their faults as a default position. The reason for this is not just that it is a nice thing to do, but that it results in love returning in your direction. The love you get is equal to the love you give.

So far I have not been surprised in any way by the make up of the secrets. They are commonly known as the way to live your life. What stands out to me is that it is the application of these commonly known principles that is important. The book seems to me to basically state that you know how to live a good life, but so many people simply don't do it. We don't do it because we are distracted, busy, unthinking, or afraid. If you want to be happy you have to pay attention to your own life, what is going on today, and then decide to make any changes that are necessary. Self-knowledge, mindfulness, courage and application are the keys. If you know what you love to do, if you know that those around you feel consistently loved by you, if you spend time doing what you love, this book is useless. If you feel confused about what you want, if you wonder whether you are doing enough for those around you, if you think that there's something that you should do but are not doing it for some reason, then this book can be summed up by the words, "Do something about it."

Leave No Regrets

Secret number two is the deeply insightful Leave No Regrets. This is pretty much self-explanatory, if you regret that you haven't done something, go do it, and don't wait around as that might result in it being too late. This seems a pretty straight forward piece of advice, if something bothers you enough to effect your happiness, go do something about it.

The book emphasizes that those interviewed did not tend to regret things that they had tried, but regretted things they had not done. At least this group of people didn't dwell on failures, they dwelled on not having tried in the first place. One thing I wonder about is whether the results from a large survey of bitter and miserable people would have similar results in that they regretted not having tried things, or whether the happy group's experience with risk was better because they had generally succeeded? The other question I have is whether the imagination of a dream is better than the actual dream? That what we dreamed we might have done is better than the reality of doing things, and so when we don't do things we feel worse than failing at a dream.

The book seems so far to largely be an exhortation towards courage in life. Those who are happy and fulfilled late in life are those who knew who and what they were and took risks to get there. This group when asked whether they wish they had taken more or less risks indicated that they thought they should have taken more risks. Again, I wonder if that is due to their experience with risk? I have talked to extremely happy and contented people late in life, and they did tend to be brave and go out and do extraordinary things. But I've also talked to terribly miserable people late in life and some of those took risks that didn't work out (joining the military being an important one of those).

The book does give a couple of caveats to this exhortation towards taking risks in order to leave no regrets. The first is that the risks they are talking about are not physical risks, but emotional risks. This book does not suggest a lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll in war zones. What it suggests is that when you think of something that you wish to do, that you are called to do, that has the risk of public embarrassment, or failure, or disappointment, do it. Failing at your dream is less misery inducing than not trying a all.

This leads to the second caveat, that regrets will occur. You will fail, you will not do things, circumstances will occur that mean that life is not just as you would wish. One of the qualities of this group is that they dealt well will failure. One of the ways to leave no regrets, is that when something goes wrong one accepts that, one feels good that at least an attempt was made, and then one lets the regret go. This quality that mitigates the second caveat seems to me to be vitally important, if you don't regret things when your risks don't work out then taking risks is actually a non-risk situation. If you reap the rewards when things go well, but don't suffer the consequences when things go badly, you should try as many things as possible.

So far the book has given two "Secrets" that are known by everybody, they are common knowledge. Be true to yourself, find out what you are meant to be and then do it. Leave no regrets, if you will feel badly if you didn't try something, try it as failure is less painful than regret for those for whom failure is less painful than regret. The problem I have with the book so far is that it does not give methods for finding out who you are if you don't know it, and it doesn't give methods for accepting and dealing with regret and failure. What the book does do is remind people to think about these things, to take time to contemplate what they should be doing with their lives, and then to go do them.

What I have found in this book so far are two things, one about myself and one about other people. With regards to myself I have found that what I do is generally in line with this advice on how to be wise, happy and fulfilled but I still wonder about whether there is more to life than this. It leads me to think that perhaps I need to be more mindful and appreciative of what I have, and possibly that I should go to Asia and have an adventure sooner rather than later. With regards to other people the book has led me to the position that perhaps most people go through their lives unaware of themselves in a way I simply can't imagine. This concept that most of humanity is just blundering through their lives blind to themselves, acting simply out of habit or cultural rules, not thinking, questioning or searching, is frightening. Anyone who knows me will be aware that I am unimpressed by the cognitive abilities of humanity on average, or its concern for its fellow man at a distance. But the fact that such a book as this exists, and might be useful, has increased my contempt for people en masse.

Am I happier than most people but simply someone who questions and searches for more happiness at an even greater rate? Is my caricature of most people as sheep, doing what is habitual, buying what they are told is cool, doing what they are told is interesting, believing what they are told to believe, even more true than I had thought?

Tune in over the next few days for the Third Secret, which is even less surprising than the first two.