The Golden Rule and Screaming About Squirrels

In the local park I occasionally come across a woman walking her dogs. Her method is to take them to a park, let them loose, and then scream "Squirrel!" at them so that the dogs can chase it up a tree. The screaming has an intense, shrieking, desperate nature, as though it is somehow vital that these dogs chase this particular squirrel. I bring this up because of my interest in how this woman thinks. A great interest of mine for twenty years has been how people think, it lead to my degree in psychology, my career in social work and presently explains my fascination with religion. But over the last few years my focus has changed. Having met an extremely diverse group of people in terms of how people think (it's a very interesting experience to explain to someone that they are delusional) I find myself doing a pretty good job of working out how people think. This means that I think I do a pretty good job of being able to predict future actions of people and outline how the individual got to that action. But what I have become interested in is what it feels like to think in particular ways.
I think humans have a certain level of empathy, a certain amount of capability in putting themselves in the position of someone else. This is the essense of the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have done unto you. Put yourself in the position of another, walk a mile in their shoes, and then treat them as you would want to be treated. But there's a problem with that. The other person is a different person in that situation. Empathy has an essential problem, that people are different. A better Golden Rule would be to do unto others as you think they would wish to be treated to the same level of effort as you would wish to be done unto you. Like most things in life the more accurate a statement, the onger it is, the more qualified it becomes, the more complex it becomes.
Try it for a moment. Think of someone you are not like, but you feel you understand how they tick. Now, think of them in a particular situation and try to imagine what they are thinking. Then try to imagine how they feel when they are thinking that. It's extremely difficult. The example I use is George W. Bush. I think he's essentially a decent person, he wants other people to be happy. I also think he's relatively smart. But I also think he's a lazy thinker, he doesn't think deeply about things, he doesn't ruminate on the pros and cons of a situation, he doesn't waffle. Liberty is good, so lets give people liberty. He doesn't ask what the people might actually want, or even consider that what they might want something different from him. I think George W. Bush is one of the least discriminating public figures I have ever seen, he thinks an impoverished muslim in Iraq has essentially the same views on life as himself. I's an interesting thought experiment, trying to feel what it is like to be a person who thinks differently than myself, and the way they think differently is by not thinking that people think differently.

25% Increase in Happiness

How much would that be worth to you? Here it is for free:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/practicing-gratitude-can-increase.php

and how to do it:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/10-grateful-steps-to-happiness.php

If you wish to use a mnemonic my wife and I both use the lyric from the Bob Marley song, Rat Race, "In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty."

Happy Accidents.

Probably the thing I am spending most of my time,thoughts and energy on at the moment is the training of my dog. Since I am an extremely lazy person I am working night and day in order for Larry to be the dog that I want later. I think the things that I have learned most from this experience is that being positive and caring gets you a lot further with social creatures than anger and punishment, and the importance of happy accidents.
Happy accidents are things that just happen for no particular reason, but are good. The best thing that happened to me was not planned as being good for me, moving to the USA was not a decision I made for myself, and I had no inkling whatsoever that my parents moved in order to have any effect on me at all. But the move changed me as a person, it gave me confidence, it made me much more outgoing and social, it gave me perspective on different people and different cultures.
"Successful people" (perhaps someday I will comment on this term, I find it rich in bias and meaning) are optimistic. What that essentially means is that they think they might get lucky, they think that things may work out. As a consequence when things do work out they are ready to see that it does, and to take advantage of it. Unsuccessful people generally spend their time explaining how things won't work and concentrating on how things fail.
In the ongoing molding of Larry from the Face of Evil to loving companion the greatest step I have taken, the one with the most dramatic and incontravertible success is being aware of the happy accident. A puppy is pretty close to a random action machine and as such they occasionally do things that are good and right. When I'm tired and cranky it is hard to notice these things in between the chewing, the biting, the defecating, but occasionally I do notice and I praise and love the wonderful little doggy and then he wants to do the good thing again.
So, my suggestion is to try to open yourself up to the possibility of things just going well, of even the worst person doing something nice, even by accident. It's a pleasant default position, if you don't do it naturally you might be surprised by how much does go right, and you can tell yourself that it's good for your life and career.

My vote.

So, I've decided who I will vote for in my first american election. For a start I want to give my appreciation for my father who has clearly explained the value of my vote. This being statistically almost zero other than how it makes me feel about myself. In a first past the post system the only time when it makes a difference whether you voted or not, or how you voted, is when the election is seperated by a single vote, which is almost never. So, I'm going to cast my vote based on how it will make me feel.
To start with I want to express how relieved I am by the three candidates we have left. All three seem sane, actually connected to reality, unlike the present siuation. With Huckerbee and Nader out it means that the wacky people are out, both of them meant well, but the USA wants nothing to do with either of their positions, theocracy and socialism respectively. Mitt Romney struck me as someone who had the old belief that what is good for GM (big american business) is good for America and would therefore have done whatever necessary to enrich those companies no matter the expense to the US citizen. But the three left all seem to grasp the concept that others have different opinions, and working with others gets things done while disagreeing with them gets nothing done. So, at worst, things will get better.
So, I'm going to characterize the three candidates left in how they make me feel, rather than the substantive policy positions. Not only am I doing this because that's the biggest effect of my vote in real terms, but also because it doesn't matter what politicians say they are going to do, they often don't, they often can't, and ofen it's a good idea to change your mind when you've gone and bolloxed the whole thing up in the first place.
Hillary Clinton makes me think of a safe, conservative investment. Like a savings account. I believe her to be a highly competent politician and bureaucrat. America under Hillary will be sensibly but unspectacularly run. She will use the model of the USA over the past fifty years which will be safe and steady and at the end of it she will be voted out of office because of the problems she will have inherited. A recession, war, debt and declining services will mean that the USA will be steadied, but not return to vibrancy.
I think John McCain is a decent person with a basic level of understanding of the world. I think he would start off as a somewhat lame-duck president, halted from achieving anything significant by a democratic congress (gridlock is actually among my favorite positions in USA politics, the USA often does best when the government does nothing). But John McCain seems to me too afraid. He wants to preserve and limit threats rather than nurture and create good things. He seems to me a person hanging on to the past, someone who believes that the USA is #1 while the rest of the world gently passes it by. John McCain seems to me like one of the last captains of the British Raj, hanging on in a charming, crumbling colonial manse writing detective stories based in a world that nearly existed but twenty years ago. That is my favorite aesthetic, but a poor way to run the world.
Barak Obama gives me the chance to hope. I don't believe him to be more competent than the other two, I think his chances of being a good president to be no better than the other two. He may well be a con man, saying the right things in a charming and intelligent way but really without much ability to get things done. Jimmy Carter is a deeply good man, full of the right principles and a belief that good things can be done. but that doesn't do you a lot of good when faced with the american people. But there's a chance, just a chance, that Barak Obama will do the things he talks about. He might actually have an Apollo Program for alternative energy. He might actually engage the rest of the world from a position f respect. he might actually invest in education and health care. He might do these things, and I want to have voted based on hope, rather than based on fear of incompetence.

Liberals, Conservatives and Brains

The current political situation has determined that almost all political talk features a single continuum stretching from liberal at one end to conservative at the other. Those in the middle are called swing voters. While this prevents anyone who thinks both health care for all is good while homosexual marriage is bad from being able to have a name for themselves, there is some truth to it. There are clear personality traits that are correlated to people who self-describe themselves as liberal and conservative. The linked article gives an excellent overview http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=20061222-000001&page=1
"Conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature." But what I consider the most important difference is this, 'The study's authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity...Liberals, on the other hand, are "more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information""
I frequent a religion forum in which are a number of conservatives. One of them described himself as seeing the world in black and white, and he thought this was a good thing because it made his decisions quicker. When I suggested that the world was often not black and white he replied that his "Decisions are almost always dead-on." He saw the world in black and white, it was good to make decisions as quickly as possible and he did not doubt the accuracy of his opinions.
As a liberal I find this sort of mindset amazing. But that's because I have a different mindset. If you go back and read my first paragraph it is as stereotypical a piece of liberal writing as the guy from the religion forum is stereotypically conservative. A conservative might write that "People are politically liberal or conservative, and conservatives are better because they aren't wishy-washy, they know what they want and they know the difference between right and wrong." It's shorter, it's more to the point, it's clearer and as an opinion it works just fine.
In the same forum is someone I believe to be liberal, but it's hard to tell. This person is so comfortable with ambiguity and relativism that it's impossible to tell what they believe in. If you ask him a question about how a problem should be solved he will describe all the possible problems in any solution for the problem. He will take great pride in not committing himself to a position, embracing doubt as a laudable ideal.
But what I want to touch on is that these mindsets are facts of existence, they will change very little despite our best efforts. You will not get a liberal person to happily make a snap decision on a complex topic, and you won't get a conservative person to happily waffle about something for an hour weighing all the pros and cons without reaching some conclusion. As such we must start changing how we communicate if we want to cooperate. It is like learning another language, if you want to get cooperation from someone who speaks a different language we have to alter what we say.
So, if you are a liberal who wants to convince a conservative that we should bring our troops home from Iraq don't spend a lot of time on deceptions, and doubts, and worries and equating iraqis with americans (that's ow you convince a liberal) simply say, "The mission in Iraq was simple, get rid of Saddam Hussein and remove any WMD's, those are done, they don't want us there, let them fix their own country" and then don't say anything else. Just pound on these dogmatic points, ask "Is Saddam in power, yes or no?""Are there WMD's, yes or no?""When a mission's over, what do you do?"
If you are a conservative who wants to convince a liberal I suggest the following tactic. Think of five outcomes to any situation but make sure that what you think is right will be the best answer to get the best outcome. Thinking of the possible outcomes and what is the right solution should be entirely natural. But what won't be natural is outlining these five different possibilities, what is more natural is just saying what the right thing to do is. It will show to the liberal that you are nuanced, thoughtful, open to different ideas and therefore to be respected intellectually. The summary is exactly the same, but a liberal will take it seriously.
But in the end, most of the time, conservatives and liberals will keep on being conservatives and liberals because they can't help it. Just like puppies have to chew, girls like pink, and everyone likes to gossip, liberals have to waffle and conservatives have to decide.

The Face of Evil.

My political beliefs are based on humanism (doing what is good for humans, based on what humans actually are) in the form of utilitarianism. I think things should be organised in such a way as to make the largest number of people as happy as possible. Since we aren't able to read minds as yet the best way we know to determine people's happiness is for them to tell us what they want in order to be happy, and the easiest way to provide a means to reach these individual goals is to give people the freedom to go and do what they want.

Three weeks ago I was as happy as I have ever been. My responsibilities were few, I lived in a beautiful place, I was carefree. Today I am tired, frustrated, annoyed, trapped, devoid of hope. What made the difference? His name is Larry.

What is evil? From my political belief based above evil is what prevents people being happy, prevents them being free to do what they want. I want to sleep and Larry prevents it. I want to sit down and relax, be stress free, have a jam sandwich. I don't like to tell people what to do I'm a believer in freedom. Yet I spend hours every day in a running mantra of "No, no, leave it, down! Good dog, no!, leave that, leave it, good dog, LEAVE IT!" Right now Larry is lying unconscious next to me, which should be ideal, but I know that every second he sleeps now is two seconds of energy when I am exhausted, which poisons this moment. The alternative to chasing Larry around is to put him in a barred crate (as recommended by all professionals). Larry hates this, and I can understand why, a child seperated from its family and put in a jail cell with no apparent reason (as close a human analogy to the situation as I can find) would be immediate cause for outrage and criminal prosecution.

Larry whines. He has a vocalization specifically designed to communicate distress and frustration. It is very effective. It's the main reason I know he hates being imprisoned in a crate, because of the almost constant whining. But Larry is not just inconsciously evil, he is cunning. Larry is very smart, to our knowledge he had been housebroken in four days, an astonishing rate. That was until we found his secret area. He knew he should go outside, but sometimes it is cold and wet and he prefers not to go outside, so he crapped in secret. As part of the whole housebreaking program I look closely to see if Larry wants to go outside. Him sitting by the door and whining seems perfect for this. For eight hours yesterday Larry had a routine, he would come up to me sit down and sigh. Ten seconds later he would go to the door, sit and whine. He would do this continually until I went outside with him which I did on probably twelve occasions during this time period. He peed three times, the other nine times he was deceiving me, lying to me in order to get outside. Once outside he would cross the street to see if the neighbors dog was there (it wasn't) and then he would try to drag himself desperately back inside for the routine to start again. I was being trained to be his servant.

Larry is never satisfied, just exhausted, and then for only three hours at a time. If you feed him this is an immediate signal for him to whine and beg and harass for more food. If you give him a chew toy he will be interested for perhaps five minutes for a grand maximum of two days and then will never touch it again, but pillows, blankets, clothing are all infinitely fascinating. Larry simply has no concern for any other creatures feelings. He will steal things, he will lie, he will chase our cat to play despite the hissing and scratching. Larry is an entirely non-moral creature, a sociopath. His only concerns are personal pleasure and power, the fact that I care whether he is miserable or not gives him an enormous advantage in our struggle.

Larry is amoral, a liar, a cheat, a sociopath, a vandal, cunning, and he is making my life miserable. Clearly he is the Face of Evil. I wonder if I'll love him in three months?

A Few Words on Religion and Childhood.

I'm an atheist. That means that I have a belief that there is no God. I also have no belief in spiritual creatures, karma as an acting force, or a soul. But at one point in my life I had a belief that cannot be termed as anything else but supernatural. I believed in my own luck. I had faith that even if I couldn't see how thins could be OK that they would actually work out. This happened when I was a teenager, prime territory for "Being in trouble" and prime territory for being terrified of the results.
Looking back it is really alarming to think of the times I might sit in a classroom, my hands sweaty, my heart racing, literally terrified that a teacher would catch me at something so heinous as not doing my homework. The only times I get anything close to that level of fear nowadays are in life and death situations, like a potential high speed cr crash. My fear of authority figures was literally equivalent to my present level of fear of horrific car crashes, or the fear of the death of a relative. Yet there was a little part of me that felt things would work out somehow. I didn't know how it would work out, and it certainly wasn't going to work out because of anything I was going to do. But I had a feeling it was going to work out, that I was somehow just lucky.
After a few times when things did work out (and how could they not turn out better than my terrified self expected?) this reinforced this belief until I started to rely on being lucky. Over time this belief has left me. I have been lucky in many ways in my life, but I've also been clinically depresses, utterly miserable. I've been treated well and treated badly, and over time my terror of people has left as I have been able to take more control of my life as naturally happens in becoming an adult.
I don't really know if my experience as a teenager is typical, although I have certainly talked to people who found the teen years a nightmare, just something to endure. My memories of being a child are generally feelings of drudgery, extreme stress, imprisonment, with times of real joy being generally when I was alone and with some ability to decide things for myself. This isn't to suggest that my parents or teachers were ogres, I would absolutely not take a randomnly determined alternative childhood, I think I was lucky with my siuation. Rather I think my natural personality abhors not having autonomy, being under the power of others, and that was present from a very early age. My first memory is at four years old and deciding that my teacher was rude to me and I wasn't going to stand for it. I simply left the school and walked home by myself despite never having done such a thing at all in my life before. Overall I much prefer being an adult to being a child.
So, I am an atheist but I have had a religious belief. That religious belief came about in a time of fear, powerlessness. It gave me hope and may have been the reason why I simply didn't collapse as a human being. From talking to a number of people about their moments of conversion this seems to be if not usual, at least very common. looking back, I am extremely grateful for that little piece of irrational hope.

Why I am Hopeful.

The title for this blog is the Hopeful Muser. So why am I hopeful? It's not really in my nature, I'm more of a pessimist generally. It's not because somehow I've determined that it is better to be hopeful than pessimistic (it is) and then managed to convince myself to be so (I have no idea how to do such things). No, I'm hopeful based on hard evidence.
The world's biggest problem at the moment is population, it feeds all the other big problems, global warming, competition over resources, cultural fights. But the United Nations projects the world population to stabilize somewhere between 9-12 billion people over the next fifty to seventy years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates I've been keeping an eye on these predictions for about ten years now, and they seem to be coming down rather than going up. As technology and education increase populations cease growing, and actually start to decline http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/1979.cfm. I see no reason why the current spread of technology and education will not continue.
Then there is the condition of the people on the planet. As the population numbers have increased conditions have actually improved. People get more to eat on average now than they used to, and the trend as been for agricultural food stuffs to become cheaper http://www.fao.org/docrep/004/y3557e/y3557e06.htm. Life expectancy around the world is going up http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/lifeexpectancy.htm, there is less violence http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html than ever before, education is spreading with illiteracy rates dropping rapidly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World-Literacy-Rate-1970to2015.TC.png. The world is also getting more free, http://gsociology.icaap.org/report/polsum.html.
So, in summary people live longer, healthier, safer, more educated and more free lives, these tendencies are continuing and are projected to continue. The two things that might hold this back are calamity (nuclear war, massive plague, asteroids colliding with earth etc.) or lack of resources. Nuclear war on a scale that threatens the earth is declining as a threat to humanity, the effect of a single bomb is now so devastating that their presense has probably reduced warfare, what county will invade at the cost of the complete annihilation of their largets city? These remain a threat to people, but less a threat to humanity as a whole. At some point even politicians will realize that four or five of these things guarantee safety more than a thousand of them. Plague hasn't killed us off despite many, many attempts, and we are better equipped than ever to deal with it.
Lack of resources in the end comes down to lack of energy. The burning of fossil fuels has a finite time left, which is just as well since it's changing the climate. But there's no shortage of energy available, we just have to access it. The sun shines down more energy on the earth in an hour than the world uses in a year. The combination of hydrogen and oxygen, both abundant on earth as waer, burn very nicely to produce water. The difficulty in both cases is in designing technology that provides an energy profit from these resources. Now that global warming is being taken seriously (far, far earlier than I would have expected) massive investment is going to happen in these areas with extremely high chances of success http://www.enn.com/energy/article/24413, http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=solar&id=17025&a
Life is getting better for people in very real ways. The world is changing and will continue to change, and there will be casualties as a result. Species will die off and because of our increased connectivity there will be a reduction in biodiversity on a worldwide scale. But this has been happening for centuries. Europe has gone through this process repeatedly, and it is a beautiful and pleasant to live in as anywhere in the world. Indigenous cultures will die off, and the world will slowly look more and more the same the world over. But people will be happier, healthier, smarter and more free, people are becoming more moral people caring about a greater range of things than ever before, it's a trade-off that I am willing to make and I am very optimistic about the wonderful future that lies before us.

How do parents do it?

I am exhausted. Bleary eyed, slow of wit, prone to mistakes. My mouth tastes like dust and my eyes are reminiscent of the Kalahari. What could be the reason? The reason's name is Larry, the four month-old puppy we got yesterday. Apparently Larry doesn't sleep for more than three minutes at a time. And this is less than twenty-four hours with a puppy. A real-life crying baby day-after-day with all the added pressure and effort would be a truly frightening load. I salute all of you crazy people who are responsible for the continuing existence of the human race, you guys are nuts.

Portland in the Spring

There aren't many places more beautiful than Portland on a sunny, spring day. We've gone through the time of dafodils, enjoyed the cherry blossoms, but now is the time of the magnolia. These are all trees within two hundred yards of my house.

What's the Point?

I'm sure you are familiar with this question, probably when you have a wonderful idea that you think will be great and some whiner asks, "But what's the point?" But I wonder how much you've thought about the question? It has an assumption built into it, that nothing without a point is worth doing, resulting in the consequence that every single bit of your life must achieve something meaningful. That's quite an assumption, isn't it? Two choices, achievement or a waste of time. But lets apply the question to the subject, what is the point of points?

It seems to me that the point of points is to achieve some change in your environment. The point of going to work is to acquire money so that you can eat. The point of mowing the lawn is to make it more beautiful (or to please the neighbors, or to avoid getting fined by the city). The point of changing a lightbulb is so that you will be able to see. The point of points is to ensure that the environment is altered in such a way as to improve your life. Points seem very useful then, randomly doing things without a point, without a goal in mind, would be a disastrous strategy.

But I want you to consider another group of activities. Consider lying in a hammock overlooking a beautiful bay. A pleasant beverage is within easy reach, bird song calls out from the jungle, you've got nowhere else to go for a week. Where's the point in that? I like to go walking, not hiking, but just walking around. I enjoy looking at things and just moving around. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not really getting exercise, I'm not even really changing my mood from before the walk until after the walk. I don't do it to come up with clever ideas (although that can happen) I'm just walking and enjoying it. How about a nice, long, warm bath? Or listening to music? There's a whole range of activities that don't achieve anything at all, but we like them. We can be ourselves doing them and enjoying it. I submit that generally we prefer these activities to the ones with a point.

But this refrain of "What's the point" still clamors around our lives. This constant push to achieve, make, build, acquire, perfect is everywhere in our lives. But what we really like to do is not have a point. We like to do things for the pleasure of the thing as much as any achievement. Even if what you like to do is build or construct something, if you don't enjoy the actual doing of it, the building or making as much as the having built or made, you are missing the trick. Points and goals are useful things, but only if they have an end to them.

Before you start thinking that this is just the philosophy of a lazy bastard I'm bring in the big guns. Here's Jesus: Matthew 6:25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life[b]?
28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Here's Lao-Tsu in the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 9: Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity

One of the great common ideals is the concept of freedom, to do as we please. I think the purest form of freedom is to be in a situation where you have the ability to choose to do things without a point, to do just do what seems natural without thought of consequence or wasting time. But the only way that you can have the time and freedom to act in such a way is to organize your life and get the things done that need to be done.

What's the point? The point is to get things done so that there will be no point, so that you will be free. To think of what the point of in an activity is absolutely vital, the more clearly you you can see what the point of something is, the better you will be at completeing and therefore removing the point. The point is to have no point, a concept so startlingly simple that we forget it. I'll finish with two Bob Marley quotes, "In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty," and "Wake up and live!"

Sam's Cross on Tour

On Friday March 28th my band, Sam's Cross, left Portland in the spring to head off ino the wilds of Washington to Spokane. It's 350 miles away, the road travelling through the awesome Columbia River Gorge, and then through hundreds of miles of nothingness where the tumbleweed congregates along barbed wire fences. Snow blew ferociously around the most noble little car of all time, our trusty 1985 Honda Civic.Finally, six hours after we had left a sign proclaimed "Warning, Hill!" and we descended into Spokane.

Half the band hails from Spokane, a place that I had never visited and only imagined from the tales of woe from those who had decided to leave. I imagined trailer parks and tenements. Huddled rednecks in rusty pick-up trucks hating people like me with a passion. But Spokane is a real city, with victorian brick buildings downtown, parks and scenery. It has ridiculously pretentious yuppy bars with arrogant waiters correcting your pronunciation when they aren't ignoring you.

Spokane is, in fact, a place of mystery and wonder, a place of fairy lights strung below train tracks and art hung in bars the size of a shoebox. A place with elder leprechauns who will regale you with their opinions on the english in between their impossible attempts to seduce your womenfolk. In this mysterious new place we prepared ourselves to play music that none of the locals had heard before, and hoped against hope against disaster.

This is what it's like for me on stage, as a musician. For a start I feel like an actor going up on stage. It isn't me that people see up there, it is myself playing the role of an irish singer, hopefully in a well done and gritty film. In order to facilitate this illusion I wear costumes. This weekend I went with a three-piece tweed suit and a silly red beard. Fortunately the silly red beard comes with the genetics. The thing is that when I would stop at a gas station, or even when I first walk into the bar, people look at me like I'm a freak. There are a lot of quick glances out of the corner of eyes and muttering after you pass by. But as soon as I'm on stage, without having changed anything, it's suddenly completely fine, in fact it is cool and hip to be wearing a tweed suit in a dive bar in Spokane. This is a weird experience.

The next part of the weirdness is that you look out onto a group of people, most of whom you probably don't know, and they are all staring at you, waiting and expecting. In order to play music competently most of it has to become uncnscious, it's done with muscle memory, like walking. You don't pay attention to walking, you don't even know how your brain manages it, you just decide to walk across the room and your body does it. So, for me on stage I don't know how my body plays the music, or remembers the lyrics, I just trust that it will. So, the whole time there's a potential thought that you might just forget how to do it. It also gives you time to think, half the time while I'm playing mandolin and singing I'm thinking about something else. I'm looking out into the crowd wondering what they are thinking. I'm concentrating on how the cheap tweed is very itchy. But mostly I'm asking myself, "Do they like it?"

There's nothing quite like dressing up in an outfit, getting up on stage and playing a role to teach you about how much people do it every day, all day. I absolutely love it. When was the last time you tried on a different role, allowed yourself to be a bit uncomfortable but got the joy of being someone else just for a little bit?

The last thing I want to say about playing music in this post is what being part of a band is like. When on stage you are on an island, you are up there for everyone to see and there is no hiding place. The ony people with you are your fellow band mates. There is nothing much you can do to influence how they play, and one person can destroy a song, and therefore destroy the illusion. You have no choice but to trust the others in the band completely, and you know they are doing the same with you. It is a group of people with different roles and skills all working together wihout speaking, all communicating non-verbally, protecting each other against public humiliation. it's that sort of situation that realy builds friendship. Whether playing a sport, or fighting a war, or playing music, it is proven trust between people that builds the strongest relationships. I will never be able to thank Dade Cariaga enough for giving me the gift of music, something I will never lose and a bigger gift than I ever expected.

Cheers to Spokane, you rocked!