Mistakes.

I've made a few, but then again...

Pretty much every time I've been angry it has been a mistake, but I'm not sure I could have done much about it. Instinct and my nature probably took over. There are things that are just inherent mistakes based on having a personality.

On the other hand I pride myself on being rational about making decisions, and part of rationality is evaluating the decisions that you have made. So, I was thinking about mistakes today, while almost terminally bored and stuck here with gout and another leg injury.

There have been two decisions that I made after serious deliberation, that now make up most of my time, that I consider to have been mistakes. These two are getting a dog, the Face of Evil, and moving to Texas.

I think the choice to get a dog being a mistake would be argued by my wife, as she is fond of the dog but doesn't have to do anything to take care of him. It's a bit like how I like other people's children very much for an hour or two at sporadic intervals. In fact it is very much like having children indeed. The dog was obtained so that we could have something to love, so that I wouldn't be lonely, and um, that's it really.

I treat the dog marvelously, much better than most dogs are treated. Regular long walks, lots of treats, affection, drives in the car, expensive medical care, friends to see and play with, all of that. The result is that from time to time Larry is sweet, and beautiful, and fun, and makes things great. I am not lonely because his presence is so intensely there that when he is not around I have the strong impression that I have misplaced something. But most of the time he is a chore, like doing laundry. Right now he has been at the vets, getting his fourth surgery, for a little over a week. It has been an improvement, and I will admit to having some hope that he would die under anesthetic so I would be freed of the burden without it being my fault. Yes, very much like having a child, which generally (according to scientifically obtained data) makes people less happy, and any parent who pretends that they have never thought of strangling their child is lying.

Moving to Texas was a mistake because it is not an adventure, it is something to be endured. I had good things in Portland, I miss that band terribly, and the other friends I had too, although I think none of the people I actually spent time with read this blog.

The reasons for coming here were fear of being poor, the chance for Christina to advance in her career, and for the feeling of adventure in a new place. However poor we were going to be is richer than I have been in my life, and cowardice is an awful reason to do anything. The move has cost us tens of thousands of dollars anyway, but different jobs would have done that anyway, so financially right now we are probably about even. This was not expected.

Christina is in the exact same job that she was before, but having been lied to by her boss, and with a hiring freeze going on, no prospects for advancement and being generally mistreated by her co-workers. She is looking for other work. I think at this point the smart thing to do would be to not worry about a career, just pack it all in and start thinking in different terms. The thing about money is that whatever amount you have becomes the concept of a necessary amount, and anything less than that seems too hard to bear. Which is cowardly bullshit that I am prone to produce in myself.

It's hard to explain exactly how non-adventurous this has been. This is mostly because the basic issues are solved in the same way. We own a house, we shop from grocery stores in the same language with mostly the same stuff in them, our bank is the same, our news and entertainment options are basically identical. The difference is that the people here are different, which should be the essence of the adventure. But turn on Fox News and you get the cultural context, talk to a suburban mother and you get the intellectual level, watch Monday Night Football and you get an idea of the arts. Live music is classic rock covers. Parties are hamburgers and domestic, yellow beer. Community events are high school sports. It is a wasteland. Here's the thing, King of the Hill is not actually a joke, it is a highly accurate portrayal, I am not joking, not even a tiny, little bit.

When mistakes have been made it is best to acknowledge them, and use the information to make better decisions in the future. Unfortunately I bet I still have to take care of the dog for another ten years.

The Grind.

The title of this post may well seem ironic to those who know how little I work, but that's not what I'm talking about. The Grind I am talking about is that feeling of constantly pushing the rock uphill. The rock consists of the life we wish to lead, the comfort, the companionship, the beauty, the interest. The uphill consists of the constant chores, the unexpected car breakdown, the negativity of people, the ignorance, the hostility, the bad news, the illness.

There are repeated times when I just feel like I want to give up. I don't want to be civil to those who say Barack Obama is trying to destroy America, I didn't even say that about George Bush. I don't want to have to put up with the news that in Afghanistan people still stone to death a young couple for having sex. I don't want to have to see the flat lie that "God is the only way to love" on a billboard when going for groceries. I don't want my neighbors to ignore me forever because they are upset when I point out that they haven't done what they promised. I don't want to have the bill be twice as much as the estimate, or have the rental company try to steal my money, or to feel the chemicals change in my brain and know that through no fault of my own I'm going to be fighting back tears that day. There are repeated times when I just don't want to take care of myself anymore, when I don't want to do it anymore, when I want someone to do it for me.

The Grind is when you get to those times and realize that giving up just makes it worse. Those things don't go away by themselves, they just get worse. Everyone else is fighting their own version of The Grind, often a harder fight than I have. No-one is actually going to take care of you when it comes down to it, it's really you and your place in all of this. The Grind is reduced by facing it, admitting it, thinking about it and doing something.

Hope is vital. Without hope all there is are ashes and misery. Not only does hope help you, it helps everyone around you. If you don't fight against The Grind, if you don't try to be better than the misery, the hatred, the ignorance, the stupidity, who is going to do it? If you aren't going to be optimistic, to look for solutions, to smile and have fun, who is going to do it. The fight is the right, the best choice. It is a responsibility to continue that fight for ourselves and for those around us. The Grind will always be there, but what makes a person good is simply working against it.

Most of the people who read this blog have fought against The Grind with the added weight of mental illness, whether depression, or bipolar disorder, or being part of a family that deals with that (which really does count). Everyone is still fighting it, still trying, still making the world a better place. I applaud you for it.

Self-Review.

I spend most of my time alone. I practice with a band one evening a week, and other than that most of my interactions with people are store clerks or just with my wife. Yesterday evening was a nice exception as we spent some time with our neighbors. As a result of this I spend a fair amount of time most days on a computer, looking around for things to occupy my mind. I probably spend too much time on internet forums, but they do provide a real sense of interaction with people.

So, while trying to while away the hours one evening recently I started reading back through this blog. My main intention was to use it as a benchmark of where I was mentally a year or two years ago, to see how much I have changed and how. I ended up over the following couple of days reading the entire blog, every word and every comment.

What did I discover? The first thing is that I actually believe that this writing has had worth, which was a surprise. I had thought that this was largely me ranting somewhat incoherently, without much of a coherent position, and often cringingly whiny in nature. I actually was interested in what I had written and thought it made the points that I had wished to make rather well. As a series of essays I have read many worse attempts.

The second thing that I have discovered is that I have changed remarkably little during these years. The posts in the first few months could have been written in the last few weeks. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by this, after all that's what a personality is, but subjectively I had thought that the last few years had been full of change and action in my life. I suppose I should trust my brother Peter's words a little more, "Wherever you go, you are still you."

The third thing that I have discovered is that more people than I had thought read this blog, not necessarily right away, and not for the reasons that I write it. I think the majority of the readers read this blog as a family or friends connection, for emotional reasons rather than intellectual reasons. I would actually be surprised if anyone had changed their positions about anything that I have written about as a result of my writing. But that's people. That's how they operate, based on emotional ties, family, friends, feelings. I also think that reading this blog is helpful for those who need a bit of adult conversation, whether surrounded by children all day long or surrounded by ignorant rednecks.

So, I was encouraged by this reading. It is nice to feel that I have been doing something worthwhile.

Home.

When I was a boy I knew what the word "Home" meant. It was a house in which I and my family lived. Through the course of my adult life I have since lived in approximately fifteen different places in 22 years, four cities in three states. During my life I have so far visited twelve countries for periods longer than a week, and several more for shorter periods. The house in which I am presently I have lived in for less than a year. In a sense the definition of home is the same, in that when I say I going home I am going to the house in which I live with what essentially consists of my family, in my wife. On the other hand this constant migration has changed the definition as well.

For all the nineties when I talked about home I meant England. It was where I was from, it was what I knew, it was the place that was instinctive for me. Home was a place that I had left, but my belief was that it would always be there as home. The thought was that thirty years later I could walk into a country pub and feel comfortable, that I fit, that I was English. Whenever I would visit upon seeing the green of the hedges and fields through both the scratched portal of the airplane's window and the grey haze of fog and cloud a feeling would come, both sad and proud, a swelling in my breast for my homeland.

However, as the years deepened and my returns continued it became apparent that my accent had changed to such a degree that the English thought I was an American. There is nothing so certain an identification of a person in people's eyes as their accent. Although I thought of my home as England, the English thought of me as a foreigner. As nine years passed in Michigan, even with my accent changed beyond recognition in my homeland I was still continually asked, "Where are you from?" A more perfect way to ensure that you know that you are not at home than this question I have yet to meet.

So, where I lived I was asked where I was from, and when I was where I was from the natives were certain I was from somewhere else. Eventually I decided to move to Portland, Oregon, and reached some sort of compromise. For a start, a majority of the people living in Portland are from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else is simply a different part of Oregon. Different parts of Oregon are indeed, very different from Portland. The other part of Portland that helped a compromise was that the values of the people there were very much akin to mine. A belief in helping people, of peace, of thinking and talking, about drinking beer. A collegial atmosphere to a very large extent. The weather was also very familiar to me, lots of grey days, green vegetation, the familiarity of street lights reflecting off the wet asphalt.

However, during the last couple of years in Portland I felt a tingle to move on. There was the feeling of having done Portland, having exhausted what it could give me. There was a feeling of just doing the same things over and over. This is one of the several reasons for the move to Texas, although far from being the most important one. However, I think it may well be an important component of what makes up home, adequate repetition until there is nothing new to you in a place.

Christina and I just returned from a trip to a foreign country in which I felt more at home than in the place that I left. While the local accents on the Dingle Peninsular where often nearly unintelligible the countryside, the pure air, the mannerisms of the country people, all felt easier to me than in the place I presently live. So much so that on our flight home I resolved to treat Spring, TX as a vacation spot we were flying into to spend a few weeks in tropical sunshine, and to a large extent this has worked and it is what I feel. I feel like a tourist in my home.

So what is home? I think there are rings of home. There is a place that you own, that you can exclude people from, in which you can hide and arrange things to your satisfaction. To an extent home is the place where you have control over your environment. The next step is that the area is familiar to you to the point beyond thinking. Home is the area within which you can operate on autopilot, the antithesis of foreign. Then there is the home that comes from being part of a group, being part of a culture with shared values, experiences and understanding. This home comes when you don't censor your speech because you aren't worried about offending people. To an extent it's the group of people with whom you can share the ridiculing of others as an acceptable activity. For me, making fun of Sarah Palin denotes a certain amount of home.

Our vacation to Dingle solidified something for Christina and I. Our plan has failed. Texas is not where we want to be, and therefore we must leave here. It can never be home because the very act of surviving here is not natural to us. We share almost nothing with people who live here, even those who are pleasant and friendly and do no harm. It is impossible for Texas to be home in the fuller sense of the word. While on vacation in Ireland we were asked repeatedly where we were from, and both of us found it very hard to say we were from Texas.

So we need to find a place where we can have our own house in which we can hide securely, we need a form of living that feels natural for us, we need sunshine to ward off depression, and we need the people to be like us. We need to find a home, and I'm a bit sad and disappointed in myself that I seem to need the last criterion, that of people somewhat similar to myself.

Chapter One

Once, or twice, or upon a thousand times the sun gently nudged its way above the mountain, spreading its roseate glow upon the mountain's snow, the enveloping woodlands, and a dew-laden meadow replete with wild flowers. Upon a camp stool sat a man of seemingly middling years, his long and silver hair unbound and cascading down his back. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be relishing simply the feel of the first rays of sunlight upon his face, like a flower reaching for the light. He exhaled slowly, not quite a sigh, and opened his eyes to look around him. He saw the brilliant jewels of light coruscating from the droplets of dew hanging like pendants from the long grass. He saw the wild flowers in their riot of colour strewn haphazardly across the meadow. He saw the first wisps of the fog in the valley rising into the rosy air.

He smelled the dampness of the grass, he heard the buzz of insects and the melodic territorial calls of the birds in the woods. He felt the linen of his shirt in the softest scratching against his shoulders as he breathed. He tasted that strange but familiar flavour that is the dawn air.

He turned his head in a slow arc, surveying the scene before him, breathing in its essence, filling himself with the moment. A decision made he stood quickly and took two strides towards a small easel resting there. Taking brush and ink he wrote in swift and sure strokes a poem:

My life came like dew,

disappears like dew.

All of everything

is dream after dream.

Once finished the man took the brush and cleaned it in a stream of water he poured from a flask on the easel, and carefully replaced the brush in its holder.

"Shadow, it is time. Help me with my armour." His words were sudden, deep and assured, startling in the peace of a meadow. A grey figure, unnoticed until this time, seemed to step out of the fog and obsequiously ushered the warrior into a tent in which stood on a mount a suit of black and gold lacquered leather armour, tied with scarlet ribbons, and crowned with a mustachioed helmet with the face of a demon.

The warrior in black and gold walked down through the dewy meadow, down towards the fog. He could hear rustling and rumbling from within the grey concealment of the mist as he approached. Ten paces from the fog's edge he stopped, drew his sword from his scabbard and threw the scabbard into the long grass to his left. With his sword point concealed amongst the pastels of meadow flowers he took a deep breath. As he released it the fog suddenly rose and dispersed, like a curtain to a stage.

Twenty paces away was a small river, shallow enough to ford, the water tinkling like bells among the stones. Behind, suddenly silent, motionless, stood a horde, a vast array of warriors and wizards, knights and bandits, demons and assassins. The warrior beckoned with his left hand, a flight of arrows leapt into the air, blackening the pale blue sky. A bellow of ten thousand voices, both human and not, howled its fury and the horde charged.

The battle raged throughout the day, the warrior dancing with effortless grace, the bloody, vomiting horror that were the consequences of his movements in macabre contrast to his dance. He passed through the horde removing limbs and heads, opening bodies, weaving destruction with an unearthly speed and power. He could not be touched by giant's club, or wizard's lightning, or assassins dagger. When the ranks broke and fled to regather themselves, the river ran thick and red, tumbling through the dam of piled corpses. When the horde tried wave upon wave of arrows through the raven haunted sky the warrior gestured, and the arrows were caught in a sudden wind and blown back towards the cowering masses. When the first blush of dusk lit the sky around the mountain peaks there was none left to face him, they had fled, or were dead.

The warrior turned with the effort of a thousand years of toil, and looked back up across the meadow from which he had come that morning. His armour was hacked, rent, smeared with gore, scarlet ribbons fluttering loosely in the evening breeze. With faltering movements he reached with his free hand and slowly, so slowly, removed his helmet. His silver hair was plastered with sweat to his brow, his eyes sunken and haunted. He held his demon-faced helmet in the crook of his arm, and trudged back up the hill, limping from the pain in every joint and every muscle.

At his camp he looked briefly at the poem from that morning, and slumped onto his camp stool, a picture of exhaustion. A greyness slipped from the tent, tentative and cautious, more abject than humble, everything in it attempting to escape notice. It sidled up towards the warrior who sat silent and motionless apart from the hoarse pants of his shallow breathing.

"Halt!" came the sudden cry, and the greyness stopped, the black sharpness within its hand held quivering in the evening air.
"Shadow, I know who you are and what you have done. I know that you gathered this horde to meet me today. I know that you have the powers of secrecy, and silence, and move in the background. I don't even know your name, but I know you, Shadow. I knew all of this and I permitted it."
"Shadow, I have lived a long time, a very long time. I have been a warrior, more than that I have been warrior for what seems like a thousand lifetimes. I have fought man, beast, noble, peasant, assassin, demon, wizard, witch across ages. I have fought fear, and love, compassion and falsehood, and stood true to honour throughout. I have always won, although never without hurt. But I am old, I am so very old."
"Today I decided I would have my last battle, to test myself as a warrior does against the greatest foes that could be assembled. I thank you for that Shadow, you did well. And now it is time for me to test myself against the one foe I have not met, the last test. You wish to kill me Shadow, I know that. You could not beat me in this game of ours, this last act is of my choosing, it is what I permit, not what you can do. "
"So do it."

And the Shadow did.




The poem above is a one word changed adaption of the death poem of the samurai Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 1536-1598

The Eternal Tourist

This is a subject that I have often thought that I have discussed repeatedly in this blog, to the point where mentioning it further would be pointless. However, after going back and reading lots of the blog I can't find it written down anywhere, so I'm going to talk about it.

A thing that many people like to do is to be a tourist. To be a tourist one simply needs to go to a place where you don't know what's going on, and then do what you feel like, which in places that you are unfamiliar is very often looking around. I like this activity very much. I like to be surrounded by new things, to be challenged by new problems with easy solutions that are all about me being happier. When in a new place I spend lots of time just walking around and looking at things.

The opposite position from being a tourist is being at home. At home you know where everything is, you have arranged things to your own comfort, you are shielded from the new and the different. This can also be a delightful thing, to be safe and cosy in your own little den, protected from all the morons, the loudness, the difficulties.

I have just been a tourist in a place that feels more like home than my home. Pubs, green grass, hedgerows, ruins, walking. As I was coming back to where I presently live I was determined to use my vacationing in something like home to my advantage and decided to pretend that I was a tourist who was renting this home for a month or so. This worked marvelously until I picked up the dog from the vet and found out they had decided to do $350+ worth of stuff on him because he had a skin infection and some diarrhea. I wouldn't spend that money on a child with the same problems. At this point I simply became angry, and the magic was gone.

The thing is about this whole situation is that in the place that I felt the most at home, I had never been there before in my life (The Dingle Peninsular), and every single person there could tell I was from somewhere else as soon as I opened my mouth. I didn't know where anything was without a map, the money was different, and a fair amount of the time the people around me where speaking either a language I didn't understand, or a dialect that I only understood with difficulty. In the place that I was more at home in I was still a tourist.

We were asked while traveling where we were from. This is a surprisingly difficult question for us now. Are we from Texas? It certainly doesn't feel like it, we don't want to be from here, and we would probably be disowned by actual Texans. Are we from Oregon? Neither of us were born there, we don't live there and we probably won't return to live there again (although we might, if we give up on the rest of humanity). Am I English? The English I met didn't have a clue that I was.

A friend of mine once told me I was a man without a country, that essentially where ever I am, I'm from somewhere else. Under those circumstances I have therefore attempted to be the eternal tourist, always wandering around, peeking into alleyways, looking for what might be going on. I thoroughly recommend incorporating this into your general life, to look at the things around you as a tourist would. The problem with doing this on such a consistent level is that vacationing now is less special, less amazing, more ordinary. Another journey, another new place, another temporary stay.

I think just a couple more years like that will be more than enough. It's getting close to the time where I should make myself a home, a place in which I can grow roots deep into the soil so that when I travel I can once again be going from somewhere, and to which I can return.

Taboos.

Main Entry: ¹ta·boo

Variant(s): also ta·bu \tə-ˈbü, ta-\

Function: adjective

Etymology: Tongan tabu

Date: 1777

1 : forbidden to profane use or contact because of what are held to be dangerous supernatural powers
2 a : banned on grounds of morality or taste b : banned as constituting a risk From the Meeriam-Webster on-line dictionary.

All of us have taboos, things that we think should not be done because of morality or taste. I think most of us have no problem calling Glenn Beck an odious moron, but would have quite a problem if our mothers, wives or children were called the same, regardless of the truth of the matter. The thing is, should we have taboos, or at least should we have as many taboos?

I posted the entire dictionary definition of the word taboo because I think the second part, what I am talking about, derives from the first part. The original meaning of taboo would have been the first definition, that of something being forbidden to be used because of its dangerous supernatural powers, curses and such. This is directly derived from perhaps the most visceral and powerful of human emotions, disgust. Disgust is important because it stops us from eating diseased meat and drinking poisonous water. It is as basic to us as flinching, another survival instinct. But people's brains make new connections, they expand the meaning of things, and this is what happens with taboos.

A culture associates wrong behavior with disgust in order to have consequences for that wrong behavior. In some cases this is clearly excellent, such as having revulsion for child molesters and other rapists. On the other hand, it isn't all that long ago that a young lady expressing an opinion on a political issue would have brought about reactions of horror, disgust and humiliation, often even from other young ladies. The question is whether the taboo is helpful or harmful.

There are a group of people called New Atheists. Here they are sitting around a table talking about basically this subject. What constitutes the difference between old Atheists and New Atheists? The difference consists essentially of the New Atheists being rude enough to say that they are Atheists. After all, what being an Atheist means is that you think all religions are wrong, and if you think they are wrong it would be a rather odd person who then thought that people should continue to be religious. Now, it is interesting to look at the characters of these individuals. From my point of view Christopher Hitchens is a deeply revolting personality, brash, pompous, contemptuous. Dan Dennett seems to be a charming person. It isn't the personalities themselves which are problematic is that it is a taboo to say that you are an atheist and therefore you think religion is wrong and people should stop it.

Right now there are probably readers of this blog who are uncomfortable with this point, that I write in here that their most important beliefs are nonsense. However, think about if I said that the best economic system is barter and so everyone should stop using money. It is a position that says that the basic system that we use, that we all believe in to a large extent is simply wrong and we shouldn't use it. But would anyone be offended if I said it? Would acknowledging that I had that position publicly be considered rude?

Then, consider the world in which I live. Any time I drive from one place to another there are public statements in the form of churches, often with literal statements in front of them, which tell me I am wrong about my basic beliefs on the subject of religion. If you travel around the world you will be hard pressed to find a place that doesn't have a building specifically designed to support the view that I am wrong, with symbols all around it, that is treated as more special than other buildings. Pretty much everywhere the opinion that I am wrong has special status.

Why I am I writing about this? It is because in my friend Dade's excellent and thought provoking blog he wrote a post stating "that Islam is not your enemy." Now, I do agree with the idea that Islam isn't in general a religion bent on invading everywhere and forcing conversions on people, although that certainly has been true in the past, as with Christianity. I don't think Islam makes you a terrorist and I think a mosque at Ground Zero is a great idea, if there are going to be mosques at all. But I do think that Islam as a religion has a set of ideas that they would like everyone in the world to agree to. I'm opposed to that because I think the ideas are wrong. I basically wrote this is a comment, which you can see at the link. So, I'm opposed to Islam. I want less of it because I think it is wrong. The following post to it said my comment borders on bigotry.

So, I say that I think Islam is wrong and I want there to be fewer Muslims and this makes me a borderline bigot. Why is this? Because there is a cultural taboo against Atheists. An Atheist is someone who is simply saying that they are opposed to the idea that there is a God. If I said I was against communism because I think it is wrong, and I want there to be fewer communists as a result would I have been called a bigot? Of course not. Now are the demonstrators against the "religion of the Devil" bigots? I think so, but here's the problem, if you are the sort of Christian who takes The Bible seriously, a false religion is of the Devil. So the people are bigots because they sincerely follow their own religion and tell people about it. The reason I think these demonstrators are bigots and why I am not is because I think my position has come about by reason, while the demonstrators' position has come about by unreasoned faith.

So, is this taboo worth it? Should we link our disgust emotional response with the statement by somebody that their beliefs are that there is no God so people should stop believing in God? Or would it be better if culturally there was as much right to say that there is no God as there is to say that there is a God? Clearly I think so. Part of the reason for this is because the taboo came about to stop people questioning and thinking about what they were told. I think thinking and questioning are important.

This doesn't mean that I think Christians and Muslims and so on can't be nice people, or you can't be married to them, or that they aren't smart, or that they are all going to kill people. Not at all, I just think Christians and Muslims are wrong, and since it's wrong people should stop believing in these religions. I think I should be able to say so without this being an offense, and without being thought of as a bigot.