Iterations

Doing a thing 5,000 times, you'll be rewarded with one of two possible magic tricks:

1. If you try to do slightly better each time, your output will come to seem like more than the sum of its parts. At first, only subliminally. Your cookies "grow on" people, or your prose is "hard to put down". Over time, greatness arises.

2. If, instead, you focus on maintaining quality, you'll nail it even on bad days and under poor conditions. Your magic trick is consistency. A sort of heroism.

But if you don't set a standard to maintain or to push, results will be scattershot, and you'll often find yourself impatiently awaiting inspiration. Magic appears to arrive, erratically, "from above".

This applies to all action, not just one's center stage activity.

Exceptionalism

Rick Wilson, inventor of the immutable political axiom “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, writes (regarding the Noem and Bondi—and, soon, Gabbard—firings):

You’d think after a decade of watching the Rick Wilson School of Applied Political Thermodynamics, these people would understand the phase change from “loyal foot soldier” to “discarded husk” is an absolute, an inevitability for anyone in Trump’s crapulous orbit.

I mused, as a kid, about how guys who’d stolen girlfriends from other boyfriends always assumed they’d live happily ever after with said stolen girlfriends. What makes them so certain the same fate won’t befall them, given their paramour’s fickle track record?

It’s because everyone, in their heart of heart, thinks “I’m different.”

This, just like “ETTD”, is a peephole into the gargantuan self-superiority and narcissism quietly lurking within the *average* person. Everyone’s exceptional. Without exception. We fail to grasp how narcissistic everyone is, because we’re all far too narcissistic to notice.

The Seminal Facebook Post

The seminal Facebook posting follows. I posted it in reply to comments after my latest attempt to offer a sharp point drew, as always, nothing but slobberingly distant bla-bla-bla from my distressingly intelligent and savvy social media circle.  

I do realize that many people use Facebook by seizing upon a single charged term and unloading their general policy position on that term, regardless of the point being made in the posting. Sort of like kids gathered around a campfire and riffing on a theme like “storms” or “ghosts”.

I don’t mind that people do this, though I do mind greatly that because this is all people do now, they are increasingly unable to engage in on-point discussion of anything anywhere ever. I just find it surprising that someone would judge my feed just another place to plaster their random, keyword-triggered thoughts, when I take obvious pains to buck the trend and be thoughtful and specific, offering interesting thoughts deserving focused consideration and discussion rather than a campfire bullshit session of ghost stories and shit-that’s-been-preoccupying-you. 

I literally can’t remember the last time anyone took a point head-on, rather than sloppily and indulgently releasing their random iddy issues. Y’all couldn’t pass a Turing Test. 

So I’m not going to frame this as a warning or anything, but this might be a bit like musical chairs, because at some point I’m gonna blow my top, and the last person to be caught out might feel excoriated. This is not that, btw. This is me being cordial. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Reframing Pain

For younger people, pain is usually sudden and galvanizing. Your body is supposed to "just work", so pain is aberrational. A danger sign. But, being young, you heal fast and the pain goes away. So pain is rarely a big deal, yet always feels like one.

Around late middle age, your body begins to carry a rich palette—a portfolio, if you will—of pains, like a bunch of progress thermometers. Doctors and physical therapists do not find this aberrational, so they're usually trying to help with pain management rather than elimination. And when I was explained this in younger days, it terrified me, because I figured old age was a hell of non-stop galvanizing pain.

It's not, though. It's something you can mostly just reframe.

Two questions are always front-of-mind: 1. Is something horribly wrong? and 2. Will this pain keep getting worse?

Neither is unknown to youngsters, but age makes you more more prone to serious conditions, leaving you skittish about scary diagnoses and downward trajectories.

However, the moment you understand what’s paining you—how it behaves, what to expect, and assurance it won't climb to infinity—even substantial pain becomes easier to bear. Young people don't often have chronic pain. It sounds ghastly, but only if you're imagining galvanizing pain that never goes away.

When you reach the age where pain becomes informational rather than existential, it becomes viable to carry a pain portfolio without suffering much if you understand the situation, and know the upper limit, and have some fixes (however partial) close at hand.

For example, I have a sensitive tooth occasionally delivering toothache-level pain with no possible fix (my dentist generously offers root canal it if it gets unbearable, which is not an enticing prospect). But it's not jaw cancer, and I know the pain curve, and I have three creams, one of which usually fades it into the cosmic background pain radiation. Interestingly, I rarely find myself applying the cream, even when it hurts. My knowledge and self-stewardship make it so bearable that I don't usually need to do the thing. I know the bout will be short-lived, intensity-capped, and medicable. And that's usually enough. It's essentially sandboxed.

I know it's hard to understand. 20 or 40 year old me would have been bewildered by this explanation. But my point is this: while old age does indeed mean soreness and pain, it's not the galvanizing pain you feared while young. It's informational, not existential.

At least, for the most part. But when some fresh hell ignites, I scramble not for solution so much as understanding, collecting countermeasures and support to trim the crisis to a more realistic size for pragmatic management—at which point that management might become strictly optional.

Robert Mueller

Given the MAGA movement's insistence that Mueller's report exonerated Trump, why is he not being commemorated by them as a hero?

Why would they hate him so bitterly for exonerating their guy?

The Ideal Framing for Aging

I've struck upon the ideal framing for aging:

Try to squeeze all the toothpaste out of the tube.

That's it. Don't complicate further. Just that.


All postings on aging, in reverse-chronological order

Backing Up to Proceed

Many of the deepest and most persistent mysteries of the human world resolve with baffling ease if you simply back up an inch before proceeding.

• The term “soul” was invented by poseurs to identify the mysterious and unobservable part that’s not posing.
  
  
• Tai chi is the practice of embodying the natural flow one normally pretends not to be a part of.
  
  
• Spirituality is the process of learning to recognize and identify with the immutable subjectivity you are, rather than with the ever-changing persona you've been pretending (merely for kicks, at first) to portray.

• Here's why a loving, munificent god lets kids get cancer, and all the rest of the horrors: It's because we want it that way.

Misgivings

I had misgivings about posting yesterday's essay about sharpening comprehension and intuition via winnowing.

An epidemic has arisen out of isolation and narcissism stoked via the unholy trinity of devices, social media, and COVID quarantine: we prioritize our gut impressions, our flip assumptions, and our baseless conjecture above all else.

So a superficial read of my posting might make people think I'm urging everyone to trust their visceral impulses even more.

The world is not complex or subtle or surprising. You're fully on top of it, standing triumphantly astride the landscape, so stand confident, eschew subtlety, and go with your gut!

No. None of that. There is a vast difference between 1. Cursory dismissal of subtlety and surprise while brutishly elevating your ditzy mental noise, and 2. Canny, sensitive pruning of irrelevant choices in order to escape a state of confusion.

But even having explained this, the brutish will read my essay and shout "EXACTLY!"

Confusion Isn’t Infinity, it’s Twelve (or Three)

I'm reposting this from May 2025. It's not just a whimsical reflection, or some sort of allegory. And it's not really about music. It's a key. Not useful for everyone, but those moved to sit with it will find value here.


All professional musicians go through ear training. This is where they develop the ability to play back melodies, or write them out in musical notation, using only their ears. It's daunting for newbies, and while you'd imagine it gets easier with practice—and it does—the real key is reframing:

There are not infinite notes. There are only twelve.

This is a huge—and hugely useful—realization. What's more, these twelve notes are your friends. We've all heard all the notes umpteen zillion times. They are few, and they are eminently familiar. Like old friends.

Twelve is much much less than infinity. To be adrift amid twelve is a whole other predicament. You're already much closer to your goal, without a minute of practice.

But wait. Unless you're tone deaf, you can easily tell a small musical jump from a large one. So you don't need to consider all twelve notes each time. Even a wild guess will land you within a half-step or so. So you're really considering more like three notes. Not infinity. Not twelve. Three!

Like magic, ear training is transformed from an advanced skill to a matter of choosing between three candidates.

INFINITY -> TWELVE -> THREE -> ONE

That's the geometrical progression to hone in on.

There are innumerable scenarios where we feel awash in infinite possibilities. That's what "confusion" is. That's what it is to be "overwhelmed" or "ignorant". Massive, daunting unknowability is a familiar human condition. And perhaps needless, if you shift perspective.

A year after moving to a place like Portugal, one easily handles everyday encounters—ordering lunch, asking for directions, etc. I order with such casual aplomb that you might imagine I speak fluent Portuguese. But my problem is exceptions. If the waitress returns to ask—in rapid-fire Portuguese between bubblegum pops—"I'm totally sorry but the oven's on the fritz and we can't like do roast potatoes do you want a different side dish or whatever just lemme know what you want ok", I'm dead.

But the move is to recognize that you're not swimming in infinity. The waitress is not reminding you to change your car's oil. And she's not reporting Taylor Swift's latest song drop. Nor is she informing you that Komodo dragons mate asexually. The infinity in which you imagine yourself drowning is a false perception. There are probably more like twelve possibilities. Three, really, if you're reasonably focused, watch body language, and parse a few muttered, clipped, vernacular words.

Context is a Thing. It's nature's own constraining device, if you'll merely consider it.

Like every life strategy, the dealkiller for most people is the notion of paying any attention at all. The waitress must be an entirely real person for you, with recognizable and empathetic drives and processes. You need to show up and be present in reality.

The first move in any confusing situation is to fully register context, and let it calm and focus you. One can drastically trim down "infinity" to cull a manageable set of possibilities.

If you muster the clarity to register that you're in a restaurant, and she's a waitress, and something happened in the kitchen—or en route thereto—to make her reverse course and come speak words at you, then even rudimentary language skills should take you the final mile, more or less. No more than a half-step away.

I still find this planet confusing, but it feels like a tidy pool of friendly options—severely winnowed by context, which is where I focus my attention. Even heavy confusion doesn't feel like an oppression of infinity. At most, it's 12. Or, realistically, 3.

Celebrating Allies' Refusal to Aid

Reactions to Trump's call for help to secure Strait of Hormuz:

JAPAN Japan does not currently plan to dispatch naval vessels to escort ships in the Middle East, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said on Monday. AUSTRALIA Australia will not send naval ships to assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a government minister said on Monday. BRITAIN Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday he would not be "drawn into the wider Iran war" whilst reiterating he was working with allies to reopen the Strait. EUROPEAN UNION EU foreign ministers will on Monday discuss bolstering a small naval mission in the Middle East but they are not expected to discuss expanding its role to include the choked-off Strait, diplomats and officials say. GERMANY Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Monday that Germany would not participate with its military in securing the Strait. "What does Trump expect from a handful of European frigates that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do? This is not our war, we have not started it," Pistorius said. ITALY Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Monday that diplomacy was the right way to solve the crisis in the Strait, adding there were no naval missions Italy was involved in that could be extended to the area. GREECE A government spokesperson said on Monday that Greece would not engage in military operations in the Strait of Hormuz.

Being profoundly anti-Trump, and recognizing the attack on Iran as an effort to drown out Epstein revelations, performed in a way to make freedom-seeking Iranians cling to their regime and recharge the bitter anti-American hatred that fueled their revolution, these reactions from foreign countries give me a heady rush of pleasure. Even leaving aside the deserved comeuppance after a year of spitting in allies’ faces for no reason beyond juvenile posturing.

However, when Republicans consorted with foreign governments to foil Obama's foreign policy, I was enraged by their anti-Americanism. And I've got a character flaw: I can't do the clean-wipe brainwashing my fellow citizens, both left right, have mastered. I repel from hypocrisy. Not just in my withering view of Them Out There, but in Me In Here. I hold myself to the same standard. I've got a screw loose.

Allies are steadfastly refusing to help the United States out of a predicament, and the left feels the same delight I feel, but they're gushing over it. They're basking. As if there were no other possible side to the story.

I wish there were a way to resolve 1: my insistence that citizens—while always free to disagree—must never work against American foreign policy or delight in its thwarting with 2: my thirst for this Iranian "excursion" to be thwarted, and my delight over allies’ refusal to help.

There's no answer —no right behavior—because the morality is upstream from our present moment, so all we can do presently is struggle in tempestuous effluent. The moral decision-making is behind us. We've sealed our fate and forced our hand. So at this point I can only shout backwards:

Don't eagerly defy norms. Don't be extreme. Stay moderate. If you find a politician (be it a Trump or a Bernie) vowing to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch in a way that feels satisfying to your more visceral thirsts, lean away from that movement, regardless of any agreement with policy proposals or tribal signalings. Stop seeking personal satisfaction in politics. Build a government that's competent, mild, and boring, even if you don't agree with everything and don't want to have a beer with the person in charge and s/he doesn't look/talk/seem like you. Find some other mirror to peer into!

We didn't (and won't) take that route because we're bored haughty aristocrats who have, alas, upgraded to luxury politics. Our stories must be tales of glory, leaving us feeling staked—or, even better, victimized.

Poor people don't need glory, they need food and safety. We've got those things, so glory's the sole objective. Trump represents one sort of cosplay glory, while the progressive left palpably thirsts for a demagogue of its own.

Will we ping-pong, or will we moderate? Americans were always known to course correct toward moderation, but we may have broken the bungee cord.