On Clobbers and Velvet

When, in an otherwise peaceful, comfortable moment, your mind spasms into the not-here/not-now to present some gratuitous blast of fear/loathing/contempt/sadness/regret/bitterness/trepidation/etc., there is only one sane response:

"That's not here and now. That's gratuitous."

We confuse whims with clobbers—a tiny error that compounds titanically over a lifetime of indulging the mistaken interpretation.

Hardly anyone draws this distinction, even though it's a magic button. Why? For the same reason they conjure up all that immaterial strife in the first place. They wish to torture themselves a little, because the peace and comfort of the current moment feels vaguely troublesome or inadequate. It's unlike them.

"I am not a peaceful, comfortable person who basks in peace and comfort. I am a tough guy, or a punk, or a sullen adolescent, or a weary bitter cynic, or someone who craves sharp sensations—the very opposite of the velvety embrace of the current moment."

In one of my most popular postings, "Ballasting Happiness", I wrote:

If you know a worrier, you've surely discovered that such people play a perpetual game of "whack-a-mole". Alleviate a worry for them, and they'll instantly find something else to worry about. It's all about the mindset, not the worries themselves (if there are no real worries at hand, silly ones will be manufactured). They think they're plagued by worries, but, really, they're plagued by the desire to worry.

When you try to alleviate the circumstances that make an angry person angry or a sad person sad, nothing is accomplished because circumstance doesn't create the mindset, it's the other way around. The mindset comes first. Slings and arrows are sought out and eagerly grabbed at.

Your Uncle Louie is not an Aggravated Person because things aggravate him. Things have aggravated him because he's an Aggravated Person.

How does this happen? Everyone, at a certain point, decides how happy they will be (as with most such choices, cues are taken from the happiness of family members and others around them). This decision becomes a bedrock part of identity - the "I am this kind of person" inner narrative we all maintain.

I trimmed a couple of paragraphs, but recommend reading it all.

Some people can clear their slate—distinguish whim from clobber—if coaxed to simply notice the gratuitousness and the immateriality. They won't do it themselves, for the same reason they deliberately lead themselves needlessly astray. But the lightly gripped can often see clearly for a moment, and let go back into velvet.

Others are more far gone. They cannot perform this reset under any circumstances, because they're way too committed to the bit due to long reinforcement.

"My beloved deceased guinea pig Floyd is NOT something I just pulled out of the recesses of my mind. Floyd was REAL and my grieving is REAL and you can't tell me I don't MISS him every second of every day. The Hell with you and your "reframing". I loved Floyd in a way you'll never understand!"

Sometimes it's said with a near-wink. They recognize their self-indulgence, and are reasserting their whimsy, expanding the storytelling field to include the shmuck who foolishly tried to help. It's like raising a bet—"Not only will I not recognize reality; I will yank you into my delicious and turbulent unreality!"

Of course, the whimsy soon drops away, and one can find oneself locked into a hell of one's own imagining, unable to reverse course and make more grounded choices. Fancy quietly congeals into peril.

I can understand how children and adolescents might be unsettled and knocked off-course by incoming blasts from their mental noise, assuming it's real. It's harder to understand how someone might spend decades in such conditions without at least examining them.

Me, I stuck with the bit until age 47, when I found myself locked in profound oppositional conflict between actuality (a peaceful night planted on a comfy couch drinking sumptuous wine watching a great movie on a vast TV) and incoming blasts from my inner mind (it's Christmas Eve, and, having failed utterly to live up to expectations, I am revealed as a pathetic wretch—all the more so given how plumply and disgustingly self-satisfied I'd momentarily felt amid my pitiful failure).

Read the story here

Back and forth; back and forth. I was so lost that I could not tell which side of that coin was true...even though one was patently, well, true while the other was pure mental confection. Not exactly a mystery for the ages!

After spending entirely too much time grappling with the patently obvious, I literally came back to my senses, recognizing that the desperation, shortfall, shame, and thirstiness were entirely fabricated, while reality is the velvety embrace of the current moment. Reality is a point of return that's always available amid our incorrigible flights of fancy...if we don't lose all touch.

You may dispute my observation that the current moment is always a velvet embrace. Things, after all, do go wrong.

Yes, they do, but only for a moment. 99% of the pain and emotional confection are pre- and post-tremors. And the problematic moment doesn't seem problematic, because (if it's a real problem, and not just some storyline you've created) you're occupied with acting—with solving the problem!

If someone, right now, suddenly pointed a gun at you and demanded to know "where the money is," then, ok. That's not velvet. But you won't know it, because you're not checking. You won't be sensitively dipping a toe into your emotional waters to gauge how far from perfection the temperature's drifted. You'll be entirely occupied with dealing with the situation, not fussily weaving it into your narrative of pain and woe. It only frames as a problem once it's no longer a problem—i.e. from velvety embrace. That's how you know you're at peace: when you start manufacturing stress.

Agitation is the hallmark of comfort, peace, and velvety soft embrace. And thus an eternally easy flip.

Further reading


Dreams and whimsy are a wonderful human perk. There's no need to use that faculty for self-torture. Creative dreaming leads somewhere good. Buying into gratuitous misery does not. We can be selective with our whimsy, opting out of the sort that doesn't help.

Entitlement

There is nothing more exasperating than to watch someone with a shitty job do a shitty job at their shitty job out of the unshakeable conviction that it's beneath them. They deserve so much more!

Never do they notice that that they're presenting incontrovertible proof that they barely deserve even the woeful predicament they lament.


Related:
Martin Luther King on street sweepers
"Billions, Millions, Thousands"

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 you try to maintain 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 human 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!"