Trader Joe's Frozen Turkey & Stuffing en Croute

"It's not that circus horses dance particularly well, it's that they can dance at all".
   ~ Famous old quip that's strangely impervious to Googling

A friend bought $30,000 speakers for his stereo.

"Why?" I asked.

"It sounds exactly like being in a jazz club," he replied.

"Is that so great? In actual jazz clubs, do you go so nuts for the acoustics that it strikes you like a $30,000 experience?"

"No, but this is in my house!"

"So you save the trip?"

"Exactly!"

"You know, you could rent a helicopter for $1000 per hour. Land with friends on a helipad near a jazz club, and hire a limo for the final few blocks. That's still more than an order of magnitude cheaper!"

The conversation went nowhere, of course. Especially when I made gratuitous reference to starving children...a dick move given my $100 sneakers, $400 eyewear, $1000 phone, and $15000 car parked outside. Yeah, look at me, so totally there for the starving children.

"But how," you ask, "does this pertain to frozen convenience foods at Trader Joe's?"

Because the interesting part is not the lavish spending, it's the way we reframe quality in different contexts. Jazz club acoustics, which you'd never value much in an actual jazz club, are fit for a king when they're recreated in your living room. And Trader Joe's frozen Turkey & Stuffing en Croute, which tastes like a decent meal whipped up by a real live cook (albeit not a very good one), seems like a miracle when you've simply popped a humble frozen box in your oven.

Few of us would normally feel the least bit stirred over a decent meal from a not-very-good cook, but this is an amazing result from a frozen convenience product. Hence the excitement among TJ loyalists. Shoot, even I'm excited, and I'm the cynical bastard dispelling illusion here! I can get hooked, too! For that matter, I'd probably giggle delightedly at the sound from my friend's speakers...if there were a snowball’s chance in Hell of my scoring an invitation after I put him through the Marie Antoinette treatment. 

I said I'm less interested in the pricing aspect, but I'll note that Turkey & Stuffing en Croute costs a steep $15.99, which is the Trader Joe's frozen food equivalent of $30,000.

One more.

I'm addicted to Youtube videos made by ecstatic travelers who've thrown away hundreds of thousands of frequent points (or $10,000-$20,000 in cold cash) to fly in enclosed first class compartments on swanky Middle Eastern airlines. The luxeness is just beyond belief!

We're supposed to view with admiring awe and/or seething envy. But I peer at my screen like an anthopologist at what's evidently a shitty office cubicle tarted up with leather appointments. The whole thing is laughably chintzy and uncomfortable, though an undeniable improvement over the inhumane steerage of coach. If this were a hotel room, one wouldn't pay more than thirty five bucks. And hotel rooms are yours for the day, while this crappy cubicle - rigged up in an arid, fetid metal tube - is rented for a mere six or eight or ten hour stretch.

But it's ON AN AIRPLANE. So people pay >$10,000 for the exquisite privilege of something they wouldn't ordinarily value presented in a context where they wouldn't ordinarily expect it.


Business idea: attach EZ Boy lounge chairs onto each end of a seesaw, glue jars of high-end macademia nuts to the arms, and charge $100/minute to experience the world's most exclusive level of seesaw comfort.

Of course, richy riches don't reserve those first class compartments for swanky status. It's an expedience; a marginally less disgusting flying experience that's easily afforded if you've got zillions. Then, when you transfer to the VIP suite at the Ritz Carlton, you still don't celebrate with lofty exuberance. It's just lodgings. Like Holiday Inns for us, it's a loose stand-in for the comforts of home. The only exuberant celebrants are slobs like you or Me or YouTube hosts, on the rare occasions when we stumble onto such strata. It's not really for us. We don't get it.

Failure and Faith in Business

Two irreconcilable truths:

1. All startup companies launch facing near-impossible odds.

and...

2. Companies are deemed failures when their odds are assessed as near-impossible.

Think about it a minute. Obviously, the two positions could not feel more different, right?

The difference is faith. Startups have ample faith, while failures have lost faith. Faith is a framing - a matter of pure perspective. It's how you view it.

Now for the coup de grâce:

A dismal failure is far better poised for success than a startup.

Wait, what???

As a business failure, you have at least some assets (material and immaterial). You have deep experience with the market, and someone somewhere has heard of you. You're way way way better positioned than some shmuck with a plan. A failure at least is something. It exists!

Put yourself in those shoes and see if you can shift your perspective that way. Or, better, don't, because it might drive you insane, and the Slog has lapsed its liability insurance.

Is this a case for never closing a business no matter what? Sheesh, Idunno. Tough question! But I'm pretty sure the above is correct. I, alas, have been there (more on that below, which is mostly just lumpy riffing, aside from the buried lede about giving Heaven a chance to oblige you).

---

Consider my position with Chowhound, circa 2004. I'm working eight full-time jobs unpaid, there are enormous expenses and paltry revenue, and any scheme to increase revenue would require loads of time and energy when I'm already delirious from exhaustion (for a more detailed account, see the epic series, "Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out", about selling my labor of love to a major corporation).

"Close it! Walk away!" screamed my mind, several times per hour.

Reasonable! But then what? Start fresh with some other endeavor facing impossible odds of attracting interest and creating impact? Chowhound had plenty of both! My excruciating position was, paradoxically, a triumph I'd never replicate. It made me physically nauseous to try to reconcile these irreconcilable truths.

I'd never again gather this audience, this press, this exposure, this momentum, this impact. If I couldn't make this work, there'd be no point in ever building - ever doing - anything ever again. Any subsequent project would just kill me all over again without yielding a fraction of the impact!

I failed to realize at the time that I'd defied odds in failing so little. I was merely impoverished, exhausted, and demoralized. A fantastic result! This is the paradox of success.

Success (unless you're spectacularly lucky and hit an easy jackpot) never really arrives. As scales fall from your eyes, you glimpse the parched earth upon which you've been flailing. In this featureless terrain, advancing a light year is akin to standing still. And there's no rainbow ahead. No bluebird of happiness. Just more parched earth.

Decent income would have helped, obviously. A real programmer and professional-grade software would have helped, too, and some staff designers and copywriters and some chunk of funding. But those assets would only seem livesaving to those who've never run anything.

Just for one thing, "delegation" is a myth. You have to recruit, train, manage, and clean up after those you delegate to. If you're very lucky, it's just barely worth it. When parents hire a babysitter, they know full well they'll return home to crying kids, a messy house, a ransacked refrigerator, and cigarette burns in the couch's upholstery. All this just so they can go see a frickin' movie.

Just as the fame, kudos, and media had quickly lost their thrill (I wrote, in that previous link, that "After the heady first couple of articles appeared, it became mere landscape to me, the way a restaurateur soon ceases to thrill at seeing his takeout menu on the desks of strangers"), income, support, staff, and funding would have larded on fresh challenges and stressors. Zero sum. Parched landscape, all the way down. It's never easy. It's never a kick. You never arrive.

I believed in the mission, even if it was killing me and even though it was barely visible through oceans of aggravation. That's what kept me going.

I'll repeat, for the third time in a week, my observation that humans pursue an "ever-vanishing prize no one's ever actually won or seen or can really even describe." Everyone has had fleeting glimpses of this, but those who've taken a mere 100 billion steps toward illusion lack my trillion step perspective. All striving strives for a phantasmagorical myth, a flighty cipher.

Many clearly recognize this but persist nonetheless. They state a need for visceral momentum - stakes! - and a conspicuous scoreboard. But I risk pariah status as an American by insisting that small pleasures and Easter eggs are plentiful and delightful. We've been peering into the wrong end of the telescope!

We bask in copious free sunlight and oxygen, and strangers poised to sacrifice to help us not die.

---

If I'd quit, the best I could have hoped for was to pack up and try something even more hopeless with the recharged vigor of naïveté. I.e. "faith".

I frame all of this negatively, even hellishly, because I'm post-traumatic. I didn't like it. It wasn't for me. I lost faith to the nth degree. I'd touched bottom and fully grokked the futility. Less idealistic types with more pragmatic dreams (the classics: fame, fortune, and/or power) might endure longer - though, I'd imagine, no more happily. Faith in a concrete outcome at least gives Heaven a chance to oblige you. My aim was blurry, so I received a gigantic cauldron of useless blur.

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find."
~ The Bible

"Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!"
~ Aesop

But to return to my point, my situation late in the game with Chowhound - a wretchedly futile stalemate - was, from any objective view, vastly more favorable than the situation of Chowhound's starting point. Which is not to deny that our predicament was hopeless.

I grew miserably bewildered trying to reconcile my completely appropriate feeling of doomed failure with the unquestionable evidence of stupendous victory. I didn't enjoy quite as lithe a perspective in those days. But I'm not sure greater pliancy would have helped. Under great duress, pliant reframing can spark kooky results. A lithe perspective (aka carefreeness, aka creativity, aka blitheness, aka equanimity) can, unless you're extraordinarily disciplined, even get you killed.


This sheds some light, though I despair over my inability to "bake it in" to my perspective.

Why Old People Dress Poorly

I just realized why so many older people are poorly dressed. It's because they're Crew, not Talent.

"Talent" represents the shiny centerpiece:

Talent looks like a million bucks:

"Crew", by contrast, looks like shlubs:

Talent relies on good genes, excellent skin products, and heaps of chutzpah. Little actual talent is required (not to say it never appears). Just the familiar combination of ambition and shamelessness.

Crew is a whole other universe. Crew knows how to actually focus cameras and point microphones. Crew needs skills. Talent, if you will. Crew actually does stuff.

Talent seems like "somebody,” even if they're nobody. Crew seems like nobody even if they're somebody. That’s the underlying distinction, right there.

I was Talent for a long while, but deliberately switched over to Crew seventeen years ago. I'm immensely happier, though the switch disappointed people. I appear to have given up. I once appeared in media a lot, wrote for millions, played in concert halls and nightclubs, and was the impressario of a famous web site. I coulda been a contender!

I've actually accomplished more this way, but it's been easy to miss, because the hallmark of Crew is anonymity. "Talent", by contrast, scintillates! I'm not scintillating. Merely talented. Which is deprecated, because seeming talented is vastly more impressive than being talented. This is not a bitter grievance, just a clear-eyed assessment of our world as it is. Earth, if you examine it at all closely, is a poseur planet to its very core.

Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

Those ambitious to actually do a thing - rather than to be acclaimed as thing-doers - find that Doing requires single-minded devotion, leaving little juice for Seeming. That's why frumpy Ron Howard on a movie set looks like a pimple compared to glorious Audrey Hepburn, though he's a creative mastermind while she's just swanning around in an evening gown. Isn't it striking how his vastly greater power and accomplishment are so invisible to the eye?

If you work with the rabid commitment necessary to create something truly worthwhile, you can't divide your attention by simultaneously stoking an image. That's a whole separate pursuit, where you'd compete with specialists who've devoted their lives to image cultivation. That's their accomplishment! As I wrote in my posting on Intelligence:

The most impressive intellects are not always fast or flashy. Not, in other words, impressive-seeming. In fact, most truly intelligent people I've met haven't been very impressive-seeming, because if you've got the goods, you tend not to waste effort on the "seeming" end of it. Watch out for seemers!

It never fails to blow people's minds when they learn that I - the guileless shlub before them - founded Chowhound. I once assumed the startled gasps gave testimony to my loftiness. Nah. It's just flabbergastment that this doof could pull off anything the least bit remarkable.

Did you imagine I'd arrive via helicopter with a security team, sneering disdainfully at "the little people"? Having sweated blood to build and run and sell a beloved operation, am I compelled to sweat even more to cultivate the image of someone who built/ran/sold a beloved operation? Am I incomplete until I’ve looped back to learn to pose as a person in "my position"? If I did, I'd face stiff competition from Talent, who can spew mounds of gravitas on command. They're great at it! How could I come anywhere close? I'd do a comparatively crappy imitation of someone like me!

So I don't walk around with ascot and top hat and a frozen haughty grimace of high-handed superiority. I dress comfortable and act normal. Just like my mechanic, who can rebuild transmissions (one of the hardest feats a human being can attempt), I'm proudly Crew.

And it's worked beautifully. The more deeply I've released my Talent aspirations, letting go of all pretension, the more freely talent flows. I've gurgled up fresh credible answers to most of the mysteries that have absorbed my insatiable curiosity. And self-cured numerous incurable health problems. And learned to not just appreciate, but prepare delicious food. And found peace (by opting out of infatuation with "What's Missing"). And bottled lightning by recognizing the full power of shifting perspective; of reframing.

Your elderly aunt Ethel, shlumpy in her sweat suit and waffle slippers, may not have a litany of accomplishments. But she does boast one towering attainment: higher perspective on the shiny spectacle. This marks her as Crew. And that, in turn, explains her dress code. One dresses up - fronts - to make an impression. Talent is compelled to suit up and thrust itself into consideration in order to market its brand. ABC! Always be closing!



As you get older, you begin to transcend that desperate urgency. You shake free of obsession over the (as described here) "ever-vanishing prize no one's ever actually won or seen or can really even describe." To observers, you appear to collapse, decline, resign. The ravages of old age!

Jack Lemmon's character understood some things Alec Baldwin's character did not. I was once on team Baldwin, but now I'm a proud Lemmon.

The image of an aging starlet pushing a shopping cart through Walmart strikes a deep cord of sadness; of shabby diminishment. Yet unless you're prone to peering at yourself on a mental silver screen accompanied by sad violins, it doesn't feel sad in the least. Crew happily shops at Walmart! Hey, why the hell wouldn't we?

But some people remain forever preoccupied with the vague prize just beyond the horizon. Lacking higher perspective, shallow posing continues to seem like the only game there is, so they remain Talent - dressing quite well! - until the bitter end. Nothing wrong with that. It's a choice as valid as any other.

Me? I'm fine at Walmart. The alternative would strike my deep cord of sadness. But, hey, I'm Crew! I do stuff! Who has time for shallow pretension?

This, I think, is what old age is about. I've reached these shores a tad before my time, but that's okay. I've always been an early-arriver.

And this explains why I don't wear natty sport coats with matching jaunty straw hats. I'll steer clear of the Roger Stone endgame. Now, that guy is Talent!

Corned Beef Hash as The Exemplar of Hope

"CBH Landscape", not photographed by Ansel Adams

5% of my limited reservoir of hopefulness traces to the childhood revelation that home fries are served with CBH (corned beef hash, duh), even though the latter's already rife with spuds. This is an aberration, an inexplicable exception to the fundamental starch rule of American cuisine. That's just not how it works. And yet, here we are.

I discovered this at the same time that substitue-school-busdriver Walter Crowther first appeared, offering bubble gum from a cardboard crate on the floor next to his seat as we climbed aboard. The world doesn’t work that way! Bus drivers are sullen creeps! The situation refused to compute. It was, in the purest sense, an Easter Egg.

Both are very small things, I know. So I seem daffy to carry on about them. By the same token, no one, before Chowhound, could fathom why I made such a fuss over muffins and tacos. To many, I appear to be perennially frothing at the mouth over trifles. I seem unhinged.

My old explanation for driving out of my way for slightly better brownies remains effective: the bad things of our world are super-apparent*. Unmissable, overbearing, and right in our faces. So the smartest way to survive our residency here is to seek consolation in delightful minutae. That's how I developed my devotion to nano-aesthetics. That’s my world, now, because that's how I frame things. That's how I pay attention.

* - The world's torments absorb our attention because we've completely taken for granted the great gifts, e.g. copious free sunlight and oxygen, and strangers who'll make sacrifices to help us not die. We are ungrateful creatures; princesses constantly scanning for mattress peas. It's just how we're wired.

It still astonishes me, after all these years, that the world harbors Easter eggs. They must never be unappreciated. I feel such pity for the vast majority who don't even watch for them, and who scarcely value them when they notice. I once observed that if trees had never existed and sprung up overnight, people would be driven insane by the beauty. And then there's my Corn Flakes theory (originally offered here, though I've improved it):

Corn Flakes causes amnesia. The moment you start eating them, you enter a deep bliss state which is utterly forgotten after the final bite, as you snap back to your previous opinion: Meh. Corn Flakes. Whatever.

If aliens visited and tasted Corn Flakes, and were told they were available anywhere on the planet for mere pennies, they'd assume we're a race of angels, enjoying a heavenly existence.

This doesn't seem like an Easter Eggy world. Sure, that's paradoxical, as Easter eggs are always jarringly surprising (that's what makes them Easter eggs). But still!


Warning: When you really delve into the religion of Apprecianity, and the related field of nano-aesthetics, you may begin to behave strangely. I lightly thrill whenever I'm served flexi-straws (so much better!). I was moved by automated vaccine followup check-ins. And I can get a little emotional whenever I rediscover that people come in the night to take away my garbage (in what other facet of life are non-zillionaires so dependably pampered and serviced?).

There is peril in noticing nano-miracles and appreciating Easter eggs. You could find yourself growing happier than you'd intended. You might even turn into a complete idiot, gleeful at banal inanities, and letting go of the ball - failing to keep your eye firmly on the ever-vanishing prize no one's ever actually won or seen or can really even describe.

The Missing Ending

Regarding my recent posting (the one pretentiously/preciously titled "Effortlessly Cultivating Tiny Miracles"), here's two funny things about me: 1. I always bury the lede (see the writing in tiny font explaining that I've reframed Zen) and 2. I always forget to add an ending (usually because these things get too long and I despair of anyone reading to the bottom).

So here's the ending, which I can't find a way to wedge into the original posting:

Watching my film about Von and his cookies, you see that the man is sharply conflicted. He freely admits that his cookies are unreplicable, and clearly takes pride in them, yet he's deeply skeptical of the notion that he's doing anything special. He's just following the recipe on the oatmeal box, for god's sake, talentlessly using stupid ingredients.

This contradiction, which I highlighted, isn't just charmingly quirky. Rather, it's the precise combination of perspectives I've declared necessary. To climb high up the curve of declining results, be bemusedly undramatic - never overthinking or overdoing - while sustaining your mild caring over many iterations. So the video didn't just get to the heart of the mystery; it also (unbeknownst to me at the time) reveals the secret.

Von cared because the cookies became his calling card. His friends had come to expect glory, and that expectation stoked some light fuck-giving, sustained over decades of iterations. Von was a man with deep interests and impressive accomplishments; oatmeal cookies were a playful sidelight. So he baked them bemusedly, never taking praise seriously. He was as surprised by their grandeur as the rest of us. After all, it was nothing he did. Things just turned out that way. Such is the effortless cultivation of tiny miracles!

Sloppy Slogging

The posting below, "Effortlessly Cultivating Tiny Miracles", was mistakenly posted for a while in a very early draft and under a different title. It's much improved, and I'd urge another read even if you checked out the previous version. It's strewn with Easter eggs.

Effortlessly Cultivating Tiny Miracles

Every day I make masala chai, and it's always way better than last time. I always use the same ingredients and the same recipe. No clever new moves, no tweaks. And, frankly, the procedure is not difficult. Zero learning curve. Yet the improvement is hyperbolic.

I've always known, of course, that "practice makes perfect", but that's a notoriously bumpy ride. Many people spend their lives making chai or cookies or violin concertos or other things, always yielding more or less the same-old. If practice always made perfect, McDonald's filet of fish would be a work of art by now.

Many elements of my life have not blossomed with practice. Some have even degraded. But every masala chai is WAY better. Same with my cooking, and a few other things. My insatiable curiosity compels me to try to understand what's going on, and the underpinnings have begun to tie together.

Ten years ago, I made a video about a guy named Von, locally renowned for his unimaginably great oatmeal cookies. He couldn't understand the fuss, as he wasn't a good cook and he used the most standard possible recipe. Yet he had to admit that when other people made the same cookies from the same ingredients and recipe, they never turned out nearly as good.

I used the video to explore the central mystery of cooking; of creativity; of humanity itself. It had been pondered by Aristotle, and we still haven't pinned it down: why is the whole sometimes greater than the sum of its parts?

Why are certain brownies delicious, certain song performances moving, certain poems illuminating?

What the heck, here's the video, embedded:


My Guatemalan superstar contractor has a fatal flaw. He can't estimate jobs. A pragmatic man, his head swims with potential snags. And if an unanticipated problem absorbs extra time, he might find himself below the weekly income he needs to feed his kids (and the kids of his workers). That outcome terrifies him, so he estimates crazy high (most customers just pay him by the hour). Here's how I advised him:

Whenever you start a job, flash a number in your head of what you think the job will cost the customer. Don't try hard! Don't mull it over, or get out your calculator. Just let a number frivolously, stupidly float into your mind. A two second operation, if that.

Then, when the job's complete, see how close you came. Don't try to learn from your mistakes. Don't analyze short/longfall. Just note the disparity, shrug playfully, and move on. And keep doing this, over and over and over. In way less time than you'd imagine - weeks or months, not years - you'll find your guesses getting more and more accurate until you’re eventually nailing the exact figure every time. All without even trying! Hey, trying hard never worked, anyhow, right?

This is something our spidey-sense recognizes as possible, because we brush against this mysterious facility from time to time. For example, many people claim the superpower of always knowing the precise time when they wake up. They've guessed it many times, as a mere playful caprice (more on that essential part in a moment), and gotten incrementally better and better at it. After a few hundred iterations, one becomes weirdly infallible. It's like a magic trick no one ever really examined.

The Slog is my longstanding effort to examine facilities we normally relegate to spidey-sense.

I don't try particularly hard with my masala chai. I approach it like a playful caprice, much as I urged my contractor to be off-handed with his practice estimations. Hard trying and industrious thinking are counterproductive to this strangely light-and-breezy process.

No one stresses while guessing the time when they wake up. It's light playfulness; a breezy childish guessing game. And that's the proper framing. If you can conjure up that perspective, opting out of effort and needfulness, results will become semi-miraculous over time, so long as you stick with it (the way children stick with whatever they’re currently playfully working on).

Most likely, you'll mess it up. If you stand at your kitchen counter with $4000 worth of fancy tea-making equipment and special water, grimacing in your effort to craft Great Tea by rigidly controlling the procedure to GET IT ALL RIGHT, you'll struggle endlessly. You're getting in the way of a natural process! It's not a process you can consciously own, so trying to force it is like pushing a string.

Don't turn it into some Big Thing. Don't derail the mysterious - and innately natural - process of forging a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The calculating, narrating, highly critical mind is useful for certain tasks, but it loves to co-opt processes better left undisturbed - especially this fantastically useful one.

Paradoxically, you actually do need to do one thing with your mind. One small thing!

If repetitive processes always improved, your mother would have been crafting absolutely scrumptious peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by fourth grade. I don't know about you, but my Mom's sandwiches were crap the whole way. And that's because she didn't care. She lacked even a scintilla of interest in sandwich deliciousness. The notion never occured to her. And you do need to care.

But it must be a certain sort of caring. Not squinching up your face and praying to baby Jesus and making a big display about your deep caring. Don't fill your mind with Improvement Thoughts, or tell yourself stories about it, or judge yourself, or any of the other absurd things humans do to tie themselves in knots. Don't watch yourself on a mental movie screen - the super diligent soul who cares soooo much. Don't pose as Mr. or Ms. Mindfulness. Don't do any of that poseur stuff.

Let yourself deflate to a state of detatched blasé, but still give like a half a fuck...and steadily maintain that part. Don't ratchet up the intensity, but don't let go of the intention; the perspective; the framing. That's the move, and it's small. A half fuck of caring applied consistently over a few hundred iterations is the golden ticket. The bottled lightning. The key to the kingdom.

Don’t self-consciously watch yourself care. Just do it. A little! A little caring, smeared consistently over a long haul of banal repetition. That’s it.

You can think about baseball while you do it. You can go ahead and be grudging and distracted and assholic. You needn't "avoid negativity" or follow any of the other sappy self-help platitudes. It's not a moral enterprise, nor some lofty quest. Don't try to seem caring. Just care...some! Control your perspective (locked and loaded on light fuck-giving) while letting go of self-consciousness ("Me, the great fuck-giver!").

If you raise the caring level (while remaining playful and stupid) that would work faster. But for most people, increasing the caring provokes stress, ego, needfulness and gobs of self-conscious mental narrative - all crashing in like a mob of rowdy vandals. So better to stay light. You can get to infinity with light iteration, so why risk summoning the vandals?

FYI, I’m translating ancient wisdom into pragmatic modern idiom and shifting the perspective, aka reframing. Making a notoriously hard thing easy. Showing you how to bottle lightning.

If you're a wake-up-time-guesser, you already know how to do this! You're already doing it! The keys are right there, in your jacket pocket! Time-guessing is certainly not something you stress over, or weightily consider. It's not a grown-up thing. It’s totally flippant (aside from the light spritz of sustained fuck-giving). Just peel your pushy mind away from dominating the innate process of effortlessly cultivating tiny miracles (great cookies, great chai, precise carpentry estimations, and always knowing your wake-up time).

So let's rethink "practice makes perfect." How about this: "Light fuck-giving, flippantly applied over many iterations, delivers miracles." The best part is you don't need to try. No effort or stress. In fact, it's best if you don't try! This is an innate ability, like a forgotten smart phone feature, and it's fantastic. Just let the process unfold. Lightly give half a fuck while otherwise relinquishing control. Then just look on with delight.

Hey, what time is it right now? Don't look at your phone! Just play a cool guessing game with your pal Jimmy! Fun! Pretend it's important, just like pretending you're cowboys or indians. Pretend hard, but remember you're just a kid, so none of it truly matters!

I've often noted that adults are so poor at learning because of their reluctance to learn the way kids do - even though kids naturally perform dazzling miracles of learning. Grown-ups formalize and proceduralize and stress themselves and APPLY DISCIPLINE, bracing like for root canal. So many unnecessary, unpleasant, counterproductive moves!

Learn playfully - without ego, in a state of bemused delight, like a toddler mastering the art of whistling - and you can learn and grow with the offhanded voraciousness of a child. The masala chai gets weirdly better and better.

The ending of this post, which is brief, was posted separately, here.

---

Three lagniappes:

1. This explains Zen archery, and other Zen "arts". Again, I’m radically revamping and integrating old wisdom for a new century (must keep baking fresh!)

2. Like nearly every epiphany that's come my way, I find myself realizing it's a lesson I'd learned before, but failed to bear in mind. "Don't forget to also hit a bullseye" is another way of saying “Lightly/persistently give half a fuck!”

3. Sorry I've been writing "fuck" so much. I don't often curse in my speech, but my mind has a tendency to echo, and I'm still working off the jubilation of my home fry posting, "Blessed Are the Fuck-Givers".

Is the Real Estate Bubble Really a Bubble?

The most common cliché one hears amid a "bubble" (an irrational buying frenzy) is "This time's different!"

This time, the market (or asset) will remain super-high forever!

This time, it will be all boon and no bust!

This time, the music won't stop!

The irrational exuberance isn't the side-effect of a bubble. It IS the bubble. (Framing!)

My parents kept moving farther and farther from NYC, but kept finding, to their utter disgust, that each time the area would fill up with goddamned city émigrés. It never, ever occurred to them that we were the city people. We were the problem.

Recognizing this is not sufficient, however. As Thomas Harris depicted so memorably, comprehension and self-awareness do not fireproof you from deluded thought or action.

Hello, Clarice.

With all that firmly in mind: I don't think the current real estate frenzy is a bubble.

I've been trying to complete necessary work on my house in order to sell it before home prices crash back down again. A race against the clock. It's taken months, and I still have a couple months to go. I've been watching prices very carefully, and they've stopped shooting up super-fast. They're now rising very slowly.

And my theory is that bubbles don't slow down. They accelerate - massively! - until they suddenly pop. I can't think of a bubble that ever decelerated. Irrationality swells until the fever breaks, whereupon punters scan their surroundings realizing, to their horror, that they've run off a cliff.

Lots of people have tried to buy houses lately, escaping crowded cities post-Covid, and as professionals embrace work-from-home. This flow is starting to slow. Eventually, home prices will plateau, and, surely, as with all cycles, descend a bit. But since this isn't behaving like a bubble, I don't foresee a crash.

Famous last words, though. I know.

Self-Healing: Muscle Cramps

This is part of a series of postings on self-healing, which you can access via the "Self-Healing" tag which appears in the Slog’s left margin below "Popular Entries". For general tips and background on self-healing, read this.


I've had problems with muscle cramps all my life. Over the years, I cultivated, with great effort, the habit of lightly resisting the cramping - i.e. opposing the direction your body part's pulled by the muscle spasm. It's difficult, and requires grace under duress, but it helps. But it's not always sufficient.

I eventually came to notice that firmly tapping my foot against the floor relieves toe cramps. And I expanded on that to develop a cure:

Rhythmically and firmly slap the body part with the palm of your hand like you're trying to coax ketchup from a bottle. Repeat two or three times per second until the cramp subsides. It works.

The 'Great Resignation'

This is one of my "old-dude" postings, repeating a point I've previously flogged to death, out of the hornery conviction that nobody fully grokked it the last x times.

The repetitiveness of old people is not entirely innocent, though they hope you'll keep thinking so. They know they're doing it, but are too lazy, self-indulgent, and entitled to throttle the impulse because they think they've earned the right. Consider my favorite anecdote about old age (originally posted here):

My favorite aunt had a favorite story. Her mother's mother was a piece of work; a hard-assed, uncompromising, raging bucket of unreasonable impossibleness. My aunt's besieged, haggard mom had pleaded with her, as a child, "If I ever become anything like my mother when I'm old, please let me know!" When the day finally arrived and my aunt let her mother know, her feisty, pugnacious response was "She was right!!!"

---

A much-discussed Forbes article from last week titled "The 'Great Resignation' Is A Workers’ Revolution" started off like this:

We’re entering a new post-pandemic paradigm. The old-school management style of dictating terms to workers is ending. An ongoing war for talent pushed businesses, such as Target and Walmart, to offer free tuition for their workers. Many companies are providing sizable sign-on bonuses and higher wages to attract and retain people.

The "Great Resignation” is a sort of workers’ revolution and uprising against bad bosses and tone-deaf companies that refuse to pay well and take advantage of their staff. Millions of workers voted with their feet and walked out of their jobs—many without having another position already lined up. They no longer want to feel like victims. The quitters are making a powerful, positive and self-affirming statement saying that they won’t take the abusive behavior any longer.

Nope. Absolutely the wrong take.

It's not that we're fed up or beaten down or unfairly treated. It's that we're aristocrats. We've reached a point where we're piqued at the prospect of being directed or held accountable in any way.

As I argued here, the missing factor in the Fermi Paradox (explaining the mysterious lack of evidence of intelligent life in the Universe, which mathematically should be teeming with it) is comfort and wealth.

Intelligent organisms are not built for comfort and wealth. Mrs. Howell is not a happy, grateful, satisfied person, and we're all Mrs. Howell now; princesses increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas. And that's why it's all unwinding.

This article describes a milestone in societal disintegration. If we grow much more coddled, our immensely expanded sense of rage and victimization will lead us to blow up the world. And this is the x factor explaining the Fermi Paradox.

Caring Less to Avoid Burnout!

I keep seeing smug people saying evil crap like this:

...and it infuriates me.

When Beethoven composed in diapers, it wasn't because he needed advice about work/life balance. He wasn't doing it wrong. He wasn't unhinged. He understood that this is the level of commitment required to give posterity a majestic gift. I'd say nothing less about my car detailing friend, a seeming yokel who devised a way to change the reflection of light off of paint via thousands of caring strokes with his trusty blob of putty. He doesn't need the money, but works like a demon. He cares way too much.

People who care too much have given us everything worthwhile about our world. Every delicious bite, every funny quip, every comfortable chair. Anything better than adequate/functional comes from fuck-givers. And none of them - no one who's done anything good or meaningful or delightful - would ever advise you to care less.

One exception: you can definitely care less about the fake mental drama you've been nurturing as an ongoing project.

Burn out! Burn the hell out! All the way! Use every damned calorie and then keep running on empty! Leave it all on the field! Do everything like your life depends on it because life is short and if you spend it just fiddling around, you're wasting a great gift!

Care the bejesus out of important tasks, but also seemingly trivial ones. Because there are no trivial tasks. Your every action - every word, every gesture - shapes the future. You are the god-like prime mover of all that comes after. You are the Ancestor. You create posterity's ripples.

Funny how the people telling us to care less are always dullards. Shitty reporters grinding out click bait, or Glen from Human Resources, or the sort of noodge who hangs around Facebook all day piling up "likes" via strokes and platitudes. Unimpressive people. Not people you'd want cooking you lasagna, or sharing a foxhole.

The world is full of milk-blooded puddy pud-puds, which, by itself, is fine - I don't judge - but a few of them aren't content to simply eschew full-heartedness. They devote their feeble cojones to persuading the rest of us to give less of a fuck. That's where they invest their quarter-watt of vital human energy. Their passion - insofar as their sour, farty, primly moderate inclinations could be equated with passion - is to patronizingly coax the rest of us into being less passionate. They are forces of darkness. They are energy vampires.

I wrote here that

Passionless people don't behold passion and say "Yup, that's the good stuff!"

The passionless maintain relevance via two lines of gaslighting: 1. "nothing's worth passion", and 2. "passionate people seem awfully loopy".

We have been deliberately blinkered by the myriad stolid pud-puds trafficking in the wide part of the bell curve; in mere competency.

I like to observe that "Shitty", "Adequate", and "Great" are not neighbors. Greatness is a quadrillion times more demanding; a separate realm above and beyond. You can't get there out of moderation. 

I know the reply to that. "Greatness? Woah, buddy. Slow down. That's not my jam."

Yes it is. You've just been denatured by the pud-puds.

And needlessly so, because you do phenomenally great work every single day. The mental world of brooding discontent, self-aggrandizement, and general fantasy you've been nurturing is a bona fide masterpiece of painstaking creativity. If you feel too exhausted to raise your aspirations - for example, to generate delicious bites, funny quips, or comfortable chairs - it's because you've been so fully committed to that.

Technology, Creativity, Hacking, and Risk Assessment

My iPhone's been bugging me to update its apps. Scores of them. So I let it "Update All". Then, a few minutes later, I asked it to update to the latest iOS. I was cognizant the OS update would require the device to restart, interrupting the other process - the app update. Was this a problem?

"No," I quickly determined. But I noticed my mind doing a bunch of things to reach this conclusion.

My first thought was that both these iPhone processes have been largely unchanged for a decade. If they played badly together, it would have been noticed and fixed.

My second thought was that App Update was designed to roll with interruptions. Power interruptions, connection interruptions, restarts, etc. Knowing how programmers think, I understood that the two processes don't need to talk to each other. App Update will simply assume its subservient position when the gnarlier OS Update seizes control of the device. It will duck out of the way, and continue later...or, come to think of it, maybe not. App updating might not resume upon restart, but I can always resume it later.

What won't happen is my winding up stuck with zombie half-updated apps from an interrupted process. If that were a thing that happened, iPhones wouldn't work. So that potential peril point had surely been addressed eons ago. I know that the device doublechecks newly downloaded apps to ensure their integrity. And, again: App Update gracefully gets out of the way. My only downside would be needing to complete App Update later. Ni problema.

My next thought was more complicated, and more ominous. There was a minute risk of a freak condition no engineer had thought to address. App Update and OS Update each contain multiple user-invisible processes, and there is a sliver of a chance that some vulnerable component of App Update might collide with a vulnerable component of OS update, confusing the phone and creating Problems.

It's unthinkably unlikely. These processes are close to fully assured for safety because there's so little a user can do to surprise them (and, again, they don't need to ever talk to each other, anyway). Each is triggered by a simple start/stop command, like a light switch, so there's little terra incognita - potential interference or unpredictably shifting conditions.

I'll note, parenthetically, that you actually can mess up a light switch if you use it surprisingly - e.g. violently mashing it on/off over and over, especially if it's a cheap or old switch. And maybe you could burn out the bulb faster if you stood there flicking on/off/on/off 10,000 times. Even the simplest process can fail if you surprise it with behavior its designers hadn't anticipated.

Creativity is about defying expectation and behaving in unintended ways. So creative people perennially make themselves edge cases, conjuring surprises that designers never anticipated, which means they break stuff a lot - both deliberately and accidentally.

This makes us terrific software testers. In fact, that's a hobby of mine. I've helped programmers uncover problems with their code by mashing their switches 10,000 times, or pushing the down-volume button when they wouldn't have expected it, or dunking the device in chocolate milk, or a zillion other surprising moves normal users don't normally do. This helps them make their apps more robust. A programmer once told me, with great admiration, "Gosh, Jim, you could break anything!"

See here for how this all ties in with creativity, Groucho Marx, Banksy, and Kali the Goddess of Death.

The start/stop commands for App Update are non-physical, so an iphone, unlike a light switch, doesn't care if you sit there punching at it all day. And there's little confusion or surprise one can introduce into such a simple process. Rigid constraints and simplicity ensure predictable user behavior.

Turning this around for a moment, if you've ever watched engineers use technology, you've noticed that they do so carefully, like walking a tightrope. They have a deeply engrained sense that stepping off the path of normal operation (to any degree and in any way) might provoke crisis. A layman might conclude that engineers are oddly frightened of technology, but that's not it. They're immensely cautious because they know that everything is held together by spit and wires, designed to surprisingly narrow purpose.

In that last link, I wrote:  

"There is risk in making yourself an edge case. Parking lots, for example, are designed for slow driving. Those who navigate them at high speed will tend to have drivers crash into them, because anticipating really fast cars while backing out of parking spaces requires more violent neck-craning than most people apply."

So this isn't just a tech thing. It's true of any designed system. It might work out fine for a night or two to sleep on an air mattress perched upon your kitchen countertop, but it's risky, because there are potential failure points never anticipated by the designers of the air mattress nor the designers of the countertops. And the severity of failure is inherently unpredictable. Anywhere from mild annoyance to the implosion of the galaxy. At least theoretically.

As a child I loved it when calculator batteries ran low and began reporting that 2 + 2 = 0000101010 or whatever. Good times! That spirit is what made me (I hesitate to use the English language's most misunderstood word) a hacker. I don't steal data, I don't break into the Pentagon, I don't change all my grades to "A" in the school computer, and I don't wreak revenge on adversaries. Those are activities of criminals with tech expertise, some of whom might also be hackers. Hacking is a simple and beautiful thing. It's the mindset of being unable to resist using technology in unintended and surprising ways. Creativity + technology = hacking. In earlier eras, we called it "tinkering." And, hey, as in any human realm, assholes gonna asshole.

I'm hacking right now. I'm repurposing this "Blogger" platform to create a whole other thing. Do I really strike you as fitting the "blogger" mold? No, I've got something else in mind - something hard to name or to pin down - while I squat gleefully in this hokey environment like a virus subverting its host.

I was hacking in 1997 when I repurposed the still-new tools of web publishing for the supremely odd purpose of chronicling my eating ("What Jim Had for Dinner"). These days half the world blogs about food (the first popping kernel doesn't make the other kernels pop), but the first time's always a hack, inevitably perpetrated by a hacker. So stop hating on hackers! You need us! We blaze the trails!

There is absolutely good reason - and a long and storied tradition - of willingly making yourself an edge case...and breaking stuff in the process. That's what art's about (or should be about). Creativity is inherently destructive!

All these strands, god help me, run through my head as I decide whether it's ok to run App Update and OS Update concurrently. I recognize that it's almost surely safe; and that the less important process, App update, will probably be interrupted, but surely recover gracefully; and that, yes, there's a minuscule chance that obscure aspects of both processes might coincide to make my phone play only Mr. Magoo cartoons for all eternity (or, more likely, transform into an expensive and stylish brick), because I'm doing a somewhat less common thing, which inescapably leaves me on marginally thinner ice. But I chose not to worry about it.


Being intensely curious, I begin to consider how other types of people might approach this same question. I turn my hacker's eye toward their mental operation.

Novice: "What, you mean the phone's doing two things at once?"

Average User: "Better cancel the App Update. It's not worth taking the chance. Tech can be unpredictable. I've been hurt before."

Power User: "I trust Apple on this one. Both processes are highly iterated and work beautifully, and App Update is designed to robustly handle interruptions of various sorts. So whatever OS Update does to the phone, App Update should gracefully get out of its way."

Engineer: "Mostly agree with Power User, but she failed to recognize that some unanticipated portion of one process might conflict with some unanticipated portion of the other process, creating problems with no hard limits (i.e. phone bursting into flames is ridiculously unlikely but not completely impossible). Best to be safe, and not make yourself an edge case."

CEO Type: "Technically possible catastrophe is not a pragmatic risk when odds are this low. Don't sweat it."

I know people who still disinfect groceries because, early in COVID, a scientist demonstrated that COVID can survive a day or two on surfaces. The study shook up laymen, who didn't understand that detecting some small quantity of virus under laboratory conditions is an exceedingly far cry from contracting covid from an egg carton. The research didn't conclude that the world is crawling with potential infection. It merely delineated the range of what's technically possible. It should have surprised no one that cooties transfered to a slab of plastic or paper don't immediately vanish in a puff of smoke. This doesn't place us in a Michael Crichton thriller with deathly supervirus lurking positively everywhere.

The risk is virtually zero. You'd need a ragingly infected stock boy to recently smear gobs of snot all over the item you bought, and for your fingers (unwashed and un-disinfected) to pick up sufficient viral load AND transfer that load directly into your nasal cavity (didn't your mom teach you not to pick your nose?). And even then infection isn't assured, nor are symptoms inevitable if infection does arise. So it's more like your phone bursting into flames from updating apps while updating OS. Theoretically possible, but not a pragmatic risk.

I'm not super curious about the conclusions of novice, average user, power user, engineer, or CEO. Nor am I particularly interested in their reasoning. What fascinates me are the various perspectives. All are looking in completely different directions!

Novice views from the baseline perspective of "me and my cool but unfathomable device," with a hazy expectation that it will always work.

Average User views from the perspective of distrust. Bad experiences with technology have instilled a visceral unwillingness to refrain from getting "fancy". A burnt hand forever recoils from hot stoves.

Power User views from a high-level perspective.

Engineer views from a low-level perspective.

CEO Type views from a managerial perspective, broadly scanning the horizon - all component factors - to identify likely SNAFUs and assign a risk level. Focus is on the potential for individual minor human failures to aggregate, creating chaos....while avoiding the engineer/scientist's professional fascination with pragmatically irrelevant edge-case scenarios.

That last more nuanced style of consideration involves myriad agile reframings of perspective, whereas the novice, average user, power user, and engineer remain mostly fixed in their perspectives.


A lithe perspective staves off addiction, depression (also this), and can even save your life. But it also allows you to view the world more holistically by nimbly swiping through a multiplicity of framings impacting a given situation.

This facility underpins my chowhounding prowess. While others stand before restaurant windows poring over the menu, or querying Yelp for ratings, or hustling departing diners for their assessment, I'm less specifically immersed, considering the evidence and mentally swiping through jillions of micro-decisions (of design, of branding, of lighting, of pacing, etc.) by the forces behind the operation. I'm sensitively probing their perspective in order to gauge my risk level in venturing in for a bite!

You Can't Solve Most Problems With Money

This is a followup to my previous posting, "Zen and the Art of Bathroom Renovation", where I wrote:

I'm not saying problems can be solved by throwing money at them. That's completely false.

I'll explain, below, how I first realized this. I hesitate to do so, because it makes me look silly in multiple ways, but I'd rather make myself useful by telling truth than look good.

In "Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out", an epic series of posts telling the tale of my web company's sale to a major corporation, I explained how the windfall impacted me.

The amount, really, was immaterial. Literally. Below a certain point, publicly traded companies need not disclose acquisition costs. Our price was never announced (and I'm sworn to secrecy) because it was below that threshold. The official term really is "immaterial". It's the businessman's way of saying "pocket change".

Of course, an amount laughably immaterial to the business world is material indeed to a jazz trombonist/freelance writer. If I remained modest in my overhead, I could, post-CNET, enjoy a few years off to handle long-deferred personal maintenance. I would never again be forced to take crap from clueless authorities (which I hate), and could concentrate exclusively on doing quality work (which I love). And I'd be able to afford as many pizza slices and secondhand dvds as I want. Awesome!

Many of my friends assume Chowhound's sale made me a massively wealthy Mr. Howell (and the more I try to dispel the misapprehension, the more certain they become). But here's the thing. Being quite poor (as I was) and becoming dentist rich is far more transformative than going from "comfortably well-off" to "billions". My sensation of wealth, in other words, was indeed massive. So, in a way, my friends are not wrong.

For a freshly-minted billionaire to live up to his new circumstances - i.e. feel a real sense of change - he must add cumbersome elements to his life. That new private 727 won't fly itself. And you'll need to go find a chalet to buy, and add it to the long list of things you worry about. Your "people", who you'd imagine would help you with all this stuff, must be found and hired, and will ultimately disappoint you and mess things up just like the people you and I hire for our more modest needs. Even if you get lucky and stumble into someone flawless and honest and resourceful and perfect, that person won't work for you forever. He wants to go out and become someone like you, not work year after year as your well-paid butler.

My position is much better. When I use a Manhattan parking garage, I get giddy over the privilege and convenience. I can't believe I can afford this. I do not require a plane or a chalet to feel massively wealthy. And, now, having filled in all this background, I'll tell the story of how I realized that throwing money doesn't solve problems. It's a doozy.

The immense cruelty of my new boss became apparent at the moment his company's cash transfered to my checking account. I've explained the aftermath in my work life, but not, until now, in my personal life.

I'd been living in cheap NYC rental apartments in scary areas for my entire adult life. Now I could afford to step up a couple notches. I had to move, anyway. My current landlord needed my apartment for one of his family members, so I had a month to get out.

My deal with CNET did not relieve the immense burden of running Chowhound. All plates would remain spinning, plus there'd be time-consuming interaction with corporate overlords. So my workload actually increased. There was no time to buy a dream home, or even hunt down a more habitable rental. What's more, the overlords wanted me to spend lots of time in California.

I'd be in a state of limbo for the year I was contracted to them, so the smart move was to book a small, cheap apartment for the year, then run screaming from the corporation and attend to life issues such as housing.

I hastily rented a small fourth floor walk-up apartment in a bad part of Queens. This may sound harrowing to you, but it was well within my established comfort zone. I took the apartment so hastily that I forgot to measure rooms and consider fit. It didn't matter. I'd leave most possessions boxed, poised to transfer somewhere nice after the sacrificial year of corporate servitude.

But on moving day, my couch didn't fit. My beloved couch. The only nice thing I owned.

What do you, reader, do in this circumstance? You're standing on a mean street in Corona, Queens in 95 degree summer heat and the movers are bringing your beloved couch back down to street level, and need a decision. I tapped into my poor-guy resourcefulness, but no solution occurred to me. And suddenly I remembered....I was no longer poor. Petty vexations like this were a thing of the past! I could buy my way out of problems like this!

I actually reached for my wallet. I didn't quite pull it from my pocket, but I did reach for it, in a delusional impulse to extract a fat wad of cash, hold it high above my head, and insist that someone fix this, pronto. I'd summon the rich guy helicopter, which would land beside me on 82nd street, and terribly competent fixers would spill out and handle this, albeit at great expense. It made me indignant to think that I, a person of some means, had found myself in this position. Unacceptable! I marinated in my indignation until Louis, the 6'7" mover, tapped my shoulder and reminded me that, bro, we have another job to get to so what do you want us to do with the couch?

"Leave it," I sullenly replied. It was dumped in front of my apartment building, and was gone by morning.

No helicopter ever appeared. There is no helicopter. I was still a shmuck. I'd always be a shmuck. There is no elevation from shmuckdom. One might spend a handsome sum to pretend otherwise, but that's the truth. My huffy elevation lasted a brief three minutes and never reappeared.

Money buys comfort. One can occupy a marginally larger and fluffier airplane seat for a few hours for a couple thousand extra bucks. But money can not, in and of itself, solve most problems.

If Bill Gates really needs to get from First Avenue to Tenth Avenue IMMEDIATELY during Manhattan rush hour, too bad, Bill. You can reach for your wallet, hoist bills, and imperiously scan the sky for a Rich Guy Problem Resolution Helicopter, but you'd be wasting time better spent hopping in a cab. Even better: the subway, which is faster. Bill Gates, in that position, cannot do better than the subway.

I've never lost touch with that image of Bill Gates hopping in the subway.