Blame Fred

I blame Fred Rogers for the most pernicious American affliction. With the best of intentions, he convinced several generations of children that they're special just because they're them.

And now, sure enough, we have a society of people who feel special for being just them. And it's killing us. Fred broke everything.

I keep meeting Americans with nothing to offer. They aren't funny or smart or charming or kind or helpful or interesting. Lacking a personality, they speak only tribal talking points. They're extraordinarily bored - and thus extraordinarily boring - and utterly empty.

In a recent posting about moving to Portugal, I wrote:

Ideally by adulthood a person has passions and pursuits. And/or some ability to kindle social engagement. If you have none of those things - if you're a passive, undeveloped blob of weepy hope - stay in Long Beach or Tacoma.

They move to Portugal hoping it will invest them with...something. Anything. Like flaccid puppets, they imagine a new locale will pull their strings and conjure a show for them to star in. It's a level of shameless passivity normally seen only in the most frothy aristocracies - the ones immediately preceding reigns of terror.

They're all just sort of...there. They self-present - "Here I am!" - and await fueling. And it's fine, really, except for their unshakeable conviction that this suffices. Convinced to their very marrow that they are special just for being them, they don't need to try. Nobody tries.

Even if they did, there's no "there" there; nothing solid to draw from. It takes decades to develop usefulness.

Fred Rogers never meant to create a society filled with people born on third base who feel like the only real player on the field. But that's precisely what he did, and now it's not such a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

The Problem Solver's Dilemma

The pipes burst in your house. It's a disaster. Your possessions are soaked, floor boards are failing, and the forces of mold are gleefully standing by. You call a plumber who rushes over, but you don't let him get to work. Instead, you insist that he listen to your tale of the trauma you've been experiencing...while water continues to gush.

I've resorted to a pretty extreme example to land my point about what we are devolving into. And even so, it doesn't read as oddly as it would have only ten years ago. Ten years forward from now, the average American will assume the story's ending was cut off. So what happened?

The craziest thing is that we yearn for a Messiah to come and make it all better when we work so staggeringly hard to stoke and flaunt our pain, and to suppress any intrusion of the clarity that might dispel it. We didn't nail up the last one due to misapprehension. It was our signature move. This world is, above all, a Messiah trap.


Further reading:
Solving Problem Solving
Waiting for David Copperfield
You Can Be The Messiah

My One Single Post-Election Digestion News Link

My approach to political news has been a gradual tuning out. I stopped listening to MAGA ages ago, because I found it 100% performative bad-faith horseshit. And around the 30,000th time I endured an MSNBC panel discussion of whether Trump's racist or not (spoiler: he is), I realized I was getting zero nutritional value from that sort of thing. As a child of the 70s, I was conditioned to accepting non-nutritive TV. I've probably seen every episode of F Troop twelve times. But I've been forcing mysel to learn - late in life! - to resist media stupors.

I do stay up on what's happening, but I've opted out of "Can you believe this????" media-coached digestion. Yes, I believe it. I don't need help processing the obvious, nor do I need to be spun up any angrier. Even the stuff I agree with starts to feel so tediously repetitive that it feels like hypnosis. Hard pass.

I stay on top of headines - which I catch once, without coached digestion (unless I need help understanding implications, which is often available via a brief quote or tweet or soundbite - the Must-Read Twitter list I curate usually does a good job of contextualizing news) - plus I'll pay attention to anything that seems like it might be both smart and surprising.

Virtually nothing fits that description, unfortunately. But this does:



The segment offers a number of fresh facts and framings. The big one: Trump has not only hollowed out and zombified the Republican party, but he's done so with the Democrat party, as well, though the mainstream hasn't noticed yet.

It starts a bit slow (where they indulge the clickbait fury - which I find hypnotic, not fresh - conveyed in the title), but is only a 15 minute commitment, and it's entertaining.

Jealousy, Redux

My observation a few weeks ago that jealousy appears long before praise (the other girls will detest you for your beauty even if you can't score a prom date) was true. But my explanation was unnecessarily convoluted.

Jealousy arrives long before acclamation because the world is not set up to acclaim. Unless you're a competitive swimmer or office-leading linoleum salesman, don't expect medals or certificates, or even kind words. Praise comes only to those with little use for it, the monkey-see/monkey-do machine having identified them as praisees, a positioning with little to do with talent or other tangible bona fides.

Jealousy is much more tightly pinned to bona fides. The jealous scan their perimeters 24/7, with sublime sensitivity and hair trigger responsiveness. They notice early, along with the paranoid and the manipulative. Those with a vested stake in spotting exceptionality stand alertly ready to slash away.

And that's the world’s only scanning system. Most people are not wired to detect (much less celebrate) the exceptional, because it’s all about them. Fully occupied with their own fantasies of exceptionality, they are your competitors in the marketplace for recognition. When actual talent does get spotlit, it's a bank shot. Acclaim happens despite talent, not because of it, as an outgassing of tribal flocking hormonal magnetism, normally kindled via cynical tactics.

Your neighbor's German shephard barks though you never considered breaking in. He parses your innate threat before you imagine yourself in such terms. To the barking German shephard, you seem a formidable foe, even though your friends barely suppress yawns.


It was ghastly to be envied, even by old friends, for my seeming Chowhound success while I struggled to pay bills and devoted 16 hours per day, 365 days per year, to repelling online psychos and shills alone in my claustrophobic apartment endlessly awaiting download of gigantic log files because I couldn't afford broadband (full tale told here).

I desperately needed someone to feed me a doughnut or to take me for a walk and reassure me that I deserved my share of the world's sunlight and oxygen, but most everyone assumed I'd ascended to some rarified position, wanting for nothing, and I was hated for it. I have not recovered from this.

Roy Haynes Meets Mr. Raucous

I despair at the task of making you understand what drummer Roy Haynes, who just died, meant to jazz. You need to really understand jazz and jazz history to fathom the impossible sweep and significance and miracle of who he was and what he accomplished.

This was not just jazz hero #600 dropping dead. Not "he played so well." Not a "long and storied career". Not "beloved the world over." Let me try to explain Roy Haynes via analogy to a realm you probably know better: writing.

Say Roy Haynes anonymously wrote Beowulf. And, as a cohort of Chaucer, composed one of the Canterbury Tales. Say he was an important member of the Continental Congress helping Jefferson revise the Declaration of Independence, and a pioneering author of wicked Victorian political satire who'd given Oscar Wilde his first break. Say he went on to write Emmy-winning screenplays for Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and sip absinthe with Hemingway (who looked up to him like a hero) in Key West. Then say, at age 90, you found him writing fiendishly intricate postmodern novels as vibrantly modern as any of the young leading lights. Better, even.

Say he did all this not like some crafty operator making strategic pivots - donning a bunch of wigs and making superficial course changes - but that every single step was brilliant and right and slick and AHEAD of the curve. He sounded not just like twelve different guys from twelve different eras, but like the BEST guy from each of twelve different eras.

It seems ridiculous. Nobody ever did that. Nobody ever could do that. It sounds like I'm exaggerating. But Roy Haynes, who'd played easy, lyrical swing with Lester Young and frantic bebop with Charlie Parker and Blues Rock with the Allman Brothers and modern jazz with Chick Corea and fiendishly complex late-stage intellectuality with the smuggest recent youngsters, truly was that guy. Nobody else in jazz ever did anything remotely like this. Nobody in any field of endeavor that I'm aware of ever did anything remotely like this.

Also, there was my minuscule cameo appearance. 

One night Roy walked into my weekly blues gig - my first steady work out of school - in a trashy little gin mill in the ghetto of Roosevelt Long Island where Eddie Murphy, just a couple years prior, had done his first standup (there was an 8x10 glossy in the manager's office made out "To Mr. Hicks' Place, where I lost my comedy virginity, from Eddie") and Roy was, as always, dressed like a million bucks and had his slick sports car parked out front, and I wasn't the least bit surprised to see him there because Roy Haynes was everywhere and into everything and knew everyone (the garrulous bartender at Skylark Lounge where I hung out when not gigging was Roy's best friend because of course he was), and I, a cocky lad compensating for deep shyness and insecurity, especially here in this ghetto bar at the height of a dangerous crack epidemic, overcompensated by rocking the joint with trombone so raucous and funky that our band's guitarist, Bo Diddly Junior (no relation), who played his axe with every part of his body including his crotch, occasionally took me aside to suggest I tone it down a notch, and on this night Roy was joking around in the back room with the club's manager and a small entourage as I ducked in on a break to make sure my horn was out of everybody's way when conversation suddenly stopped and I immediately began to sweat buckets, sensing that I was about to take some focus, and, sure enough, Roy said "Hey man sound good out there" and I froze. Absolutely froze. I couldn't respond, I couldn't acknowledge, I couldn't even let myself imagine that it was me he was addressing. Must be anyone else.

No more Mr. Cocky, just an awkward white suburban kid right out of school feeling mortified that Haynes, a subtle, poetic musician with a sublimely light touch, had walked in to hear me playing the most raucous fatback and collard greens trombone, and, at age 24, I wasn't wise enough to realize that he bloody well knew I was simply playing the gig as it needed to be played - anything but subtle! - and furthermore heard the poetry latently beneath it all, but I was committed to my embarrassment at being caught with my pants down, so to speak, despite the seemingly solid counter-evidence of "Hey man sound good out there", which only confused me further - was he addressing Mr. Raucous? - leaving me unable to respond or look up or breathe or move or live.

I went on to exist in the periphery of a lot of Roy Haynes stuff. That bartender was my buddy, too, though we never hung together with Roy. I was friends with many of the young players Roy hired to play in his band. I caught a bunch of his gigs, marveling at his pliancy and otherworldly, Faust-bargain-level touch and finesse. As he climbed through his 70s, 80s, and 90s, Roy never failed to sound far more modern and youthfully, nimbly energetic than anyone from my generation.

I never exchanged a word with him. I'd botched my chance, but was quietly present in his world, popping up in the little hood joints unknown to fans or jazz writers where Roy let his hair down between concert tours. Part of that furniture. And it never bothered me much, because there are far worse things than being comfortable furniture for Roy Haynes. If you're gonna Zelig, that's how you Zelig.

Insiders knew that Roy Hayne's favorite record of his was "Out of the Afternoon." It was my favorite even before I learned this. I invite you to download it now and listen. It's remarkable. The blind saxophonist Roland Kirk, who is featured, was important to me, though I never got to meet him. At the same time I was blasting the paint off the gin mill in Roosevelt, I was also seeking out Kirk's surviving sidemen, wherever they were, and befriending and playing with them, poetically and subtly. Roy never stopped into any of those gigs, alas (though those farflung clubs were certainly on his radar, because nothing wasn't on Roy's radar for, christ, literally 99 years), so I never got to be Mr. Poetry for Roy Haynes.


So check this out. This guy 1. is EIGHTY SIX YEARS OLD, and 2. started out with Lester Young, who was one generation removed from "When the Saints Go Marching In”:

 

The Pitch

Eight billion people on a planet assuredly proclaiming "I've got this!" while hilariously bungling absolutely everything.

It's pure comedy gold. Not as metaphor. Not a wry aside about the greater human condition. I mean it quite literally. That's what this all is. Not joking. Not being cute.

As a child, I had the inescapable feeling of being trapped in a comedy movie for the entertainment of some invisible party. Maybe "God" or whatever, idunno - I was never a big name dropper.

Decent insight for a kid, but it's a whole other thing to reverse engineer the full proposition of a farce in which one is trapped. It took me a bunch of decades.

I realize that there’s vast juicy goodness to be gained by reconsidering absolutely everything from this framing. So if you just chuckle and move on to your next bookmark, you'll miss out on tons of potential integration and explanation now that the entire predicament has finally been nicely framed for you.

But you will miss out. You'll consider it for no more than 17 seconds. Why?

A greater conviction that you've got this.


Thanks to the great Bill Monk for planting the seed. A few years ago when Red Ventures shut down Chowhound, I submitted a few smart requests and suggestions, and they answered me condescendingly, just like every feckless, cocky product manager since the day I sold out.

Bill noted how remarkable it was that I was still hearing “Yeah thanks but we got this” even as they were literally shutting the thing down.

"We got this," I realize now, is an absolute monster.

Flipping Solicitude

A few weeks ago I indexed some useful flips of perspective to better understand this mystifying world. "Selfish people feel overly generous, while the generous feel terribly selfish." That sort of thing.

But I forgot one. It's something I've mentioned here before, but I want to boil it down and tie it in to that index:


Helpful people never flamboyantly offer to be helpful. It would never cross their mind to do so.

So whenever someone emphatically tells you to feel free to ask questions, that's always a pose. An empty gesture. You'll be granted one, perhaps two, grudging replies, and they won’t be well-crafted.

Helpful people never declare solicitude. They’re just solicitous. So they craft the bejesus out of their answers.


I craft the bejesus out of my postings here, though no one's forcing me/paying me. I'm just trying to be helpful (and am not the least bit vested in seeming helpful).

The Vance Stock Bump

I'd finally broken up with a deeply damaged - and damaging - girlfriend who'd inflicted real torture. I had put up with it not because I dig that sort of thing, but because I'm someone who can fall in love with a ham sandwich (literally, now that I consider the statement!). And love, alas, is love.

She chased me some. A few weeks after the breakup, I mentioned on Chowhound that I had trouble finding good butterscotch, and she sent me a fancy little package of the stuff. My cinematic move would have been to violently throw the package in the trash with a vicious snarl. Set it on fire. Donate it to hungry children. Anything but eat this tainted butterscotch from a person who'd worked tirelessly to make me miserable for the sin of loving her.

But I don't play out cinematic scenes. In fact, that's the only reason I'm still alive.

Once, a long time ago, I was feeling severely suicidal, and it was patently clear what comes next in the movie scene. "THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU JUMP OFF THE CLIFF OR TOSS ALL THE PILLS DOWN YOUR THROAT!" But I don't mindlessly follow tropes. I don't stay on-script. I'm thoughtful - which, in this grand Idiocracy, makes me seem shmart, but only in the sense of a one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

It seemed plainly evident that I had no beef whatsoever with my body. That wasn't even an issue, so it wasn't the move. So I simply let go of my pain and anguish en masse, which, I instantly discovered, is exactly what a suicidal urge really urges (read the tale here).

I didn't need to think much. I scarfed the butterscotch, enjoying every last pellet. I didn't relate it back to my ex in any way, for better or for worse. I just ate the butterscotch. Yum!

This week, because finance bros are feeling exuberant about the upcoming reign of President Vance and Vice President Musk, my savings have gone up by a ton. And I don't feel an iota of petulance about it.

I'm still very upset about the election, and rueful about what's to come, but I don't do cinematic petulance. Not once have I violently swept objects off a desk or table while hollering madly. I'm not pretending to star in a movie. I'm real.

So I'm eating the butterscotch! Not bitterly. Blithely happy with the gain. Why not? I mean, of course it will sink back down as kakistocracy has its real world effect. But for now, I'll enjoy it. I don't need to tie together all strands of my Emotional Journey into some Grander, Bigger Story, because a story is just a story, while a tin of butterscotch or a little extra money are concrete and enjoyable.

I'm not "playing along". I certainly haven't been "bought out". I'd do anything legal to remove these m-f'ers from power, regardless of its short-term impact on my finances. The money doesn't make me appreciate Trump any more than the butterscotch stoked fond feelings for my ex. But even a stupid poodle understands what to do when kibble lands in its dish.


Regarding the millions of Trump-voters who don't have savings, and have not reaped this reward - and won't reap much else in the next four years: I don't gloat at them, nor does my heart bleed. I earnestly hope their situation improves...while I blithely and non-petulantly scarf the butterscotch.

On Moving to Portugal

Oddly, I wrote this before the election.

Since recent events place this in an entirely diferent context, I'll add links to part 1 and part 2 of my explanation of how I originally construed my move ("How to Plan an Alternative Timeline While Remaining Momentarily Complacent"). They were written a few years ago now, and land differently now. But the following is my perspective two years into my move, and has nothing to do with politics.


Old friends often ask whether I'm "happy in Portugal."

The question presupposes that one's dramatic trajectory slopes toward winning or losing as one goes here or there and does this or that. "How's your arc today, Sally?" "I dyed my hair last week and I'm up six points, Mary!"

Real life is not a two-dimensional vignette, there's no dramatic payoff, and channel changes don't deliver happy-ever-afters. I once noted that "This is not a film. We're raindrops slowly working down windows, not heroic protagonists." So when people make big moves imagining it will feel like a big move, they nearly always wind up deeply disappointed, because it didn't change everything. Or even much of anything. Because wherever you go, there you are.

Here (in cinematic terms because most people can't escape that perspective) is what a move like this actually changes: it swaps in a fresh backdrop. The stuff you do in front of the backdrop remains largely unaffected.

Wherever you go, there you are!

I'm beyond being surprised by this. I’m able to learn lessons after the trillionth repetition, and the world is an elaborate contrivance to patiently teach us this fundamental truth. So with that in mind, here’s realistic advice on moving to some distant shore.

If you have inertia - passions, projects, and interests which bring you a satisfying sense of meaning - you'll thrive pursuing those things in front of a snazzy new backdrop. I take responsibility for my life experience. I write, play, ponder, walk, cook, eat, travel, help, scheme, optimize, learn, meditate, and generally enthuse, all in similar fashion to before, but in a sunnier place where the prevalent narcissism feels somewhat less familiar. 

No life-changing pivot. No plot development leaving our protagonist happy ever after - or gnashing his teeth in fraught regret. Just an agreeable new backdrop swapped in behind the continuity. When I leave my apartment to take a walk, I like how it smells. Are you getting the idea?

If you lack inertia, and need the external world to prod and delight you and supply your sense of meaning, you'll be fine so long as you're able to create and sustain those conditions at your destination. If you expect the new place to provide those services while you remain passive, you will be sorely disappointed, because the world absolutely does not give a fuck about you.

If that observation upsets you, don't move, because it will grow starkly evident when you go elsewhere expecting something different. Back home, you can lose yourself in fury over your neighbor's political yard signs and other petty trivialities.

Ideally by adulthood a person has passions and pursuits. And/or some ability to kindle social engagement. If you have none of those things - if you're a passive, undeveloped blob of weepy hope - stay in Long Beach or Tacoma and develop passions or social stirring skills. Learn to make your world interesting (the introvert move)...or to make yourself interesting (the extrovert move). And then - and only then - find a snazzy backdrop to do that in front of. 

Or else accept the path of least resistance, remaining in situ, doing what you can to stave off the torpor which is never not your responsibility. Whether you sit in a Venetian gondola or a La-Z-Boy recliner, that part is entirely on you. Without the ability to inhabit a foreground, shifting backdrops can only depress you.

Boredom is not a sucking action from a vapid universe. It's a thrusting push from vapid you.

If you're bored in Tampa, you'll be bored anywhere. That said, if you can find equanimity being bored in front of a new backdrop - shrugging off your non-delight with only mild bitterness - that's not so bad, though you might have saved yourself the trouble. But if you find life interesting while at the DMV or on line at the drug store, you'll find it differently interesting after a move. And that's a delight, so, by all means, go for it!

Today is Not a Bad Day

I posted this (as well as my brief acknowledgement that *I* had been misframing Democracy, which you should probably read first) to Facebook yesterday. I'm throwing it up here as well:


This is not a bad day. This is a day when the risk of future bad days elevated substantially. That's a different thing from a bad day.

I’ve trained myself not to pre-suffer, because it needlessly makes good days bad. That strikes me as the goofiest, stupidest thing a person can do. Just for one thing, it delegitimizes any professed desire for good days.

What's more, good/bad is a simplistic and childish concept. Innocent children would have gotten cancer under Harris, and joy will exist under Trump (unless we deliberately inhibit ourselves out of pique). The sun came up this morning and my toast smells nice. My desired outcome did not occur, but I've lost my sense of entitlement to desired outcomes, just as I've lost any impulse to inhibit joy out of pique.

Democracy

Democracy means every contingent has its shot. Power is sequentially shared. 

Democracy doesn’t mean the politicians I prefer get to lock in. That’s not the optimal state of democracy, that’s autocracy. If I’m for that, I’m no more democratic than the people I describe as autocratic. 

Insisting that my side is the only tolerable victor, while waving the flag of glorious patriotic democracy, is the exact move I/we claim to loathe.

Check Your Tailwind

I added this TL;DR ( "too long; didn't read") atop my recent posting "The Banality of Two Prominent Miracles":


The remarkable thing about declining to generate a 900mph headwind
is that you find yourself riding a 900mph tailwind.

And that's cause for enjoyment,
but not glory-basking.

Modesty

Level 1
"Check out the glorious stuff I've done!"


Level 1A
"I am humbled to invite you to check out the glorious stuff I've done!"


Level 1B
"I may have done a thing or two!"


Level 1C
"I'm just a simple pizza deliveryman!" [said with a wink]


Levels 1A, 1B, and 1C are backtrack. More prideful than Level 1, not less. Glory is further augmented by a glorious display of modesty. Awareness of pride stokes pride of awareness!


Level 2
"I'm just a simple pizza deliveryman." [said without a wink]


At this point, you're viscerally letting go of your own legend. This surrender, paradoxically, stokes (as explained here) greater accomplishment...which is more challenging to let go of. In an immense circle of hilarious irony, the universe shoves accomplishment down the throats of modest people.

It brings to mind an old saw about politics: "The people most eager to hold power are often the least qualified to wield it." Draw down deeper for a less eager, more qualified candidate, and, nine times out of ten, they'll "grow into the role" and shmuckify.

Per that same dynamic, when the modest earn their power-ups, most revert straight to Level 1. "Check out the glorious stuff I've done!" But for the few able to swim against the swelling tide, two levels of further modesty remain:


Level 3
"I'll erase my tracks so no one calls me glorious!"

A remarkable guy named Maurice Friedman had hidden but pivotal impact on a wide range of twentieth century issues and institutions, but we'll never know about most of them because, being a bit of a saint (seriously), he laboriously erased his own tracks.

David Godman, a skillful researcher and talented writer, has reconstructed some of it (I highly recommend this interview with Godman, and and this article by him).

The problem is that tracks-erasing is just another form of glorification. Why work so eagerly to erase glory if it's not glorious? If it really didn't matter, you wouldn't waste the precious time/effort. We blithely flush our shit down the toilet; we don't launch it into space or zap it with lasers, and we certainly don't seek out and expunge third party accounts of our ever having stepped into a bathroom.

Self tracks-erasers protest too much!


Level 4
"I'm an ant"

As I once wrote,

I'm like an ant. I'll very contentedly reconstruct a smashed anthill, one grain at a time, even amid multiple re-smashings.

To human beings, I suppose this seems sad. Humans aspire to grander dreams than endless drudging anthill reconstruction. They're taught to rage at the smashing.

But to ants, human beings - who grow ever more crippled and demoralized with every inevitable reversal, and who only with great weighty effort manage to soldier on - are the sad ones.

This is the essense of karma yoga, which I've written about extensively. Head down. Stay in the flow. Do the thing. And refrain from sniffing your own farts. Appraise only insofar as it spurs you to invest still greater love, care, effort, and nuance. Don't misuse your appraisal engine to conjure tales of attainment.

Zen Buddhism, which describes an ultimate goal of "chop wood, carry water", frames the most ant-like end point, while karma yogis are loosely imagined to go out in some blaze of glory, comically missing the point of the whole thing.

I understood the ironic circle as a child, and worried that if I managed to become truly ant-like (i.e. fully locked into flow and invested in love, care, effort, and nuance) I'd be disturbed by people reassuring me that I'm certainly no ant.

It's turned out not to be a problem.


Previous postings on pride and modesty:
Modesty, Heroes, God, and Singers
Going All the Way in One's Shmuckery
Modesty, Arrogance, and Political Correctness
Kafkaesque

Lincoln Project

My Lincoln Project ad (the same concept as their 2020 closing ad) got bumped. Fine by me, because its replacement, featuring the whole main cast of The West Wing, is a banger:



If the ad strikes you as a bit square and hokey, bear in mind that Lincoln Project's main thrust isn't the outrageous ads you see on late night TV and on Twitter, baiting Trump and preaching to the choir with MAGA mockery. Their real game has been in exerting gentle pressure on moderate Republicans in swing states via square, conservative pitches. And it's worked great. Including this one!