Crazy Adaptable and Crazy Petty

I'm the most adaptable guy in the world. Several of my best friends voted Trump, and I feel perfectly at home in Ecuadorian or Cambodian restaurants, and I've palled around with addicts and murderers. I used to play blues in a white tuxedo in a ghetto crackhouse (there was gunfire twice), and after-hours Dominican meringue gigs at 3am in the South Bronx (back when the South Bronx was the South Bronx). In tenth grade I took the train into Manhattan for my weekly trombone lesson in 1977-era muggalicious Times Square. And I swaggeringly add stuff like watercress and farofa to my pasta without so much as blinking.

So how am I also the pettiest guy in the world? Just one example:

Here, Kleenex tissues are half the weight, which feels like torture to my expectations every damned time. And they come in flimsy cardboard boxes which hold like 40 tissues, total. When I pull one out of its box to gratify my runny schnoz, the box hoists along with it before reluctantly falling back to its surface with a dissatisfying "FUUUULFF". It drives me absolutely crazy. I haven't yet paid to ship kleenex boxes from America, but I'm more than halfway through the DOBEE dish cleaning pads, the Ivory Liquid detergent, the Theratears lubricating eyedrops, and the SimpleHuman quality trash bags I shipped over with my furniture to preserve my sanity.

And when I finally run out of Bandaids, and must use the hellishly expensive, 1965-ish ones sold in Europe which stick only to the wound and not at all to the skin around it, and are neither waterproof nor flexible, I will face a grave existential crisis.

Hubris

1000 years from now, teachers explaining the concept of hubris will no longer use Icarus as their example. Instead, they will recount the parable of Elon Musk.

The Soul of Pasta

Gringos - including food expert gringos - don't "get" tacos. Tacos aren't a dish. They're a format. Only Mexicans understand this.

Everything is eaten with tortillas. Because, of course it is! Tortillas are the staple. What rice is in (southern) China, tortillas are in Mexico. Eating food consists of tearing off bits of tortilla and wrapping food in it. If you're in a hurry to pack food to go or want "finger food" for a party, you might pre-wrap. That's what tacos are. It's the entire world of food (which of course is eaten with tortillas), but pre-wrapped. Sandwiches are an exact equivalent. We eat bread with meals, but for reasons of convenience, portability, modernity, and/or change of pace, we might "do it as a" sandwich. "Sandwiches" isn't a dish, it's a format. Most anything can sandwich.

Once you understand what tacos are, you understand that anything's potentially a taco. Not in the fusion sense, or some chic experimental sense. Any Mexican grandma would recognize and approve of my seemingly radical tacos. Because whatever she eats might be pre-wrapped, because why not? If you grok this, you're spiritually Mexican. And being spiritually Mexican, everything you make will taste Mexican, further anointing your tacos. You can't go wrong!

Same for pasta. Pasta is not a set of recipes or ingredients. It's not a special corner of cuisine; it is, like tacos, a wide-open means of interfacing carbs and protein. If you grok this, you're Italian, and if you're Italian, your pasta will taste Italian regardless of what's in it.

I'm Italian enough to combine (per photo below) watercress, garlic, avocado, farofa (Brazilian toasted manioc flour), and red pepper flakes with ghastly supermarket cheese ravioli, and have it taste 1. good and 2. Italian. And you could, too. You just need to reframe!

Still Expecting Damaged People to Self-Repair to Accommodate Me

I was friends with two married couples back in the day. Two of them, some years back, chose to break up with their respective partners so they could be with each other. This was intensely painful for the rejected spouses, of course.

It happens. It's not nice, but it happens. Commitment to relationships is a thing, but so is love. It's a tricky wicket. I have no pat answers.

However, the happy couple, both of whom are celebrities here, had the chutzpah to produce a TV special detailing the storybook nature of their beautiful love story, retracing their circuitous paths to a middle-aged discovery of a level of towering, billowing love neither previously imagined possible. This shlock played on television in front of their exes, who'd done nothing but love them sincerely (one of them had moved across the world and put aside career ambitions for the relationship).

Holy Jesus on a shingle.

Obviously, I took the side of the jilted, and aimed to steer clear of the storybook lovers. But circumstance landed me in their midst, and, having no personal beef with either, I was cordial, and we kept up some contact for a while. But at some point they were shamelessly and callously inconsiderate of my feelings. And this actually shocked and perturbed me.

Proving, yet again, that the human psyche can't process the fact that damaged people cannot be expected to self-repair to accommodate you.

Consider the narcissistic absurdity of my thought process: These are people who not only cheated on their partners, and devastated innocent lives, but then went so far as to gloat about it on national TV. And when they were less than agreeable with me, well, I took UMBRAGE! How dare they! And it took me months - months! - to frame it correctly.


So that time I met Don Rickles, he was so - what's the word? - insulting!

Stating the Obvious

I try not to state the obvious, or things lots of other people are saying. You have countless places to go for confirmation bias; I work the the other side of the fence.

But just as a sanity check: yes, this is pretty bad, particularly co-president Elon Musk's ketamine-fueled raid through the inner sanctum of American's private data and his move-fast-and-break-things purges of what he deems overly liberal agencies like USAID without a shred of legal basis or standing.

My mind is also boggled by the prospect of RFK, Tulsi, Hegseth and Patel let loose on gigantic institutions for which their lack of qualification is the good news. The alcoholism, Putin affiliation, and extreme views are much more insidious. Organizations can run competently under idiots, but not under vindictive crazies.

It's odd, though, that so many knowledgeable people are failing to recognize how old-school a lot of this is. So old-school that it's not the least bit MAGA. I asked Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson:

“Obliterate the federal bureaucracy and privatize everything” is 90s conservatism. Reaganesque, even. When the hell did that re-arise? And why so sneakily? Can you trace it? Or are you as blindsided and confused as I am? There’s nothing harder than to parse tectonic shifts 'in situ'!

The trick to being friends with super busy and/or famous people is terseness.

He agreed, noting that the difference this time is the desire for regulatory capture by Elon and the tech bros. I wrote back that it was no more "idealistic" in the 90s, when the purpose was regulatory capture for the Koches. As a true believer back at that time, he may not have appreciated the cold water splash. No reply as yet.

But that's old litigation. The point to remember is that this stuff isn't Trumpian twitchy impulse writ large, like his first term. This is Trump-as-puppet. Project 2025, it seems, is happening, and not as a tangy ribbon, but as a wholesale revolution based on ideas that 80s and 90s movement conservatives barely dared to toy around with.

Solidarity Masks

A literary event last week at Boston's First Parish Church:

Don’t forget your solidarity mask!

During COVID, when rage-spittled conservatives refused to wear masks because they decided it was nothing but liberal gesturing and sanctimony, I considered them dangerous lunatics. Now with the epidemiological part removed, the gestural trope remains, and one might conclude that conservatives were right all along.

They certainly were not. But this line of thought illustrates how gestural madness and extremism propel people into the opposite camp. Both sides are fueled by a noxious combination of 1. tribalism and 2. recoil from Those Horrible Assholes. We are no longer approaching an Israeli/Palestinian-type situation. We're there.

I look Right and I see gestural stupidity and extremism. I look Left and I see gestural stupidity and extremism. So I choose the rational center. In Portugal. 


"BUT JIM, AN INVITATION TO OPTIONALLY WEAR MASKS HARDLY TICKS THE METER IN A WEEK WHERE MAGA IS DEVOURING THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT!"

Correct! But many in the crowds cheering on these extreme actions from the Right were driven to MAGA by disdain for extremism on the Left (few Americans have the self-restraint to gravitate moderately to center; their disgust impels more hyperbolic recoil).

And I invite you to go back and listen to Bernie Saunders speeches circa 2015, where he promised - with populist fire - sweeping, tectonic changes to institutions, while crowds roared appreciatively. Extremists only pretend to hate tyranny. What they really hate is the other side's tyrant.

The Kids Are All Right

I aim to be helpful. It hasn't gone well.

The punishment of good deeds can play out as a mild Reader Digest quip or a harrowing Twilight Zone episode. At worst, it can be quite a lot.

I frequently recall a rare instance of utter ease and perfection. My 80 year old childhood trombone teacher called to say:

"Pipes burst. Carpenter needs $2000. I don't have it. If you loan me, I'll pay back out of social security every month."

I burned 5 calories writing and mailing a check, and my bank statement reported monthly deposits until I was repaid. It was so luxuriously easy. A tangible fix to a dire circumstance at no real cost to anyone. The episode had glided on greasy smooth tracks, as close to "nothing" as any something can feel. And I often make this my basis of comparison. Especially regarding that weird night at Lou's house.

My friend Lou held a reading of the book he'd just published post-mortem, written by his miserable dead wife. She'd experienced horrors in childhood and never recovered. Her book recounted the horrors from which she'd never recovered.

She was born and raised in a big wonderful mansion in Austria with loving parents and siblings, boisterous dogs, and crackling fireplaces. As the eldest daughter, she'd inherit the house and raise a family of her own there one day. But her father died and they lost the house and moved into an apartment. The end.

In the living room of Lou's house (much nicer than anywhere I'd lived, and where his miserable dead wife had spent decades), several attendees wept openly, while the rest dabbed their eyes with tissues. So, so sad.

Me, I was incredulous. Really? That's it? She went from a house to an apartment (and then to Lou's pretty damned nice split-level colonial), and this compelled her to make herself — and everyone around her — thoroughly miserable forever and ever? I know people who don't even have apartments, and none of them paint grand tragedies.

The difference, I mused, was the difference. A small apartment — like where I lived — was a come-down from a mansion. Ok, sure. But when she'd hooked up with Lou, her mood might have elevated as she made up some lost ground! But no, her suffering was a one-way ratchet. And this made no sense.

So I diagramed her trajectory, stripping away particulars to consider the broad contour:

"I thought 'A' would happen, but 'B' happened."

Not being wealthy, this was unfamiliar algebra. I never had reason to assume that my expectations would be met. I figured I'd continue bobbing and floating amid the waves of an indifferent ocean for my duration. And the notion of haughty entitlement to expected results struck me as, well, hilarious. I tried not to guffaw as Lou read the very sad manuscript, his cheeks streaming with tears.

If I contrast my trombone teacher's problem with Lou's miserable dead wife's problem, the difference is clear: The former was a problem. The latter was not a problem.

In fact, stripped of particulars, scarcely any problems are problems. Most often, they boil down to "I thought 'A' would happen, but 'B' happened." And that's not a problem — unless you're immensely privileged and extraordinarily confused.

This explains why my problem-solving impulse creates problems for me. If you try to solve a problem that's not a problem for someone who imagines they have a problem, you will mostly just get entangled in their fervid problem creation. For my elderly trombone teacher that one time, I provided a solution. For nearly everyone else, I'm grist for their mill.

Really, Sir Lancelot, the kids are all right.

Chowhounding the Prato Do Dia

A couple of weeks ago, I explained the southern European tradition of "plate of the day" and how it fits into the long arc of civilizational dining... all in eight comically reductive paragraphs. The following epilogue explains how the situation has affected my chowhounding tactics.


I spent a full year, per my instinct, ferreting out better lunch places, and ones serving less common dishes. But I gradually realized I was working more against the grain than ever because that's not the proposition here. These places frame themselves as providing a commodity, like soybeans or propane. All roughly the same thing at roughly the same price, with none aspiring to do better.

Yet talent always reveals itself. Some are especially good, though never intentionally so. And hardly anyone notices, because everyone's tied to their local, while I'm the only moving part in the whole machine, dropping out of the sky into this or that lunchroom. When I score - finding exceptional talent - it's a matter of serendipity, not due to any ambition to develop a business edge.

If you complimented a chef on her delicious cooking, she'd take it as a romantic overture. Imagine if, having filled your tank at a gas station, you smiled languorously and pronounced the cashier's fuel delicious. You'd be a lunatic. Or have ulterior motives.

You're not eating in restaurants. You're patronizing fueling stations, where deliciousness is both accidental and commonplace.

Wait, what? "Accidental and commonplace"? To a chowhound, that's irrational. Deliciousness is always tied to ambition and wielded as a business edge. But not here. And it's taken time for me to adjust. I do, of course, find treasure, but from far outside the frame. This is not the Upper West Side.

If you asked a Portuguese person why the food's so good when chefs aren't the least bit aspirational, they'd all answer the same way:

"Because it's Portuguese food."

Who am I to argue?


View a series of photo essays of non-aspirational local lunches indexed (and updated) here.

I’m Ok; You, I’m Not So Sure

When I was a small child, an early self-help book titled "I'm OK – You're OK" came out and was an immense hit. A summer camp counselor tried it out on us, slow-talking super-deep truisms like:

“Parent is not the same as mother or father, Adult means something quite different from a grownup, and Child is not the same as a little person.”

Jesus.

The title says it all: this is not a zero sum world. Person A can respect Person B without shrinking. You can consider yourself a hero without conceiving of others as inferior shmucks. I'm failing to convey the book's saccharine voice — it's hard to work backwards, and I can't expunge my snarky exasperation with the trite obviousness of the message. But that's the gist.

Even as a child, I considered the book's message to be a cotton ball coated in "duh", kindling a lifetime of disgust with self-help and New Age material (some people imagine that's what I'm about, but it's definitely not what I'm about).

But that message, I learned much later, wasn't so obvious. It was a bestseller, after all. Even psychologists didn't find it banal. Their consensus was the very opposite: Readers will need copious therapy to swallow such a bitter pill of non-supremacy. This sappy cheese, it turned out, was deemed powerful medicine!

The book was a breakthrough proposition, less "Duh" than "Woooooah!". It was revelatory not just for oblivious types, egotists, and narcissists, but even for people you'd have imagined were light years beyond.

The brainy professor well-versed in cognitive fallacies and biases.

The smiley super-nice guy.

The detached therapist who well knows how people misframe.

Thinking it through now, I grasp the sheer animalism of the human perspective and am horrified. It turns out that people truly need to hear this. It's like a monolith.

Even more horrifying is that I was so slow on the uptake. I spent 62 years — including a decade managing a community the size of a large city — in a world of rampant zero sum egoism and selfishness, where even generosity and kindness can be diabolically transactional, before finally catching on.

I've frequently referred to the "suspension of social disbelief" in recent postings. This one's a doozy.

All the Marbles

If you've noticed that my writing's been getting better, this is, per my trademark contrarianism, actually a sign that my mind is going.

I'm getting older and no one in my family ever enjoyed noteworthy marble retention. So I've been compensating in two ways:

1. I'm trying harder than ever. Readers often assume that I dash this stuff off, which is both extremely flattering and completely maddening (I work like the house is on fire). But now I'm squeezing every last drop of juice from the grapes with extra purpose.

2. I've found assistance. I'm using ChatGPT to coax me through an extra few dozen drafts. I've found that the problem with mental fog is not inefficiency. Writing, after all, is performed out of time, so I can go as slowly as I'd like and you'll never know! The problem is that middling drafts strike me as finished. So the chatbot kicks me into gear by rooting out sloppy incoherence like a truffle dog.

I'm not being supplanted. The chatbot doesn't actually write anything for me...with one notable recent exception. That fantastic closing line on my last posting ("We're drowning in certainty and starved for magic") was 100% ChatGPT, whom I cursed with ample venom for having coughed up a line too great to ignore!

“Anything I Don’t Understand is Nonsense”

Anything I don't understand is nonsense.

It seems to be a widespread credo, and while it's always been popular, I believe it's been getting worse as we complete our unwitting transformation into silly, foppish, entitled, bizarrely overconfident aristocrats.

Also: I'm noticing better.

It took me a very long time to even begin to recognize that this credo exists, because it's so opposite to the way I think. For me, anything I don't understand is magic. Some magic I feel sharply compelled to acquire for myself, while most of it I just peer at with admiration, saluting the magicians. But ‘nonsense’?? Jesus, certainly not! Regardless of the source, anything surprising — anything I haven't heard before — makes my antennae eagerly perk up. Like I've been waiting for it.

Here's how people get stuck in this mindset: there's a conviction that anything that escapes me reflects on me. It lessens me. So any potentially humiliating evidence of my incompleteness and imperfection must be preemptively dismissed. I confidently arrange my desk only with familiar, mastered items from my owned realm. My ruler, my pencil, my pencil sharpener....

I went another way. Time and again, I've stumbled into discovering that self-lessening induces awe. One must feel small to be impressed by...anything. (This explains the omnipresent boredom.) I'm one of the few modern Americans capable of awe, which means I don't need to pop antidepressants or guzzle wine or fuck comely strangers or draw a promotion, a raise, or acclaim to muster appreciation for being alive.

Opting out of awe, we ferociously repel any self-lessening like a grizzly protecting her cubs. And, ultimately, it's profoundly exhausting to keep batting away indicators of deficiency. The main cause of major depression is the bitter collapse of one's heroic self-image in the face of unremitting contrary evidence. 

What sort of loser is eager to feel lessened? Isn't that going the wrong way?

We engrain cognitive judo as a countermeasure. The thinking is subtle, so pay close attention:

"I'm not stupid, you're stupid!"

That's how we develop and stoke the tectonic conviction that "Anything I don't understand is nonsense” (AIDUiN)

The great thing about this conviction is that it precludes self-awareness. Jealousy is far less effective. Jealous people know they're jealous, and this plagues their effort to mentally diminish That Lucky Asshole. Jealousy requires an intrinsic, galling acknowledgment of that other person's superior position. It's horribly dissatisfying.

But AIDUiN is seamless. No self-awareness, no lingering doubt. It feels like deep intuition: “I don't understand what this guy is talking about, but it sure sounds like nonsense to me, and I trust my gut.”

The jealous would love to trust their gut and mentally frame That Lucky Asshole to a position of delicious inferiority and crisply move on, but, at some level, they know the truth. Whereas not knowing is the very point of AIDUiN. “Anything I don't understand is nonsense.” So crisp!

You might argue that "I don't understand" — a tacit admission of shortcoming — is half the statement. But that portion is an incoherent mumble, while "nonsense" is a scalding howl heard throughout the multiverse.

This all explains why we're drowning in certainty and starved for magic.


For much of my life, I've been widely regarded as nonsensical, even by people who otherwise admire my intelligence and clarity. I might have expected the benefit of the doubt amid their non-comprehension, but AIDUiN is not a conscious credo applied with thoughtful reason. It's purely visceral, like a hockey goalie's puck vigilance.

My problem was that I'd spent my early years among willfully ignorant people who felt brazenly smart (they were ahead of their time; we've now reached a golden age for this mindset). And I try to avoid other people's mistakes. So when people deemed me nonsensical, I refused to sneer defiantly. I accepted and shared their assessment. Deep down, I knew I was right...while fully accepting my apparent wrongness. This psychic split seemed wiser than indulging my genetic propensity for haughty idiocy.

My decision to launch this Slog helped me out of the bind. Reading the backlog, it all seems pretty sensible. Sane, even! The gaslighting finally lost all effectiveness when someone queried an online forum for advice on launching an online community covering a narrow topic and attracting an especially expert and passionate user base. I was one of the best possible authorities to answer this, and while I (anonymously) offered a clear, easily digestible reply, it was — you won't be surprised to hear — counterintuitive. Failing to flatter expectations, it left readers just slightly baffled, and they projected their bafflement back onto me. My response was, they informed me, sheer nonsense, and it was downvoted into oblivion.

Would it have been better if I'd been a stuck-up prick all this time, sneeringly defiant of worldly feedback? It's a popular stance, but do I specially deserve it? Ick! The notion beckons me to follow in the mucky footsteps of fools. Forget it.

Moving forward, I'm pretty sure the cocky train has passed me by. I'll never grow overconfident. I continue to clock my failures, mistakes, and general confusion with great enthusiasm. It balances my confidence and helps me maintain my psychic split with poise — I'm a guy who's both deeply right and palpably wrong. Only a psychopath can deftly reject consensus over time.

I continue to seek the sweet spot: confident in my rightness yet hyperaware of my gaping limitations and comical missteps. When a good result pops out, I levelly recognize its quality but chalk it up as a lucky break — an errant jewel plucked from the muck. Which does, actually, feel right.

The Lickety-Split Century

This new century is now 1/4 done. 

A millennium is not a long time.

Limitation

To a bass-player friend stuck motionless in a hospital bed since August (non-musicians: low "E-natural" is the lowest note on a bass):

We all have limitations and boundaries. You cannot play lower than the low E natural, but this doesn't mean you don't have infinite potential in the range available to you. Human creativity is magical. It finds ways to expand fully into limited space. 

The only limitation is your perspective. We think the world limits us - we think the LIMITS limit us, like the low E natural - when it's our perspective of limitation that limits us. 

The world is the world, but perspective is pliable, and creativity - if you let it - will find ways to expand fully into limited space. 

 Be well.

O Prato do Dia

I've been planning to write a treatise on "plate of the day", a southern European fixture that I've only come to fully undertstand since moving to nineteenth century Portugal.

But in my latest photo essay summarizing the past week's ingestion (here's a grand index of all previous to this latest), I managed to boil it down to eight paragraphs, including, la-dee-da, a sweeping history of dining, generally. For full context plus photos, see the first link, above.


I'm an exponent of soulful grandma cooking, but too much of anything provokes cravings for the opposite thing. So I booked a table at the fanciest place in town, hoping for a refined touch, step-up ingredients, and some creativity.

"Sóce by Mauro Loureiro" is like a real restaurant restaurant, and I can't explain the significance without a comically hasty journey back to the dawn of dining.

Restaurants started when one villager took it upon her/himself to venture out into the fields or the mines or the mountains to feed workers who didn't have time to get home for their midday meal. The hearty one-pot offering — rotating daily to stave off boredom — cost mere pennies, sufficient to reimburse ingredients and keep a roof over the head of the cook's family.

It all developed and refined from there, except here in Setúbal, where anonymous little joints still serve sturdy, rotating lunches for pennies to local workers. They look like restaurants, and seem like restaurants, but it's more medieval/communal. None of the standard restaurant smoke and mirrors, for good or for bad. No aim to DELIGHT — any delight is strictly incidental, though also commonplace. The same hyper-local crowd goes every day, and couldn't imagine eating elsewhere, because their families patronized the same lunchpot practically since the fields, mines, and mountains.

"Daily plate" lunch is a staple offering all over southern Europe, but only here do you feel the roots of the tradition. It's not a capitalistic enterprise. You're not a consumer, you're a cog being nourished per civic duty, and your restaurateur dutifully accepts grinding poverty to serve this critical role.

This ain't no Zagat shit.

A real restaurant would be an oddity here, and they arise through a twisty route. The daily plate lunch places can't charge much more than around 10€ for a complete lunch, severely limiting profitability. But some folks glimpse fancy lifestyles on TV and develop aspirations. They can only bust through the 10€ barrier by laying it on thick — everything shiny, pretentious, and presented with smug flourish.

This parallels the 19th century development of "French Cuisine", where ways were found to justify charging real money for what had always been a commodity, if not a human right. But the French provided meticulous quality amid the flamboyant gestures, while, hereabouts, it's mostly just gestures.

But, hey, I thought I'd give it a shot.


An epilogue to this posting for chowhounds: "Chowhounding the Prato Do Dia"

Index to a series of photo essays of non-aspirational local lunches: "Non-Aspirational Lunches"

Good is the Default

I used to spend a lot of time explaining myself to awful people who didn't realize they're awful and therefore couldn't understand why I treated them as such. Explaining was the least I could do, because they often seemed genuinely confused and hurt. After all, everyone sees themselves as a virtuous good person.

But awful people, I decided, are inherently confused. In fact, that’s why they’re awful. 

People don't behave awfully unless their perspective is warped. The unvarnished truth is that we're in Utopia, basking in unimaginable comfort on a singular speck of color and beneficence in an otherwise cold, dark, tight, vacant universe, blessed with ample oxygen, life-giving sunlight, and quenching water. Our greatest problems include a troubling excess of food and personal possessions. Socially, things may feel a bit malevolent, but in reality, everyone's just fumbling through their day, and almost nothing they say or do truly reflects on you. In their minds, you're mostly a placeholder.

We depart from this baseline perspective on mere whim, choosing to indulge in drama — in Rich People Problems — which we eventually steep in so deeply that we forget that we paid and waited on line to ride this rollercoaster. And maladjustment begets confusion and awfulness.

So there is no Evil serving as an equal oppositional force to Good. Good is the default, though confused people may do evil things.

It's notable that the clear-headed are seldom awful (exception: psychopaths, who maintain a narrowed crystal clarity despite tectonic skew). I don't know anyone gifted with expansive wisdom and equanimity who makes a habit of being awful — though they may seem so to those expecting them to indulge posing and delusion.

I no longer explain myself to awful people. They're too lost to accept a road map. Anything said to them is received through a distorted lens, and you can't push truth so artfully that it maintains itself through a warped perspective.

But I take heart in knowing that any confused, awful person entangled in complication can, with an effortless gesture of surrender, re-moore to the simplicity of baseline goodness.


See "Flipping Your Street Smarts" for a much more down-to-earth version of this same flip of perspective.

I Forgive You For My Error

If you ever have your motives or intentions misconstrued or your words misapprehended, or if you're falsely accused, once you manage to make the other person recognize their error, your counter does not reset. You will remain on probation.

The other person, you see, has applied the faculty of forgiveness. If there's a subsequent violation, you will be afforded much less opportunity to explain.

This isn't a problem for most people, who say normal things and act in normal ways. Most people avoid being misunderstood by constraining themselves to highly-patterned, easily-construed behavior, aka conformity. Add this to the myriad reasons the world encourages us to choose and portray a canned personality type - the bearded teddy bearish dude in fuzzy sweater who says "It's all good" a lot, or the brassy husky-voiced woman full of high-spirited good fun, etc. No surprises, no friction. Social lubrication remains nicely greased.

But if you're the least bit original, or creative, or spontaneous, perils await you far beyond the expected playground-style immune response. It would require multiple leather-bound volumes to catalog the wide-ranging weirdness.

Am I being cynical? Nope. I'm being extraordinarily guileless. The notion of making someone "recognize their error" even once is ludicrously unrealistic.

There's a phrase I've heard over and over which reveals the whole ballgame. It's my rhetorical kryptonite, leaving me weak and defenseless. Upon explaining, with earnest horror, that someone has misunderstood me, I very often get back "No, I understood perfectly." Whereupon my internal organs commence to liquify.

If you can suggest a productive, non-murdery way to receive that response — "No, I understand perfectly" — I will hand over my house, my car, and my prized bagel plates.

Replacement Balloons

When I was a small child, I'd get terribly upset when a relationship with a helium balloon ended with a pop or heavenly ascent. They'd offer to replace it with an identical balloon, but somehow this made things worse. I wanted my balloon, which was obviously irreplaceable!

I recognized, even in my sorrow, how silly I was being. An identical balloon is an identical balloon! Yet the previous one felt special by virtue of — well, it was hard to explain. Time spent? Shared experience? Whatever the explanation, the popped or lost one was my balloon, whereas this was just some garish, oblivious hunk of inflated latex. The certainty was accompanied by an uncomfortable awareness of my childish caprice.

But my certainty was appropriate. At 62, I see that I was right about balloons. I only felt silly because the world has a gaping blind spot extending far beyond balloons. Even people can be viewed as interchangeable objects slotted into roles and categories, their singular essence, their essential reality, overlooked. 

We, ourselves, are often replacement balloons. It's common to approach new romantic relationships like swapping in a fresh tennis partner. And to yearn for canned family moments where relatives cosplay their respective roles. Bosses can't conceive of an employee knowing better, merely because they're The Boss. We have a devilishly hard time seeing individuality.

The world outside our heads appears as a grand glass menagerie, with everything and everyone serving as placeholders. But within this hot-swappable world, it's neither sentimental nor capricious to appreciate the unique individuality of some person or thing — even a balloon!


I am obviously continuing to examine The Empathy Asymmetry.

See also "Love Theater".

Another Empathy Asymmetry

My recent posting, "The Empathy Asymmetry", explored how the burden of empathy often falls unilaterally, and how the suspension of social disbelief can blind us to these imbalances. Here's a perfect real-world example from a few years ago:

A friend invited me to a beer festival, and, alas, brought along his bombastic, contentious wife. True to form, she immediately took strident exception to some trivial disagreement, launching into a tirade while I placidly waited out the storm. She concluded the tongue-lashing by noting that her mother had died two weeks ago, leaving her utterly uninterested in taking any shit from me during this difficult and highly vulnerable moment.

I responded, calmly, that my mother had died two weeks ago as well.

For a brief, fraught moment, she hesitated, calculating whether I was speaking truth and whether it mattered. The pause didn't last long. True or not, she'd formed her response.

"GO FUCK YOURSELF," she bellowed, dragging her spouse behind her as she strode away. 

Empathy imbalance in 21st century America can be a confusing and surreal proposition.

Processing Processing

It doesn't take much to recognize the prevalent and damaging habit of obsessing over what's missing, what didn't happen and who's not here. Reframing is effortless and instant, so effortful lingering often constitutes malingering.

"But people need to process! If we don't mentally work through such dilemmas, we'll be skewed going forward, and suppressed emotions may arise at inconvenient moments!"

Well, sure! You should certainly take a moment.

I'm no fan of suppression. I recently wrote "Watch out for Vulcans", noting that "those who fashion themselves evolved beyond emotion are actually emotionally stunted." Emotions must be given a chance to express — to avoid bottling, and also to develop equanimity. The sidestepping of grief, pain, and disappointment doesn't represent composure; it represents the operation of a perilous pressure cooker.

But most of us go way too far the other way. Pop psychotherapy has fostered the notion that processing must continue until we’re okay with it — okay with the death of a loved one, or with the fire that destroyed all our belongings. We fervently and endlessly replay the mental tape until it pops out a different, better result, or until we're okay with it.

Neither is realistic. So, in 21st century America, nearly everyone seems trapped in an infinite processing loop. This explains the widespread stress, self-absorption, and depression seen in a society of unprecedentedly safe, comfortable people — people struggling to process iotas of lingering pain and disappointment which rudely defy their sense of entitlement.

Processing is necessary, but fraught obsession won't make you okay with it. The infinite loop offers only two off-ramps: boredom (the mind tires of the looping) and self-awareness (a shocked recognition of the absurdity).

Perhaps the above felt vague. I haven't offered a crisp flow chart for handling grief, pain, and disappointment. But there is no clear line. We must figure it out — process it — as we go. "Processing" requires processing! 

However, it's not a particularly sticky wicket. Let out the steam, and let light venting suffice. The "feeling okay" part can take care of itself, over time.


See "Grief Survival Kit".

Also: reframing too smoothly/instantly/effortlessly confuses onlookers. They, too, need to process!

Creating PDF Photo Book on Mac

The PDF photo book of Bengali food I linked to in my previous posting was surprisingly difficult to create. Well, no, it's super easy to create; just hard to create in a way that actually works.

Here's the easy way (I'm a Mac/iPhone user; if you're not, sorry/not sorry!):

• Open Photos on Mac
• Select photos
• Command to Print
• Choose "Fill" in right sidebar (or whatever you want)
• Hit Print again, and choose "Save PDF". 
• Voila, a ginormous PDF with all landscape photos rotated to portrait.

Here's how to do it right:

Using an image editing app (I use GraphicConverter), set up a batch job (or go one-by-one if you're patient...it might be faster if you're not well-versed in the app) to:

1. Scale the photos to 1500 pixels long edge (ie. make the longest side 1500 pixels, so landscape and portrait photos scale equally). If you see an option, make sure it's set to scale horizontal and vertical proportionally.

2. Save as JPG. Even if they're already JPG! Because as you do this, you're offered a quality slider. Set it to 70 or 80.

3. Change Color Profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. In GraphicConverter, choose "Relative Colorimetric", and then, in Settings > Open > Color Profiles, set everything but greyscale to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. If you're a professional photographer or designer with terribly complicated and specific needs, you know not to do this. Otherwise, go ahead.

4. Remove Metadata

Run the conversion. Quality should be pretty close to original, at a small fraction of the file size.

Drag reduced photos into a new album in your Photos app.

Select all photos in the album, hit Print, choose "Fill" in right sidebar (or whatever you want), Hit Print again, choosing "Save PDF".

Here's the clever move. Open the PDF, and choose File > Export. In the "Quartz Filter" scroll menu, choose "Reduce File Size". Rename the file (so it doesn't overwrite the original, and save. There are other means of compressing PDFs, but they all affect photo quality. Note: Nothing in this whole workflow significantly reduces photo quality, though your PDF will be shockingly small.

Open the PDF, and choose View > Thumbnails. Scroll down, and click (in the sidebar) each landscape shot that's been forced into portrait and type Command R to rotate it back to landscape. Repeat for every such photo (go slowly, it's a clumsy process).

Save the PDF

Non-Aspirational Lunches

A few weeks ago, I confessed how I've Cruelly Deprived You of Food Porn, and linked to Facebook photo essays sharing my non-aspirational lunches in anonymous Setúbal restaurants. At the time, I caught you up with these:

October 18, 2024
October 25, 2024
November 3, 2024
November 12, 2024
November 13, 2024
December 1, 2024

Here are more recent ones:
December 6, 2024
December 14, 2024
December 22, 2024
December 28, 2024
January 5, 2025
January 10, 2025
January 18, 2025 (bad week)
January 24, 2025
January 31, 2025
February 8, 2025

And here is a downloadable 23mb PDF showing all the outstanding Bengali food I ate last year at Setúbal's Leiteria Montalvo in chronological order (the olives in the second shot are hilarious. She's trying hard to fit in in Portugal!).

Nearly All Leaders Have Nearly Always Been Awful

Just a periodic reminder that, until very recently, leaders were all corrupt, power mad narcissists perpetually pushing boundaries and resisting constraints. The precious few who occasionally considered the good of the people were stand-outs. Edge cases!

Yet civilization advanced from screeching gangs bashing the skulls of neighboring tribes to moon landings, iphones and lasagna under the leadership of those very same maddening shitheads.

We've lately been spoiled by a run of honorable presidents. George W Bush, who I considered an ogre at the time, seems, in retrospect, an honorable man who genuinely did his (deluded) best. Thing is, we've come to feel entitled to honorable leaders, even though we bitterly curse every one of them — exactly like how we always spit at departing years on December 31 as the world^* grows unimaginably wealthy and comfortable.

*Yes, the world, not just the First World. Prevalence of extreme poverty fell from nearly 40% to below 10% in 25 years.

Before this aberrant recent run of honorable presidents, leaders even of relatively free, bright, successful societies were nearly all sneering, corrupt, racist, sexist, profoundly shallow secretary-fondling tyrants. If their societies didn't fall into complete tyranny, it wasn't for lack of trying.

And, historically speaking, Donald Trump is far from the worst. Just as he's made George W Bush seem honorable by comparison, a few years spent under the likes of Idi Amin, Pol Pot, or the Assad or Kim families would leave us recalling Trump in a considerably warmer light.

I've despised Donald Trump since the 1980s. I believe he's a cancer on the country and a blight on the presidency. I'm not defending a damned thing he does. But one characteristic of this ditzy aristocracy we've transformed into is a tendency for all negative results - every emotional pinprick - to raise a DEFCON 1 response. A feeble wannabe authoritarian not yet in office not only makes us contemplate the very Worst that could happen, but to deem it a foregone conclusion. Sheer apocalypse seems inevitable from this doddering 78 year old fool and his posse of weirdos, skells, and grifters.

It's helpful to adopt a larger perspective, and to question one's news food supply. Remember how the Right screamed bloody murder at literally everything Clinton, Obama, and Biden ever did or said, even eminently sensible and bipartisan things? Even things the Right had pushed for? Perhaps we ought not allow ourselves to be steered, spurred, and spun into that same mode.

For example, consider this: Biden preserved most of Trump's tariffs. Yes, the ones the Dems went nuts over in his first term. The media never mentions this. And in the 2024 campaign, the Left continued to scream bloody murder about the latest tariff proposals. They insisted it was all based on fundamental ignorance of what tariffs even are.

Biden kept them! Ponder that, and consider whether we're being played by an outrage machine. Me, I keep cold water handy for periodic self-face-slapping. I aspire to oppose the bad stuff, but not reflexively reject every utterance. Even a broken clock is right twice per day!

The Empathy Asymmetry

If you visit someone in an asylum, you'll encounter people firmly grounded in non-reality. You can't deny their reality because, obviously, it feels real to them. You must find the empathy to meet them in their perspective; bridging the gap on your end. And, of course, none will return the favor and consider your perspective, much less try to "meet you" there.

The situation doesn't improve when you walk out the door and into the greater world. Still everyone locked into their respective realities, demanding to be met there, while yours seems peripheral at best. The bridging — the empathy — always falls to you. Of course it does!


As a child, my parents pressured me to send letters to my grandparents, who I barely knew. I tried to "catch them up" on my activities, though they'd never shown the slightest interest. I dutifully sent cheerful letters, and it was decades before I registered how strange it was that they never wrote back. Obviously, I was in the letter-writing position. The bridging — the empathy — fell to me.

Of course it does?

Another example

The Evil Glee of Sanctimonious Scorn

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

- Aldous Huxley (in "Crome Yellow")

"Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others."

- Gurwinder

Actual fascism and racism can't be fought while shouting down every disagreeable utterance as fascistic and racist. Performative gesturing dulls the blade. We've mostly been commoditizing rage, stoking tribalism, and diluting morality.

The unquestionable good of racial tolerance doesn't make strident anti-racism great. Those yearning for greatness would be better served by creation than evisceration. This is not a video game where points are earned by slaying Baddies.

A useful thought experiment: deem yourself the villain and observe where it leads. This requires courage, but that's unavoidable. Screaming at transgressors on social media isn't courage. It's self-indulgence—and, per the two quotes above, counterproductively draws from our worst impulses.


I remember, with nausea, the "Moral Majority" movement of the 1980s, where an extreme faction tried to impose its narrow, rigid doctrine on a heterogeneous nation. It boggles my mind that Progressives, apparently having seen great value in that approach, became the new sanctimonious enforcers of moral rectitude.