Uncommon Terseness

I'm replaying this posting from April, 2014. The reader who prepared the following disappeared years ago, and I'm trying to whip up a new one but need help with sequencing. If you (or someone you know) have professional editing experience and might be interested in a quick (paying) job, please drop a line to jimleff.ny@gmail.com.


A Slog reader who prefers to remain anonymous was kind enough to share her favorite pull-quotes from past postings. I honestly can't recall writing more than half of these (I remember more clearly the labored overlong ones!):

Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing. That's why most singers are so awful. (link)

Admiring and supporting unheralded greatness is what the universe wants us to do. The angels swoon when we discover their hidden treasure - their fiendishly clever and luminously beautiful Easter eggs. (link)

We over-emphasize first-movers, crediting them with creating waves when, truly, they're just surfing them like everyone else. Causality has nothing to do with it. The first popping kernel doesn't make the other kernels pop. (link)

I wouldn't want to return to 1973. We went too far. You could feel society slogging and smell the rot (and pay a tax rate north of 90%). 1973 could have made a Tea Party partisan out of any but the most fervid of current liberals. (link)

When people are determined to misunderstand, misunderstanding's unavoidable. Per Maslow's hammer, if all you have is snark, everyone looks like an asshole. (link)

Billions of people yearn for greatness. Millions of people do things they hope will make them great. Thousands of people do great things with nary a thought about where it will leave them. (link)

Richard Scarry was right: it takes all kinds, and by contributing our respective expertise, we create a utopian whole (which liberals romanticize as cooperation and which conservatives theorize as competition - a false dichotomy that was the "original sin" of political theory). (link)

The opposite of being a discriminated-against minority isn't becoming an empowered minority, it's pluralism. Boring old pluralism. The reason gay rights have transformed with such miraculous speed is that this is exactly the tack they took. "We just want to love who we love, like any American." Not 'a gay thing', just an American thing. The message was delivered by boring, well-dressed, reasonable people, not dudes defiantly flaunting their nipple clamps. (link)

Why on earth would I want a female presidency, or a Jewish presidency? Administrations aren't like novelty flavors of KitKat bars. I don't want some glorious rainbow, I want smart governance. (link)

I've never met anyone who's consistently lived with integrity and who regrets it. (link)

The miracle of human beings is that we're finite - i.e. limited - in every respect, yet we're capable of infinite love, infinite creativity, infinite joy, and infinite wisdom within those limitations. (link)

The really good stuff arrives via epiphany, eureka, and inspiration - "out of nowhere" and hard to claim credit for. (link)

I never understood how anyone could experience transcendent greatness and not want to devote their lives to it. (link)

If you love transcendence, you've got to cherish the obstacles which spur it; the necessity which mothers the invention. (link)

Anxiety is the bain of deep-carers. (link)

The care, the love, the discipline and thoughtfulness we invest in our most prosaic actions changes absolutely everything. That's how the future is perpetually created. (link)

If you simply sweat the small stuff, sans self-consciousness or aspiration (just "because!"), angels will sing. (link)

While the present day feels like a new corporate era - one where a CFO might play bass in a punk band and vote Democrat, and the encubicled set deems themselves cool and creative - make no mistake about it: corporate attitude remains 1956ishly square. Deep-down, these guys are all still crewcuts-and-tie-clips. (link)

Just because people keep proposing really bad solutions doesn't mean there isn't a problem! (link)

Quality oughtn't be a side effect. (link)

You have no idea how disorienting it is to spend your life plying an art form that's so extraordinarily marginalized - even ridiculed - when that same art form is the unanimous commercial choice for setting a tone of hip urbanity. (link)

Racism, sexism, classism, etc. are nothing more than the incomplete registration of a perfectly appropriate misanthropy. (link)

As a member of five or six minority groups, myself, I find myself cringing whenever I see groups to which I belong depicted or discussed with anxious care and glossy patina. What awful thing, after all, are they so carefully dancing around?!?"(link)

If you've got a zit on the tip of your nose, all injustice appears to stem from that. (link)

I no longer plug mishaps into my narrative of woe. And without that, it's all just stuff happening. (link)

Qualities such as kindness, intelligence, generosity, and a sense of humor are of service to others. Beauty, by contrast, serves only its possessor. (link)

I like to be told that I'm being an idiot. This helps me be less of an idiot. By contrast, most people recoil quite strongly from acknowledging to themselves any idiocy in their thought or behavior. They'd much rather be idiots than feel like idiots. (link)

Nationalism is always a noble-seeming mask for xenophobia. Show me someone who loves "Us", and I'll show you someone who hates "Them". (link)

History always unfolds via a succession of immoderately reactive pendulum swings. Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism? (link and another)

Scientists say it's very difficult to learn new skills after one's mid-twenties. I think they're slicing that wrong. What happens is that it becomes very difficult to imagine (and to tolerate) change as one's self-image solidifies. And learning is change. (link)

America is so rich that we mistake mere discomfort for bona fide poverty. (link)

Anyone in the first world yearning to get rich is really just dreaming of getting richer. (link)

Better to be a hapless shmuck who occasionally surprises than to be a hero who inevitably disappoints. (link)

Hell is a place human beings voluntarily condemn themselves to. (link)

The real secret is not to learn to get what you want. It's to learn to want what you get. link

The Hardest Ask

The problem with wisdom is that, if it doesn't completely confuse us (because we've been looking the other way for so long that a fresh framing leaves us as overwhelmed as newborn babies), it feels so natural—so tuned to body temperature—that we're not at all stricken. It digests so easily that we needn't chew or swallow. It merely metabolizes, vanishing without a trace.

I know a person who has remained a sulky, superior, utterly non-productive adolescent for nearly 70 years. Risking her snarling wrath, I once spoke the words she most needed to hear. They were her missing chunk, like oranges to a scurvied sailor; like a simple key to a seemingly intransigent lock. It's a maxim I've repeated here several times:

Registering stupidity doesn't make you smart; it just means you're observant.

Her reply was "Yeah, of course."

And...cut! Oranges: flippantly tossed overboard. Key: melted in the heat of the lock. Tableau: untouched. The answer blew in the wind, but who clocks a light breeze?

That self-vanishing snippet of breezy nothingness (along with its equally disposable corollaries, below) may be key insights for averting the clash we all feel coming, but I already know the response: "Yeah, of course."

Yet let's continue. Here are the corollaries:

Registering evil doesn't make you good.

Registering authoritarianism doesn't make you democratic

Spotting immorality doesn't make you virtuous.

The hardest ask in all creation is for narcissists to examine themselves first.

Our ancestors toiled and bled to push us, their spoiled children, into a paradise of wealth and comfort, never seeing that a society of narcissistic aristocrats will inherently be doomed.

Addendum

I've added a new closer to yesterday's posting, "Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes".

Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes

I once wrote about the clear-headed, peaceful state yogis call satchitananda, often translated as "equanimity", though I prefer "bulletproof". It's a state of undisturbable and ineffable peace, non-reactive yet empathically engaged, and utterly tolerant even upon choosing to argue. Lots of paradoxes make it notoriously slippery to describe, but, again, "bulletproof" gives the right idea. And I'd like to offer some thoroughly enjoyable homework for those curious for better understanding.

Watch "Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes", season 1, episode 3 of "Review", available on Amazon for $2.99.

Reality TV host Forest MacNeil is challenged to eat "an upsetting number of pancakes" (like a dozen), and he barely accomplishes it with histrionic displeasure. Then he proceeds to ruin his marriage for the stupidest reasons. And then, as the third act of his busy day, he's challenged to eat 30 additional pancakes...and does so post-haste and without complaint, in a state of numbly crestfallen indifference.

You really need to watch it. Not only is it entirely hilarious, but the ancient saintly authors of the Hindu Vedas would have tossed flower petals at creator Andy Daley's feet. Watch it, enjoy the hell out of it, and then ponder the power of framing.

Satchitananda is like the high indifference of Forest's third act, but without the needless overlay of disgust, negativity, and numbness. Indifference need not be negative. One can poselessly eat the damned pancakes, in one's raw state with nothing left to lose, but (this is the essential part!!!) without making it dramatic just because drama's the normal move.

Indifference sans drama is freedom. Blissful (yes, blissful) stresslessness. Days that should feel horrible are still nice days. Emotions happen—you don't numb yourself—but there's no suffering. You're bulletproof.

This isn't repression, denial, or dissociation. Those things inevitably generate even more stress. We're talking about real happiness—the stuff we find innumerable clever ways to suppress. We're talking about Forest MacNeil's third act but without the gratuitous self-torment.

"Freedom" is a state of infinite potential, which feels exactly like "having nothing left to lose." It's easy enough to get there. In fact, you've surely been there! But you need to decline the conditioned reflex to find it lacking, or infuriating, or devastating. That's an effortless opt-out, but you need to remember to do it, and remembering is as common as quintuplets all winning the lottery.

It took me years to settle into recognizing the necessity of this laughably easy step. But now, as I presently deal with profound loss, and am sad and shakey, I'm not suffering. Rather than hunker down into self-care, I've hastened (yesterday and today) to my keyboard to channel the wrenching into an attempt to be helpful. Not as some noble aspiration; just a frame of mind. Satchitananda compels helping rather than bewailing. One's settings toggle to "useful ingenuity", rather than "dramatic performance".


Addendum:

Some people are hell-bent on descent because they innately sense the liberation that comes with having, again, NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. The problem is that they don't know quite what to do with it, so they spin it into drama. They don't know to opt out of that part.

What can you do with freedom? Anything. I mean it literally when I say that freedom means infinite potential—even while buck naked and penniless. You can even eat 30 pancakes, no problem.


I made the same point, much more tersely, here (and this is a helpful offshoot). Numbly, glaringly giving up is kissing cousin to blissful spiritual transformation. You merely have to decline the numbness and glaring—and it's a surprisingly easy opt-out, if you can just remember. The ease of it is perhaps the single biggest and most ironic surprise in the entire human experience for the handful per generation who are sufficiently playfully nonconformist under enormous pressure to try it. But you don't need those unicorn attributes, because you've just been handed the secret on a platter. And you can remember more easily because you've just been reminded.

Lifebuilding

Someone in my circle has been swallowed by the fate I’m about to warn you about. Perhaps my harshly-awakened perspective might help a reader or two escape the trap. Urgent work is required. Clocks are ticking.


Hardly anyone plans for old age in non-financial ways. We count on momentum, supposing our 70s will be like our 60s, only slower. Loving spouse, dear friends, and adoring children will encircle us, like in a movie, and we'll venture forward as the culmination of a lifetime of general effort.

But that's cinematic baloney. It never works out that way. You may be forced to move. Your spouse might leave you, or get sick, or die. Such dark exigencies seem too horrid to contemplate, but that's the point! We avoid level-headed calculation, resorting to pipe dreams about momentum pulling us through old age. It's the height of foolish complacency.

When has life ever gone exactly as it did in your cinematic mental projection? How could you possibly think complacency would be a smart strategy on this planet?

Movie moments don't last, and you've had a lifetime to notice this and to plan accordingly. We're relentlessly and violently pushed toward that realization. Youth and middle age are brutal training grounds. At some point, we're supposed to stop engaging in childish dreamy fantasy and get real.

When things fall apart in our 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s—as they do with frequency—we have the energy, flexibility, and initiative to regroup and pursue new directions. But that's much harder when you're older. And by late middle age we should see that coming and finally internalize the boy scout credo about being prepared. If your "preparation" consists of imagining yourself sailing on easy momentum, a healthy IRA, and an upbeat attitude, you'll have doomed yourself to misery.

But it will not be the misery you imagine. I don't mean the moment of frozen horror when the bottom drops out. Hell, that's the easy part! The real problem is the day after fragile plans are dashed. And the day after that. And thousands more empty days, still here, with dwindling energy and diminishing options.

That's what you need to avoid, with all your might.

Don't rely on fragility.

Build solid footing for yourself. Internal solid footing!

If you don't, you'll have decades to rue your failure to conjure raisons d'être. You will back-load via regret what should have been front-loaded via careful planning. And, chillingly, I don't know a single person who's doing—or done—any such prep work.

Let's build the list. You need pursuits that bring satisfaction, and more than one, because if it's bird watching, you're screwed when you lose your vision, and if it's sports, you're screwed when you develop arthritis, and if it's joking around with your longtime buddy, you're screwed when he moves or gets sick or dies—or merely decides he doesn't like you anymore. You need multiple outlets and avenues and contacts. You need richness, and that's on you to accumulate over the long decades. That's what that lifetime was for!

And it all must be real, not just propositional. We can all produce lists of pseudo-hobbies, pseudo-passions, and pseudo-friends, but often they're placeholders. The karaoke machine you rarely set up but have wonderful memories of using once or twice will not cut it. You ought to have been building an actual life all this time.

You might have imagined family would be your grounding center, but if you really expected grown children to be constant presences, investing your day-to-day life with energy and meaning, you've contrived a movie moment, not a life.

You need friends...at least if you're not a serious introvert (in which case you'll have even greater need of things that bring you satisfaction, as well as backups). If you reach age 70 without everyday friends, you'd better have backup plans to your backup plans, because your friend-making muscles will have atrophied, and old people are not easily befriended.

Another addition to your to-build list: the ability to reframe. You can develop a facility for shifting perspective, making your mind an interesting and useful place rather than a torture chamber once things turn quiet and you find yourself marinating in your thoughts. This is more advanced than building social networks and interest palettes, but the return on investment is enormous.

YOU NEED A LIFE, and will no longer have busyness, buzzing alarms, and due dates to hide behind. No one will provide you with a life, nor can you buy one. You and you alone are responsible for building a life full of rich options and fallbacks and friends and outlets and perspectives. You had decades to do so, but, wherever you're at, you can start RIGHT NOW! Today!

Very few people seem to enter old age with A Life. They've merely navigated the obstacle course, ticking off to-dos and acquiring abstract rewards. It all feels like you're building momentum, but if you've built upon fragility with mere abstract notions, so it's all propositional, you'll have many years to bitterly recognize your failure. I know one such person who, being an introvert, was reasonably ok sitting in a chair in an empty silent room for twenty years. But I know another who, alas, was not.

Get going like your life depends on it. For further inspiration, this Slog has spent 17 years essentially gaming it all out. It's full of encouragement and perspectives on building an inner life and a lithe re-framing faculty.


Addenda:

1. Here's an example. Say your mom dies in your 60s (which is typical) and she was your confidant (reasonably typical). A few years later, your husband develops Alzheimer's (not uncommon). You flail for support, but you've neglected to build any. Your children love you, but, unlike the Hallmark ads, they're not perpetually right there with you, because they have busy lives, themselves. You never bothered to make close friends, you never had real hobbies or passions, and, in your perennially busy and numbly distracted younger years, you never learned to pliantly shift perspective. Unable to choose your own framings, you must passively accept how it's all been placed by circumstance. So you're looking down the barrel at 10 or 20 years as a wraith in a silent house where the phone rings once or twice per week. You recognize that you failed to build an inner life for yourself, and are too fraught and aggrieved to imaginably start doing so at this late date.

I'm truly sorry to foist you so viscerally into this frightful scenario. But the tough love is well-intended. I want you to avoid this.

2. The "momentum" I'm talking about—the false notion that your long track record of busyness and asset acquisition and networking will compile into a solidity you can hold onto and live off of in later quiet moments—is identical to what I described—prophetically last week—as the horribly wrong notion that being the irrepressible "Aunt Marge" in some narrow setting spares you from needing to ever be just plain Marge for a world at large—and for yourself.

3. I will never understand why people think immortality would be a good thing. I suppose that would be the hail mary play for a race of people who cannot, for the life of them, stop kicking cans down the road. Homes will get infinitely large to store our garbagey bullshit, and lifespans will get infinitely long to provide more time to finally get around to really living.

Why Aunt Marge Can't Be Just Marge

Aunt Marge has lost a step or two, but that's fine. Everyone loves her, and we're just so glad she's still here with us!

But here's what you don't know.

Assuming Aunt Marge isn't demented or wholly incompetent...

And she just gets a little feisty when things don't quite go her way...

And drops sullenly out of conversations...

And is stuck in her ways due to a comfort zone the size of a cherry pit...

And speaks her salty mind a bit, heh, forthrightly...

...the unrecognized truth is that none of this is inevitable.

Aunt Marge isn't helplessly dragged into this behavior by advancing age. You might not want to hear this, but she's doing it because she can get away with it. We celebrate Aunt Marge for simply being Aunt Marge, and she spends extravagantly from that immense credit. Older people grow lazy because we let them get away with it, respecting them—or, at least, the proposition of them—regardless.

You'd do the same if those around you celebrated the mere idea of you without expecting you to prove yourself. If you could get away without earning the attention you expect from others, you'd stop making the effort, too. Not trying feels like a vacation!

But then, what the hell am I supposed to do?

Just as young people wind up at the kid's table, people my age find themselves bundled with the Olds. And it has puzzled me profoundly that they have so little to offer. I don't ask much—and I'm not relentlessly judging—but very few people over age 60 seem the least bit interesting, smart, funny, kind, generous, or even just pleasant to be around. I have better conversations with my rhododendron! And I'm not talking about decrepits. I mean people as strong as bulls who talk a blue streak—but have nothing to offer. Nada. Zip. It's so strange.

It's notoriously hard for old people to make new friends. We chalk it up to age discrimination or general "marginalization". But, no, that's not it. It's because Aunt Marge is so used to coasting on being Aunt Marge that she has no idea how to be just Marge. And there's no self-awareness, just confusion, leaving her feeling oddly entitled to engagement, friendship, and eager ears for her low-effort blandness.

Nothing is offered and everything is expected when you imagine you're seen as That Person, obliviously coasting on canned personhood. But the magic doesn't work with newcomers, and it's been a long time since you earned your way. Or made the slightest effort to be interesting or pleasant. Or, really, anything.

So I keep finding myself saddled with Just-Plain-Marges who expect to seem compelling because they're That Irrepressible Person. But, outside one's musty, established circles, effort is necessary. Rise from complacency, constrain stridency, and try to follow conversational context (i.e. don't just blurt out the stuff you usually say)!

Uh-uh. I've rarely met a senior the least bit interested in pulling off that baseline trifecta of everyday solicitude. And, dear God, I hope I'm not obliviously falling into the same trap.


Why do seniors repeat the same stories endlessly? It's not memory loss. It's that they feel entitled to inflict this on you if they bloody well feel like it. It's so much nastier and more callous and self-indulgent than you'd ever imagined. The truth is an absolute horror.

All posts tagged "Aging", in reverse-chronological order.

Fixing a Bad Back

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".


After twenty years of very avid work, I've developed a remarkably easy fix for a bad back.

It's mostly preventative. It might help during a flare-up, or might not. But if you'll practice it once or twice daily (it takes about 10 seconds), it can help inoculate you from the problem.

Let's talk about The Problem. In my case—and, I'm told, most people's cases—the issue is an asymmetry, aka pelvic torsion, which temporarily causes one leg to extend further than the other. It doesn't show up on MRIs or x-rays, and orthopedists don't have it on their radar. It's the "x factor" behind many mysterious back problems, and conditions like sciatica are often "downstream" from this, so it might help there, too.

Physical therapists and good massage therapists know about this issue, and can offer temporary help. But there's no cure for it beyond their ongoing involvement. Until now.

The Technique
Lie down on top of a foam yoga block laid flat and rotated like a "|", not a "——". It should extend from your sacrum to support the buttocks.

Gently shift your hips left and right over the block about ten times. It's fine if they shift off the block at the extreme of movement, but your feet and chest should stay relatively still. You may hear or feel a "pop" as the structures realign, and it shouldn't hurt.

If I don't do this twice daily, I'm vulnerable. A heavy lift or sudden turn can trigger crippling back pain. But if I keep up the practice, I'm golden.

Add-Ons
1. Try a forward bend first.

This helps prepare the area for adjustment. If your hamstrings are tight, stretch forward over a bed, arms extended forward onto the mattress. Try to relax your abdomen, which will probably be tensed. That may help you descend further, but depth doesn't matter. Just give yourself a good stretch.

2. Heat Helps

A heating pad, hot bath, or even a warm shower will help loosen the lower back and buttocks so realignment happens more easily.

3. Ungrip Your Glutes

Tight glutes resist realignment. A tennis ball can help. Set one on the floor and sit on it—cross legged or with legs extended—avoiding the dead center of your hip socket. Gently work the ball to and fro, paying extra attention to tight spots, gradually tracing a circle around that midpoint. Then repeat with a wider circle, and then work the other buttock, and then try the yoga block again.

Done right, this should take about 15 minutes, and you may need to repeat it once/day until the area permanently relaxes. From that point, you'll only need occasional maintenance.

Caveats
I've done yoga for 45 years.

This may not work as well for you right away. But the motion is gentle, the effort is minimal, and it takes just 10 seconds. So long as you follow caveat #2, it's certainly worth a try.

Consult a professional.

If you’ve had spinal surgery, structural abnormalities, or conditions like degeneration or stenosis, you should be under medical care already—and you should definitely ask first.

If you just have a "bad back", this may work well for you. It has limited usefulness during an acute flare-up, though. Try it if you want, but you may get better results by seeing a good massage therapist or physical therapist, and then try this once you're feeling better.

Eddie Palmieri

The great Eddie Palmieri, one of my musical heroes and a formative superstar of Latin Jazz/Salsa/Whatever You Want to Call it, died yesterday.

I'll offer two stories:

Fumigation
I'm at the bar of Blue Note nightclub in Manhattan, circa 1987. I'm an insider there because I play almost nightly at the late after show with trumpeter Ted Curson. Michel Camillo, the latest big-publicity jazz star, is in residence, and he's busily and smilingly outgassing the smoothest and show-off-iest latin-ish jazz imaginable. A friend of mine refers to this style of playing as "Show You My White Teeth Music". The tourists are eating it up, but we musicians at the bar, seeking any possible relief, begin drinking with determination.

The set ends, thunderous ovation, and we eagerly await the second half of the show, featuring Eddie Palmieri's Orchestra. It's a bit like Sandra Bernhardt following Jennifer Lopez. Eddie was not dentally impressive, and his music did not drip with showy glissandi. No smug rich guy suntanned sambas. Eddie was the apotheosis of soulful grit. Eddie was antimatter to Camillo.

The mangy musicians from Eddie's group finally took the stage, tuned, and sat placidly waiting for the drugs to wax or wane, per individual preference. Then Eddie came out, and, as he often did, launched into an extended solo piano intro. Eddie can get quite "out", making Thelonious Monk seem songful by comparison. He always had the soul of an avante gardist, though, unlike just about every avante gardist I know (and I knew many), he could also swing his ass off. But on this night, he played 20 minutes of impenetrable, maddening solo stuff, giving the tourists nothing to hang their ears on. Nada. On and on it went, featuring repeated piddly hammerings on the highest piano key, making the dressing room cat mew loudly in consternation. A number of audience members walked out, though no one in the band could give less of a crap. They just sat there mopily with misaligned pupils, waiting.

Finally—FINALLY—Eddie stands up (adding maybe four inches to his seated height) and screams "ONE TWO THREE FOUR!!!!" fast, and the band just roars into a montuno from a dead standing start that's so instantly swinging and wailing and exasperated (by Camillo) that the entire room forgets to breathe for a solid minute. Whatever it is that metal heads get from having their ears blown out by garish rednecks and their overclocked guitar amps, this was the platonic form of that. This was the mythical Wall of Sound.

The interminable solo had been fumigation. And then the heavy roller machine had gone into overdrive, laying down fresh, inexorable pavement. I actually teared up a little from the emotional release. If only orgasms offered such catharsis!

Dominican Humiliation
My one gig with Eddie was a catastrophe (more for him than for me). We were playing in a brand new Dominican nightclub in Washington Heights, and while you might imagine The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico as geographic and cultural twins, their musics are like oil and water.

Dominicans dance to merengue, an easy 1-2, 1-2, 1-2 like polka. It's fast and furious and sexy and exciting, but not the least bit sophisticated. Puerto Rican salsa (which derives from Cuba, and, before that, Africa) can be furious, sexy and exciting at times, but it abounds with sophistication and subtlety.

Those not born into it (or made it their lifelong study, as I did) wouldn't be able to even clap their hands to it. Imagine that! Popular music—dance music!—you can't clap your hands to! It's not 1-2, 1-2, 1-2. Instead, it's two short claps and three long. Or three long and two short. And even knowing which is which is a move for insiders only. The difference with Dominican merengue was yet another matter/anti-matter contrast.

So I'm gigging with the greatest salsa band in the world, hideously misplaced in a Dominican nightclub (hey, a gig's a gig, you know? It's not like Eddie's manager would ever say "no"!) and no one is dancing, or applauding, because this crazy Puerto Rican stuff is happening which none of the Dominicans can parse. It's like trying to play a Windows game on a Mac. One of the greatest moments of my life is an abject humiliation for all concerned.

There had, however, been a high point the week before. The rehearsal for this gig marked the first appearance of the young conga player Giovanni Hidalgo, who'd arrived with a reputation as a genius. As he and I both warmed up across the room from each other, separated by over a dozen other honking horn players, his complicated hand slaps suddenly and improbably began to encompass my warm-up. Not that he was tuning in to me, specifically, getting all up in my stuff. it's just that he was a Big Ears Guy, never not listening to—and never not encompassing—Everything. I was the same (most players wouldn't have noticed they were being encompassed). When I engaged back, it was like Fred Astaire cocking an elbow at Ginger Rogers. He complied instantaneously and sumptuously. Beautifully. The back/forth continued for a couple minutes until Eddie hollered to start the rehearsal. Giovanni went on to become a major star, and we'll leave it at that because his story became too sad to contemplate. Best damn warm-up I ever had, though.

Back to the Dominican club, it's intermission and I'm standing in a stairwell, playing long tones to keep myself in optimal condition, when Eddie walks by and offers me a hit off his joint. I refuse with a smile, saying I need to keep my head straight on my first gig. Eddie shrugs amiably and walks away. God, I'm an idiot.

Rest in Peace, Eddie.


Are you noticing a pattern?

The HVAC Lie

So let's talk about HVACs. I just spent a significant fraction of my savings on a few of them. I bought nice Bosch units. They're overpowered for their rooms' sizes, but there's no choice. You cannot buy decent quality small HVACS in Europe. Installers don't even understand the concept of 'overpowered'. "It's Bosch! Top of the line! You'll love it! It does everything!"

I recalled, deep in my brain, serious problems with overpowered ACs, but I couldn't remember specifics...until they were up and running. Let's cut to the atrocious upshot:

1. HVAC splits do not, and cannot, draw in outside air. It's like putting your home in a Ziploc bag. You know how musty and unpleasant it gets when you leave your car on "Max AC" too long? That's your life now.

2. There is a "Fan" function, but it just blows the stale inside air around.

3. I finally remembered the issue: overpowered units don't run long enough to dehumidify. You get cool and clammy. To kill humidity, you'd need to set a super low temperature and put on a parka.

4. But wait! There's a "Dry" mode that dehumidifies! Bullshit. It just cools less efficiently, ignoring whatever temperature you may have set. It will run and run until humidity drops, whereupon you and your family will be icy corpses.

The solution, suggested by ChatGPT, is to also buy a window fan to pull in fresh air, and a dehumidifier to dry it, and then run the HVAC to cool. And I am super stoked to buy all that equipment after gushing cash on these HVAC units. Also, the decor aspect will be fabulous, with multiple snorting boxes attending to my atmospherics. Maybe I'll order the CERN package, used to keep the Large Hadron Collider on-point.

Remember those ungainly inefficient 80 decibel boxes we used to hang outside our windows? Ancient history. These modern beauties are a mere triple the price, and they DO EVERYTHING.

Cruelty Laundering

Nothing feels cleaner than a just precept providing cover for dark impulses.

“Cruelty laundering”—the license to destroy with good conscience and to misbehave in the name of righteousness—has been the eternal delight of psychopaths and narcissists on both the Left and Right.

Sins and Sinners

Yesterday, I wrote:

The hard right, which spent decades screaming and hollering about pedophilia, is largely cool with pardoning arguably the biggest monster of the biggest child sex trafficking ring in modern history.

The hard left, which spent decades screaming and hollering about rape, is largely cool with Hamas raping Jewish Israeli women.

Everyone's just posing. Signifying. Waving flags and feeling righteous in their mouthy stand. Peel back the skin, and it's brute tribalism. Hatred for the Other is the only real thing. The sole motivator.

Performative virtue, as the fruit of a poisoned tree, cannot help but be hypocritical and spotty.

So what's the answer? How do we fix this?

As ever, it will happen by each person individually reframing. Here's the recipe, and it will seem both radical and profoundly familiar:

If you have a conviction that seems so incontrovertible that it appears to justify full-on seething emotion, and your white-hot fury feels right because it serves Righteousness so you feel elevated in your screechy, mouthy scorn as you smite the wicked without observing the normal considerations....maybe pull back a little. Maybe don't do that.

We can fight perceived wickedness with an emotional pitch of "8", rather than "10" or "11", and do so with ordinary civilized restraints fully in place. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind, and has been for thousands of years. 2.5 billion of us profess to practice it already. Here it is:

While fighting what you're certain is Wickedness from a position you're certain is Rightness (I won't ask you to moderate your certainty; that would be a step too far), you can hate the sin while loving the sinner.

Of course, we're only two millennia into that proposition, so it's still way too early for the full version. Let's do baby steps. Don't *hate* the sinner. Don't *dehumanize* the sinner. Even if it makes you feel real good to do so.

---

"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

See also: "The Evil Glee of Sanctimonious Scorn"

Scalesfall, USA

The hard right, which spent decades screaming and hollering about pedophilia, is largely cool with pardoning arguably the biggest monster of the biggest child sex trafficking ring in modern history.

The hard left, which spent decades screaming and hollering about rape, is largely cool with Hamas raping Jewish Israeli women.

Everyone's just posing. Signifying. Waving flags and feeling righteous in their mouthy stand. Peel back the skin, and it's brute tribalism. Hatred for the Other is the only real thing. The sole motivator.

Performative virtue, as the fruit of a poisoned tree, cannot help but be hypocritical and spotty.


It doesn't fit my thesis, but I can't resist: Priests spent centuries preaching hellfire for teenagers depraved enough to commit the sin of masturbation, yet have been buggering kiddies in droves. Perhaps a relatively small minority, but the majority has been largely cool with it.

The Most Delicious Cocktails

Here's why I'm wrong for this world. Someone I know announced to friends on social media that he plans to open a great cocktail bar with absolutely the most delicious cocktails. His friends were supportive. What a great idea. Hey, who doesn't love great cocktails?

A few months later, he posted photos of himself taking a class in mixology at a bartending school. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Can't wait to try your great cocktails! Shortly thereafter, he opened his bar. A labor of love!

Molar-grinding though it is, this, in and of itself, is not why I'm wrong for this world. This is just why the world is wrong for me.

The killer is that the top two paragraphs will be completely opaque for 99% of readers. "What exactly is your problem with this, Jim?"

I'm a slob who wants a genuinely delicious cocktail, not the proposition of one (see the "Face-In-Hole Board" section here). Is that so crazy?


Also, I'd like to live in a world with genuineness, broadly. Where we sip and are moved to go "Mmm!", and not just grimly peck out "YUM!" on Instagram.

The Shivering Fisherman

I was newly introduced to someone who immediately wanted to discuss how awful Donald Trump is. So corrupt and shameless! Such a racist liar! Isn't he just awful?

I replied, with unconcealable exasperation, that this guy's been front and center for a solid decade, so those conclusions are pretty solid by now for those who share them. Little value could be wrung from the hundred trillionth iteration of the lament.

But I realized I'd just called him boring. And while it was true—he was being flabbergastingly boring—that wasn't the reason for my exasperation. So I reached for a metaphor.

"You're like an ice fisherman who cuts a hole in the ice, baits and sinks his line, and, awaiting a nibble, exclaims, "Jesus, it's cold!"

He stared at me blankly.

"An ice fisherman who's been at it for more than a week should have found some way to come to terms with cold. Dress for it, stoically bear it, or retrain yourself to feel eager for it. Someone who ice fishes on a frozen lake for years, complaining about the cold the whole time, is the definition of a crazy person. And while we're all free to choose our own approaches, in this case I've shown up, dropped my line, and settled in for a neighborly fishing session, and you lead with 'Is it just me, or is it cold?' Of course it's cold! We're ice fishing!!"

He squinted. "So you're telling me not to complain?"

"No. I'm suggesting you not complain in exactly the same way over the exact same situation for ten years straight. And if you can't help yourself, don't inflict it on your fellow fishermen, who've put effort into adapting to the cold. Nothing's gained by focusing on the frigidity of a frozen lake. Acceptance precedes sanity!"

"I will never accept the presidency of Donald Trump," he replied tightly, his posture stiffening in a show of staunch resistance.

And I flashed on my posting last week, which explained how accepting loss or disappointment doesn't require approval. I.e. don't expect to reach a point of approval re: the death of your hamster! Little Freddie's death will never stoke joy!

The acceptance/approval confusion seems more widely prevalent than I'd realized. We're all locked in obsession with our remaining sub-optimalities here in Utopia. Princesses, increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas, refuse to accept perturbation because they can't, by definition, approve of it. So anything disliked is forever unacceptable. Like this unacceptably cold frozen lake!

If we'd stop requiring approval in order to accept, we might actually enjoy the ice fishing—or a rewarding conversation with a new acquaintance. The stuck record might finally play forward!

This person spent ten years perpetually renewing his shock at Donald Trump's awfulness because he cannot accept something he disapproves of lingering on his dashboard.

Anything un-approvable is unacceptable!

That's the underlying mechanism accounting for all the sour, toxic stuck-ness we all sense in contemporary society (not just politics). Anything un-approvable is unacceptable, and must be re-hashed, re-processed, and relived in an unremitting loop until it’s just the way we like it.

Dressing Like a King

Noah Hawley produced two of my favorite TV shows—Legion and Fargo. Alan Sepinwall profiles him this week, ahead of the August 12 debut of his latest, "Alien: Earth". His article opens with this snappy vignette:

When a director arrives at a filming location, they have a lot of important tasks before the real work can begin. Department heads to consult. Actors to be prep. Schedules to lock. When Noah Hawley got to Bangkok to direct the first episode of Alien: Earth, he immediately had to have some suits made.

“One of the first things I did upon landing was go to a tailor and work up, not a full wardrobe, but a way, through linen and cotton, to try to manage the heat, in a way that was the most stylish and comfortable,” explains Hawley, 58, the Emmy-winning creator of Fargo and Legion.

Most TV showrunners would throw on a T-shirt and cargo shorts to accomplish that goal in temperatures that were upwards of 118 degrees. But Noah Hawley is not most showrunners. Hart Hanson, who gave Hawley his first regular TV job, writing for the Fox crime drama Bones, remembers thinking on the day they met, “He’s too well-dressed to be a writer.” He doesn’t recall ever seeing Hawley in jeans or a polo shirt.

The bespoke wardrobe serves two purposes. One is, Hawley believes in dressing for the part when that part involves leadership. “We can get in trouble as artists who are also managers when we don’t understand the power of symbols,” he says. “The boss looks like the boss. No good comes from ‘I’m just like you.’”

I've been posting diatribes against emulation and affectation, plus confessions re: my piss poor poseur skills (I wrote here that "I'm quite good at doing things, but horrendously bad at posing as a thing-doer. There are specialists for that! Thousands of them! And they're good! They can do something I can't, and I truly admire them! Me, I could never fool anyone into imagining I could do something notable. Even if I actually have.")

But this story struck me. If the great Noah Hawley at age 58—superbly accomplished, and firmly atop his game—feels obliged to dress up in a steaming jungle for a job where he's essentially God to all his underlings, anyway, then maybe there's something to it.

Perhaps I should have diverted effort to the Seeming, even at the expense of the Doing. It would be against my religion to sacrifice an iota of quality, but in collaborative endeavors this might have earned more cohesive collaboration—and with it, better quality. And it surely would have elevated a project's public profile.

My mind's eye flashes on Tom Wolfe in that goofy white suit, and Hendrix plucking guitar strings with his teeth. Those guys—and Hawley—might have had surplus bandwidth to devote to self-signaling. Me, I've always felt like I was skating just ahead of failure, so it would have been a grave misuse of assets—like a morbidly fat king reigning over an impoverished tribe.

But maybe that's what it takes to be King.

The Waif and the Limo

Following up on "Perverse Corroboration":

I cobbled it all together into a short film that's a meditation on quality. How it gets in, how it's recognized, and whether there's any objectivity. All the interesting questions! It's very poorly shot, recorded, and edited. It's tediously repetitive, lacks any discernible structure, and never quite states its theme. And yet, it has magic to it.

I was describing some strange phenomena, but neglected to deal, head-on, with some strangeness of my own. Mainly: Why did I let it be so crappy? And why would I so blithely concede it's crappiness?

That's not how you're supposed to do it! You're supposed to cover over the worst flaws, maintaining a cocky assurance that you're a great filmmaker who deliberately evoked crude, homespun flavor. "I meant it that way!"

So why freely confess my limited skills? Why even make such a film? Who deliberately sets out to make a sloppy film?

To me, it's obvious: I had no desire to impress anyone with my filmmaking skills. I wasn't trying to be a filmmaker. I just wanted to make a film.

Isn't everyone just trying to make a film (or whatever it is that they make)?

No. At least not as a straight shot. Most filmmakers make films not to make films, but to be filmmakers. The drive is much more about identity and status than authentic creative drive. As I recently noted:

Few can resist a snapshot with their face appearing within a hole in a board painted to assume the persona of a super hero, medieval knight, etc. "Hey, look! I'm a farmer! It's me doing that thing!"

"It's me doing that thing!" is what the world is about. That's the core presumption, distilled to its essence.

I wasn't grabbing a snapshot of myself as a thing-doer as I did the thing. I just did the thing. And this undermined the process, from the perspective of those who go the other way. My guileless sincerity - I was 100% invested in the cookie guy, capturing his truth, and shedding light on one of the most slippery mysteries—gave the result an elemental magic. A child's magic.

I hoped to capture lightning, but not so I could be The Lightning Capturer. Just for its own sake! Who cares about me and my terrible skills? That's irrelevant. I have something I sincerely want to show, which might coax a useful reframing (though I don't need to be The Reframing Coaxer, either)! I was taking a straight shot. Doing a thing with no regard for being a Thing-Doer (see previous postings tagged 'Karma Yoga')

Les Blank was a brilliant maverick filmmaker, one of my all-time favorites and remarkably unpretentious. Yet, even for him, everything about this felt infuriating.

When a singer-who-sings-because-she-wanted-to-be-a-singer encounters pure-hearted singing—perhaps through the window of her limo as a street waif warbles a tremulous "Old MacDonald Had a Farm"—she is not touched. She does not slip money in the waif's pocket. She will most likely be oddly miffed. And if you were to ask for an explanation, she'd criticize the tremulousness...with incongruous agitation.


How does this apply to the story of David Liebman, the sax player?

It doesn't. As a musician, I was no tremulous waif. I had copious training and solid technique. So that one represented some other ju-ju.🤷

My June 1999 Mailing List Email from Larry Page

This is interesting. I remember being an early adopter of Google, but I hadn't realized how early! Here's issue 2 of "Google-Friends News". Not "friends" just as a marketing term. Apparently it really was a friends/family list. I have no recollection of how I got on it, though I was using their site heavily by then.

Too bad I didn't hit them up for a job and grab some of those stock options. But, hey, I was busy at the time.


From: Larry Page, INTERNET:google-friends@google.com
To: Jim Leff, 75570,441
Date: Tue, Jun 8, 1999, 7:50 PM
RE: [google-friends] Google-Friends News: Google Gets Funding

Sender: google-friends-return-1-big-dog=chowhound.com@returns.egroups.com

Dear Google Friends!

Welcome to Vol. I Issue 2 of the Google Friends newsletter--news about the Google search engine. This is a monthly newsletter. You shouldn't be on this list unless you subscribed. Thank you for using Google!
IN THIS ISSUE

1) Introduction
2) Google gets $$!
3) Changes with our results pages
4) Google government search
5) Google expansion
6) Want a job?
7) We love feedback

1) Introduction

This was an exciting month for us as we secured funding so that we can continue to improve Google in new and exciting ways. This month we issued our first press release which announced our financing of $25 million and introduced the new the members joining our board, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. We also came out with a specialized government search that searches just the .gov and .mil domains. We have also been busy growing the company in employees and computers. Our plans are to keep improving Google in every way possible!

2) Google gets $$

This month Google secured $25 million in venture funding and will add two prominent venture capitalists to its board: Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Google plans to use the funding to continue to further its search technology research and grow the company's human and computer resources.

You can read our press release and articles published about our funding on our website at: http://www.google.com/funding.html

The Red Herring reported the following on our funding and new board members: On Thursday morning, Google, a search-technology startup founded by two Stanford graduate students, announced it had secured $25 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, as well as a range of high-profile angel investors. While that number may seem staggering for a company's first round, what caused more jaws to drop was the company's newly named board members: yes, Mr. Doerr, but also Sequoia's Michael Moritz. The Red Herring article can be read found at: http://www.redherring.com/insider/1999/0603/vc-google.html

The Wall Street Journal also commented on the investment saying, "Even by Internet standards, Google has attracted an unusually large amount of money for a company still in its infancy."

In the Google press release, Michael Moritz, a new board member states "Google should become the gold standard for search on the Internet. Larry and Sergey's company has the power to turn Internet users everywhere into devoted and life-long Googlers."

We are thankful to all the current Googlers out there. We will use the funding to continue to improve Google and provide the best search results possible.

3) Changes with our results page

You may have noticed some changes in our results pages. We made some key changes that we think will make your search experience with Google even better. We no longer use the "phase match" or "partial phrase match" indicator since our users found this information to be redundant of the contextual, bolded search query results. We also eliminated the Page Rank percentage given since the red bar next to it shows the Page Rank graphically. (TIP: if you click on the red bar, you can see all the pages that link to the returned page).

4) Google government search

This month you probably noticed that we had our "Uncle Sam" search off of our home page (It's the next best thing to the CIA) that is now housed on the "more Google" page under the title of "special searches." This search covers all the .mil and .gov domains. So if you are looking for something published by the government, this is the best place to start.

5) Google expansion

Our capacity is still going up (thanks to you!), and we've been expanding to meet the demand. This month we've put in even more servers to ensure a faster user experience (we've started ordering our computers in 80 packs, up from our previous increment of 21 packs). We have also been working to make sure there the duplicates are removed from search results and we are working on some new features (sshhh!) that we hope will improve our users search experience.

We have also hired our first business development and marketing employees. If you want to do any "deals" with Google, please contact us at bizdev@google.com. If you have any marketing plans for your company that you would like to include Google in, please contact us at marketing@google.com.

6) Want a job?

Looking for a start-up adventure? Google is the leading designer of the next generation search engine. We are rapidly hiring talented people to bring the latest and greatest technology to the web. We have lots of openings. Check out our jobs page at http://www.google.com/jobs.html! Or send us a resume to jobs@google.com

Reasons to work for Google:
1. Hot technology
2. Cool technology
3. Intelligent, fun, talented, hardworking, high-energy teammates
4. Location, location, location! University Ave in downtown Palo Alto.
5. Excellent benefits
6. Stock options
7. Casual dress atmosphere
8. Free snacks and drinks
9. An exciting place to work! Your ideas can make a difference
10. Millions of people will use and appreciate your software

7) Feedback

We always love hearing from our users! Please let us know if you have comments or features that you would like to see at Google. We read every email and always do our best to respond as quickly as possible. You can reach us at: comments@google.com.

Thanks for using Google!

Sincerely,
Larry Page, CEO and co-founder
Sergey Brin, President and co-founder

Perverse Corroboration

Dave Liebman
As a 21 year old jazz trombonist, I enjoyed the support of a few jazz heavy-hitters. I was clearly no boy genius—nothing like that—but they assured me I was on the right track and expected good things, which is the most warmly effective sort of appraisal. Rather than inflate my ego, it made me redouble efforts to do my very best.

This was the age where one stops being a student and starts calling oneself a professional, but I attended one last polishing program for talented kids my age. Several went on to stardom. And a number of them really liked my playing.

I knew what I was doing, at least. I was coherent, assured, and could get from A to B in interesting ways. I'd done the work of acquiring fluency and control. Though, as with my writing, it wasn't quite like anything else. But I'd always figured that was the goal. A personal, original approach was exactly what my mentors had encouraged.

Saxophone star David Liebman started the first day's class by asking me to improvise. I played with swing, feeling, and lyricism. I told a story. And, when I was done, Liebman didn't look at me. He faced the class, like a surgeon standing beside an excised tumor, and asked, with unconcealed disgust, "Does anyone know what the fuck that was?!?" Even the students who liked my playing shrugged. Geez, Dave, no. We have no idea!

I was confident enough, thank heaven, not to be destroyed (I knew—though Liebman did not—that one of his own idols strongly supported my playing). But, man, was I angry. And I remain angry to this day, though it's not something I revisit often. How could a bona fide jazz veteran be so horrible to a kid?

Les Blank
Thirty years later, I had a chance to interview a guy in Connecticut who was renowned for his cookies. He wasn't a professional, just some guy, and said he'd show me his technique and I could film it with my iphone camera.

So I showed up, and he revealed that he's just using the plain old recipe from the Quaker Oats box, so it's really nothing special, yet he conceded that no one else ever comes close to matching his results. He showed me how carelessly he cooked, and how pedestrian his ingredients were. And when I tasted a cookie, I nearly lost consciousness.

I cobbled it all together into a short film that's a meditation on quality. How it gets in, how it's recognized, and whether there's any objectivity. All the interesting questions! It's very poorly shot, recorded, and edited. It's tediously repetitive, lacks any discernible structure, and never quite states its theme. And yet, it has magic to it.

One of my best friends at the time was the great film director Les Blank. I sent him a copy, and it made him so angry—just spitting mad—that he refused to discuss it.

I instantly realized that if it were legitimately bad, there'd be no anger. Professional filmmakers don't lose their tempers over crappy films. They just wince and move on. Les' rage showed that I'd accomplished something.

Why the rage? Who knows. Some byproduct of Les' tangled inner being (perhaps having spent his life refining skills to create magic, seeing even a bit of magic emanating from guileless incompetence felt infuriating). I didn't need to parse it. It was sufficient to recognize it for what it was: corroboration.

Linkage

But while by that point I'd acquired the insight to parse Les' reaction appropriately, I still carried anger over my Liebman encounter from years earlier, before I knew how to frame it correctly.

In fact it was only today that I put the two together. If my playing merely sucked, Liebman would have been more teacherly. He'd have dressed the wound, given me basics to work on, and sent me on my way with an exasperated eye roll. A jazz superstar only howls "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?" at an eager skinny 21 year old trombonist in summer camp shorts and tank top if that kid actually has something.

What's the thing? I can't venture a guess. So what set him off? Same. But, at this late date, I see I should have accepted it as corroboration. Not in the sense of twisted, trollish delight at getting under someone's skin and eliciting a reaction, any reaction. Just the level-headed realization that 1. I had something, and 2. It's neither necessary nor possible for everyone to dig every something.


Laboriously Updating Assumptions
But this posting is not about under-appreciation. Nor about celebrity insecurity, nor the chilling subterranean streams of human interaction. Rather, it's about my failure to tie this all together until an hour or so ago.

I try hard to sharpen my thinking and strip away kludge and bullshit. I work to apply lessons forward to future experiences and backward to recollected ones. I generate my share of insights, but must constantly relearn them...endlessly. As I noted while explaining Why My Cooking Isn't Great, it's devilishly hard to distribute insights evenly into all aspects of one's life.

You can't update assumptions and memories in light of freshly-acquired insight en masse. So I remain endlessly mystified by puzzles previously well-solved, and doomed to ceaselessly re-solve it all.

On the other hand, if you're ever bored in old age—no one invites you to dance parties anymore, and your crustily truculent friends can't be pryed out of their easy chairs to come see a movie or whatever, this might be the answer. Spend your time processing mental fodder with ever more lithe framing. Be like an earthworm, improving the soil by passing it through your corpus. I guess that's what old age was always supposed to be for. Perhaps this explains the elder "wisdom" people used to talk about way back when.


For extra credit, watch that movie, and consider how the discussion of quality - what it is and how it gets in - pervades this entire discussion. Creating quality is a sticky wicket, but appreciation is no less tortuous.


Followup: The Waif and the Limo

The Lord Protects the Simple

I've never been a fan of the view of God as some bearded dude on a cloud, getting all up into our everyday lives and doling out consequences according to some ridiculously lumpy formula.

As a young man, this skepticism led me to atheism. Then I meditated enough to recognize that this is a material world full of propositionally material “individuals,” and the whole thing is a caprice of—what else?—subjectivity. Subjectivity is so utterly what we are that we're hardly able to even consider it. In fact, we tend to drop to our knees and light incense whenever we get close. And from this framing, I found that an awful lot of God talk made sense—just so long as you don't need it to involve some bearded dude on a cloud.

But I still have a tick. Whenever I see someone bumbling along, oblivious to danger while doing life horrendously wrong—pushing a baby carriage behind my car as it backs up with reverse lights gleaming, or speeding through blind turns without watching—I peer at them closely and check to see if they're limping or missing teeth. And I estimate their age.

While any of us might slip and momentarily zone out, there are people who behave this way as an ingrained habit. And such people, I can report, walk the Earth uninjured for years. Decades, even. People with white beards, who long ago should have been culled from the gene pool, stride confidently into harm's way and emerge unscathed. And they're usually not limping.

I, the careful one, am the limper. Though I'm thoughtfully cautious and shrewdly strategic, my outcomes resemble those of hapless straight men in slapstick comedies.

I'm beginning to reconsider the notion of a God capriciously goosing the settings as part of His “mysterious” work. How else are we to understand these superhumans blazing from point A to point B without watching, thinking, or caring? Either some paternal sky figure insulates them (and definitely not you or me), or else they're not bumblers at all, but a higher form of life—as unknowable to the likes of us as a man is to an ant.

Either way, it's clearly some God shit.

Chuck Mangione

Chuck Mangione (RIP) was part of a long continuum of good or very good musicians who lost their chops and reinvented themselves as images of musicians...with enormous success.

The gambit works because the public is far more interested in image than in substance (e.g. musicianship). Dropping the "music" part, and focusing on the image part, can actually increase your value...tremendously.

The list includes some names most people—even most musicians—would find surprising. Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong were faint shadows of their younger selves by mid-career (and desperately seeking chop recuperation behind-the-scenes), but did far better as icons than they ever had as musicians. Consider the Rolling Stones and so many more, even aside from more widely-recognized image-pushers ala Kenny G, Herb Alpert, Chris Bodi, Liberace, etc.

Chuck was a serious bebop player when young. By the time any of you heard of him, he could barely play two notes in a row...and made a zillion dollars with the hat and the flower and the beard, playing kitsch ear worms.

Something to consider: I know a very good jazz guitar player who won top price in a Guitar Hero competition (that's a game where you pretend to be a guitar player), and it earned him more money than his entire previous career as a real guitarist.

---

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

Relocating Sanely

I posted this a couple of years ago to a forum for American expats in Portugal, where it went viral. This pleased me, because it induces a helpful shift of perspective, and I haven't met many Americans here who are even marginally sane. They're mostly starring in movies in their heads about their Marvelous Portuguese Adventure Where They're Living Happily Ever After And Isn't It—And Aren't They—Marvelous??? Once the ditzy mania wears off, they tend to quietly sell everything and slink back to Tampa or Cleveland.

Early on, I was lucky enough to settle into a framing which has worked beautifully, and puts me in a completely different world than any of my fellow expats: I've swapped in a better/cooler backdrop. That's all. Life continues as before, only sunnier and with better food and much nicer people and lower expenses. Same life, new backdrop. A modest change, in the end, but a very welcome one.

Every day, I go outside and enjoy the backdrop, and it never gets old. I don't have to mentally place myself in the picture ("It's me doing that thing!"). This isn't some exciting chapter in my Life Trajectory. It's still the same me living the same life, only now it smells like garlic and grilled fish and it's sunny. Nice!

If you ever do a move like this, this is how to frame it for optimal mental health.

---

I'd like to help immunize newer arrivals against a potential peril.

Once the initial giddiness subsides, and you've explored environs and chilled in the plaza and strolled by the ocean and consumed 45 plates of bacalhau a bras, you'll experience a lull. You'll feel oddly reluctant to seize the day. You'll want to lazily surf YouTube pet videos or whatever. You suddenly lack motivation to Celebrate Portugal.

And you'll recognize that Portugal's not going to celebrate you, either. It all just keeps rolling out there, obliviously. Yikes.

If you've been harboring grand cinematic views of your sweeping expatriation narrative (i.e. your "Forever Home" or whatever), you will feel gut-punched by this return-to-earth. This is just another place! You frantically re-list the benefits, but pastel de nata and fado, alas, do not fill all gaps. You're bored. You're small. You're stalled. What am I doing here? Was this a mistake?

There is an antidote to such moments; a reframing I'd suggest you keep handy:

How scintillating were your previous environs? Were you perpetually stimulated and delighted? No! That's not what home is like! And you're experiencing Portugal as home.

Home isn't scintillating. Vacations are scintillating. And vacations are not eternal. If this were a few weeks of visiting sunny Portugal, you could expect unflagging excitement. But home isn't always exciting. So at some point you need to step down (like a voltage converter) from tourist eagerness to everyday life-living. It's not deflation. It's not a stall. This is just what home is like.

And if the lull persists, remember you're a 30€ roundtrip flight from Milan. The greatest tapas on the planet are a four hour drive. Such diversity at your fingertips! Living in Akron or Seattle, you'd need to go to vast trouble and expense to change your channel. So don't forget to take vacations - once being in Portugal stops feeling like a vacation of its own. Which it will!

---

I didn't include this in my posting, but if you have no life - if you've been nothing aside from your job and/or your relationships and you haven't cultivated a sense of self beneath the facade and beyond the roleplay—then don't move to a place like this. Unless, that is, you have the social wherewithal to re-contruct or transpose the facade, or create a new one. A new locale will not supply you with a story for yourself (at least not one that endures for more than a few months). A place is just a place.

Me, I don't need a story to tell myself about myself. I'm not doing roleplay or starring in a movie. But apparently that's rare. 🤷🏻

Wade Vestal

I was hovering between sleep and waking, when a name flashed into my mind: Wade Vestal.

"Like the virgins!" explained the voice of Wade, fully of oily glee.

I sensed it would be hard to get back to sleep with this damn name flashing in my mind's eye like a neon sign. It demanded attention and investigation.

I sensed that I wouldn't get anywhere googling 'Wade Vestal' (like the virgins!) but it enticed me just enough to force me awake. Also, I needed to pee (coffee is not the engine of human action; peeing is. Coffee comes from Colombia, while peeing comes from God).

So I attend to my business and then reluctantly google 'Wade Vestal', finding that there is one single person on earth by that name. And he has an Instagram account!

I click into Instagram and, atop his profile I see the slogan "Don’t give up on your dreams, keep sleeping."

Cashing Out

Most experts I listen to say the stock market is overheated. Plus, there's enormous chaos in the US and in the world. That said, the worst mistake an investor can make is to try to time markets - e.g. sell twitchily out of suspicions and intuitions. Here's the main thinking:

1. Your intuition probably isn't better than the billionaires who set the prices with their own moves. And you don't just need to be "right", you also need to beat them. Good luck!

2. You'll never time it just right, so you'll lose upside (if the market keeps climbing after you sell) or suffer downside (if the market dips before you sell)

3. The long term economic trend has always been upward, but you need to be "in it to win it". If you keep nervously jumping off the train—hoping to reboard at just the right moment—you will almost surely wind up short.

But there are exceptions to every rule. My health is poor enough that I doubt I face many more market cycles. And I don't see myself taking fancy vacations or buying sports cars into my 70s and 80s (I'm not even doing that now!). As I wrote last month, Spending Is Non-Linear (with age)

Shiny things begin to lose their luster, and savings become propositional. Abstract. While your bank balance might once have conjured fantasies of blowing it all on speed boats or vacations in Aruba or weekend cabins, at the point where you notice your transformation into a bag of broken sticks, those fantasies become more remote. They never quite die, but it's like watching kids playing hopscotch. Regardless of any nostalgic impulses, it feels viscerally not-for-you.

So here's the counterintuitive observation: when you're doing financial planning, realize that spending won't be linear. You will absolutely want clean clothes and healthy food and a roof over your head when you're 85, but there will be vastly less interest in gadgets and vacations and fine copper cookware. Some stay "vibrant" longer, but they're edge cases, and it's largely genetic. Look to your parents and aunts and uncles to augur your likely time frame. Mine were decrepit and foggy by 70.

So: spending is non-linear. And I'm therefore letting myself spend more, to enjoy a last hurrah. But I'm a bit late. It already feels tinny. A bit "not-for-me". By the time I'm 70 (perhaps sooner), the door will be closed. And my point is that you should budget for this. Maybe have more fun in your 50s (adjusting all these numbers to fit your family's decrepitude pattern, plus your own health situation).

So, all in all, this is a good moment for me to cash in my chips. A high point to freeze-frame, sharply reducing potential risk.

Easier said than done! First, one must consider inflation, the primary concern in any fixed income situation. But living in a country with a modest economy means extremely low expenses, even though I'm heedless about signing up for streaming channels, enjoying tons of restaurant meals (they average €15 here!), and staying atop gadget upgrade cycles. My Apple and Siga investments did well, and a few others hit, too, so, given that 70 year-old me won't be splurging on champagne and fancy watches, I can ride out low to moderate inflation via belt tightening (e.g. save circa €100/month by cancelling streaming channels!). I will, however, hedge against severe inflation (see below).

As I write this, I realize I probably described a unicorn. "Investing success" + "very low spending" is surely a rare combination (though I'm no miser; I just had a bunch of matcha sent in from Japan!). So this regimen isn't for everyone—hell, it might not even turn out to be right for me!—but perhaps you'll find some chunk of it useful. Here's how I'm proceeding:

SWVXX—Schwab's Prime Money Market 25% of assets
Money market from Schwab. Strong yield, great liquidity.

Certificates of Deposits 30% of assets
FDIC protection, unlike the money market account. I will "ladder" them so they overlap, yielding cascading redemptions for purposes of liquidity and the chance to capture higher rates if they arise.

SCHP—Schwab's U.S. TIPS ETF 10% of assets
Treasury bonds. I'm paying a negligible fee for professional management and full liquidity rather than holding TIPS directly. Normally, this would occupy a much higher percentage in my mix, but political instability leaves me cautious about placing too much faith in US government credit. So I'm going easy on them. Also: I can tap into this pool for emergencies if needed.

FLOT—iShares' Floating Rate Bond ETF 5% of assets
This hedges rising rates, balancing my TIPS.

PIRMX—PIMCO's Inflation Response Multi-Asset Fund 15% of assets
My one (possibly) clever move. This is an expensive (steep 1.95% net expense ratio) but deeply tactical mutual fund. They do terribly smart and complicated things to hedge against inflation. This is not my airtight defense against any/all inflation, it's my catastrophic insurance policy in case of severe inflation, hopefully staving off the worst-case prospect of grubbing around for bugs and berries. Do not touch, ever!

Speculative Moonshot Stocks (biotechs and such)
Currently 15% of my assets. I'll gradually reduce it to 10%. These hedge against both inflation and market decline, because, if any hit, they'll hit hard regardless. They will also help keep things lively. If I'm going to have the portfolio of a decrepit old man, at least I'll also hold some lottery tickets.

What Do Humans Do All Day: A Taxonomy of Posing

A loose collection of notes gathered in the hope of achieving a broader view.

Personality Cloning
From my posting "Highly Imitative Aliens":

There are a few dozen clone lines in any society, no more. People are types, which is adaptive behavior because it lubricates social interaction. When you meet a brassy lady with a gravelly voice and energetic good humor, you feel that you know that person. Love her or hate her, you can deal with her comfortably due to long experience with her clone line. Same for the aloofly ponderous academic. Or the BAD BOY. No one's born as these things. The personas are adopted via modeling, these days mostly via movie and TV actors. In the old days, one modeled the persona of a family member or another local "role models" (turn that phrase around in your mind for a moment!).

We really commit to the role. People never feel more expressively uniquely themselves than when they're being most flagrantly clone-ish. That's how the millions driving VW bugs or listening to "indie rock" manage to feel fiercely nonconformist. "I'm a free-thinking type! One of those!"

Skinner Boxes
From my posting "A Tale of Two Chickens":

A Skinner Box is any setup rewarding "good" behavior and punishing "bad" behavior. If you imagine that humans have transcended the animal kingdom, start looking for Skinner Boxes in the animal world (e.g. reproduction = good = reward; not sleeping/eating/drinking = bad = punishment), and you'll find that every damned one of them not only engages humans but absolutely captivates us. The shitty reward pellets are THE GREATEST THING EVER ("Go Cubs!!!").

Whenever we find ourselves in Skinner Boxes - as we do a zillion times per day - we instinctively strive for the cookie, and avoid the electric shock. We're no fools. We know how the game's played.

From "Exiting the Skinner Box"

If you pay close attention, you'll notice the reward is always chintzy (which explains why humans are "never satisfied") and the punishment is always oversold (which is why the worrying is always worse than the actuality).

The chicken, trained to endlessly hit the button which rewards with a corn pellet (and not the one which punishes via mild shock), thinks it's just killin' it.

Pattern Matching
Humans treat other humans like ornithologists treat birds. We glance at coloring, and at wings and beaks, and feel like we know. This, of course, is category error. Humans are not birds. Though our plumage might indeed communicate something, it's certainly never the last word. But we curate internal spreadsheets full of snap judgements—"this means that"— based on superficial parameters. Also: based on abstractions—if you're wealthy or smiley or Moslem, it means that.

Pattern matching isn't just a sloppy first pass. It most often "sticks". Shockingly scant attention is paid to the individuality of individuals, or even acknowledgement that such consideration is warranted. Few notice the gap.

Pattern matching doesn't just inform our reality; it establishes it. So when someone fails to epitomize their apparent characteristics, they’re blamed. "Why are you not matching your pattern?"

From my posting Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You:

Whenever I meet someone new who recognizes "Chowhound" if it comes up in discussion, I always get the same disbelieving reaction:

Huh? Hold on. That was you? YOU?!?

At this point, I stop the conversation and beg the bewildered, skeptical person to explain what, exactly, they expected. It's not that I'm being defensive or confrontational. It's that I genuinely don't know how a Jim Leff is supposed to look or act! No one ever taught me how to act like someone like me!
...
I never receive a satisfactory answer. It's not that they expected me to travel with a security team, or to address them with smug condescension. They don't have any particular image in mind. Just certainly not that.

Tripwires
This is pattern matching with alarms set. Certain words and ideas trigger tripwires. Anyone using any such language becomes, first and foremost, A Speaker Of Those Words, with utter disregard for their intention, context, or track record. The pattern is matched, the bell rings, and they suddenly disappear into a category.

From my posting "Sticks & Stones":

As a professional writer, I have a shrinking palette of expressible thoughts and a growing pile of taboo words and phrases (which can't even be used to express "nice" things, because everyone's blindly pattern-matching so they can point-and-shriek at deviants).
...
Thirty years of socially electrocuting anyone saying "nigger" in any context and with any intent has not tamped down actual racism one iota. It's a failed experiment.

Face-In-Hole Board
Few can resist a snapshot with their face appearing within a hole in a board painted to assume the persona of a super hero, medieval knight, etc. "Hey, look! I'm a farmer! It's me doing that thing!"

"It's me doing that thing!" is what the world is about. That's the core presumption, distilled to its essence.

And it baffles me, because I've never felt the impulse to grab such a snapshot, even while actually doing the thing. I'm not a seemer. My satisfaction comes from doing things, not from seeming like a thing-doer.

Most legit body builders, despite their physiques, are still skinny kids at heart, still sticking their heads into face holes and shouting "Hey, look!" Most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

N.B.: Astoundingly, we view Impostor Syndrome as a malady. To me, it seems like the gateway to sanity. A glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel vision. A softly buzzing bedside alarm clock.

Rich People's Problems
I don't have to explain this one. We all know what it is.

And that amazes me. Why is it so easily grokked? You'd expect people, lost in self-dramatization, to ask "What do you mean?" and to deny they'd ever do any such thing. But our clear recognition of this—and our willingness to sheepishly confess our tendencies—suggests that, at some level, we always knew how performative this all was.

The only thing we miss is that virtually all our problems are "Rich People's Problems". If you ask a modern First Worlder what their great-grandfather might make of any given dilemma or disappointment, it's hard to imagine any response but an amused chortle.

---

So what do humans do all day? The above. Mostly that stuff. And, sure, they all bleed into each other. These are just some of the most prominent buckets.

One commonality: all involve poses. But the term "pose" is far too thin to stretch across such vast terrain. For fish, "swimming" is not some distinct activity.

Posing—in all these ways and more—isn't something we do. It's all we do, virtually all the time. We have some distant notion of what it might mean to Be Real, but it quickly turns glorious. The prospect of not-being-completely-full-of-shit compels us into a reverent hush—a brush with God-fearing mystery. I once noted that the term “soul” was invented by poseurs to identify the mysterious and unobservable part that’s not posing.

If we direct attention to the relentless posing, we might eke out a sliver of distance. And once we realize how we pose, and how much we pose, posing becomes something we watch ourselves do. The observer coolly steps back, and perspective arises. The birth of wisdom? Nah, just dropping character. A subtraction, not a power-up.

In time, you identify more with the watcher than with the (hilariously flimsy) contrivance. This reframing is the gateway to a higher perspective that is delightfully bulletproof. But the final key is to behold a world of posing poseurs without superiority, or adolescent sneering. Both, after all, are just more posing. Best of all is a blithe shrug and some bemused participation. Hopefully less frantic.

In "Why God Lets Bad Things Happen", I wrote that "The solution is to wear it all much more lightly, and to remember that the rollercoasters are merely rides (we waited on line!), not oppressors."

Well-Meaning Guys Under Siege

Chowhound was racking up $300/month in data transference surcharges, and I didn't have it. Our massive popularity was straining the rented server, and we were forced to pay for it.

I needed to devise some profit streams, and fast, so I supervised design and execution of a line of t-shirts and tchotchkes such as the Chowhound Passport—sliding cards reading "Give me the real stuff, not the tourist stuff" in eight languages to show one's waiter. Plus a bundle of newsletters which I'd edit and distribute in my spare time.

A thousand passports arrived, to my surprise, unassembled. They needed to be laboriously folded and glued. I threw a party for some friends to help assemble them. In an ideal world, I'd have plied them with great food and drink, but all I could swing was beer and chips. Anyway, we assembled just 100. Not nearly enough.

One attendee sighed and volunteered to tackle the rest as a Zen exercise in gracious patience. A week later, she handed me back 900 passports, ready to go. And of course I thanked her, but not, like, a LOT. And I didn't subsequently include her in my life—because even my best friends weren't included in my life, which was crammed full of seven full time unpaid jobs (while desperately trying to make rent on the side). It was clearly non-viable, but I didn't want to disappoint a million nice people by shutting down that monstrous albatross of a website.

I sold the operation a few years later, and, a year after that, the corporate machinery spat me out like a lead slug, and then there was recuperation and then various ingenious and heartfelt ventures which all drew vacant stares. Decades were passing. I'd tried reconnecting with old friends, but they'd all moved on. A few were jealous, most just indifferent. And I never reapproached this person. So much time had gone by.

Relatable, right? If so, it's only because I've convincingly shared the framing of a well-meaning guy under siege. But imagine the perspective of that other person.

I've written all this to share one single nugget of insight you might want to bear in mind: Well-meaning guys under siege can look like assholes.


"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."

Proof of Concept

If you've been reading this Slog for some time, and want to check whether it's benefited you in any tangible way, watch this 2 minute Instagram video of Ezra Klein explaining something that lots of people find surprising and mysterious. A new way of parsing people's inner workings.

Maybe it won't feel quite so shocking and mysterious for you. See if you have a slightly shrewder understanding of the basis for this than your average Joe.

Analogies are Lost Technology

We can’t make analogies anymore. They are essentially "Lost Technology"—familiar to our ancestors but now mysterious to us.

The problem is, everyone expects them to work sideways.

Example:

Person A: “Telling me (considering my weirdly loud voice) that I need to “speak up” is like telling Michael Jordan he needs to practice his layups!”

Person B: “So you’re comparing yourself to Michael Jordan, huh?”

Try using an analogy, and some shithead will tilt it sideways and smugly declare rhetorical victory. An onlooker might vaguely frown, sensing something's off but unable to say what. That lingering doubt is all that's left.

In the 17th century, uneducated peasants eagerly digested Shakespeare’s fancy, subtle wordplay. In 2025, analogy seems like a shiny semantic monolith that mostly just spooks the apes.

---

I once noted that we also can't make reasonable generalizations if they might rub a single reader the wrong way. For example, you can't get away with this now:

Tall people tend to dislike small cars.

There is 100% certainty someone will angrily lash back:

I'm tall, and I'm perfectly fine with small cars!

Hedging terms don't help at all, e.g. "Deaf people often wear hearing aids," or "Many children enjoy spaghetti."

Restaurant Chairs and the Secret of Human Existence

Sheer speculation based on knowledge of human nature: What percentage of restaurateurs would you suppose actually try sitting in the chairs they buy for their restaurant? Let's leave out the 15% top-end fanciest ones who are well-trained to consider comfort.

I'd guess 25%. (ChatGPT, which makes a great sounding board if you don't lead it with your own guess, guessed 35%)

And how much more future success would you imagine that fraction will have with their restaurants? I guessed "considerable". (Without leading the chatbot, it guessed the same.)

The observation sheds light on foundational truths behind some unexplained phenomena.

"Grandma's chicken soup is soulful because she cooked it with love" is a nice plummy saying for a wall hanging. But let's say it straight: Grandma doesn’t utilize accepted procedures with approved ingredients to meet soup adequacy thresholds. No, grandma gives an actual fuck.

And not just as some abstract principle, but she maintains that framing. The soup eater matters, so every onion is cut, and every stir is executed, with an unshakeable connection to the eater. "People I care about will sit in this chair. I (viscerally!) want them (need them!) to feel a certain way. So I keep asking: how will it seem for them?"

It’s not florid love. It’s simple empathy.

Why are some things so viscerally good? Why do wholes occasionally exceed the sum of their parts? And when they do, why can't the result be replicated by following a formula or recipe? Rote formula-followers get dull results because it's never, ever, about how it all seems for the other person.

This explains one of the most mysterious chunks of the human experience. And, practically speaking, it's a framing that works beautifully as an all-purpose tool for doing life: GIVE A CRAP. DON'T TREAT EVERYTHING/ANYTHING AS A DRY ABSTRACTION. DRINK YOUR OWN LEMONADE. CONSIDER THE OTHER GUY'S EXPERIENCE AND FRAMING.

And don't make it theater, where you stoke an image as Mr. Thoughtful who cares so very deeply. Don't be a silly peacock. Just actually do it.

Simply flip your framing, and hold there: "How will it all seem for THEM?" That's the ballgame. You won't just be ensuring good results; you'll make yourself a stoker of magic—a vastly better proposition than working blindly to spec like an insentient robot.


If your situational awareness sucks—if you can't even register the existence of The Other, much less inhabit their perspective—don't open a restaurant. In fact, don't do anything. Just go away.