The "Golden Rule" is Loftily Unattainable!

This is a rather unsophisticated observation, but it took me the better part of a century to fully grok the obvious truth. As it's gradually revealed itself over the years, I've remarked, again and again, "I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was this bad!" and, hallelujah, I've finally touched bottom. I see precisely how bad it is.

Here's your final assessment, humanity, with thanks for the lasagna.

People who behave badly usually don't know they've behaved badly and hadn't intended to. In fact, they'd be surprised to hear it—though they wouldn't believe it, and would react (unsurprisingly) badly.

There is a fundamental narcissistic skew whose severity is far worse than suspected. We only miss it because we're too narcissistic to register how extremely narcissistic everyone is. That plus the suspension of social disbelief prevents us from paying attention to social bedrock we were never supposed to examine. It's "behind the curtain" stuff, however absurdly ill-concealed.

People treat others in ways they'd bitterly complain about if they were on the receiving end. But it's not because they're inconsiderate shitheads. Well—wait, they absolutely are inconsiderate shitheads, but my point is that they're not trying to be inconsiderate shitheads. It's that they feel distinctive, so there's no reason to link or contrast outbound and inbound treatment. The two are unrelated, because they're THEM, while you're just you.

And—this part is critical, and also the sole consolation—that's not a judgment or a deliberate insult. It does not reflect on you. Rather, it's based on an intrinsic skew. They're as unaware of it as a fish is of water, or a polar bear of the cold. They truly don't know.

When the Bible suggested doing to others as you would have them do to you, it turns out this wasn't a helpful reminder. I always figured it was like "Sit up straight" or "Eat more vegetables"—a sappy homily people sometimes need reinforced, despite its blatant obviousness.

No. I see now that it was flabbergasting existential judo—a Copernican flip of perspective. And it was received as a lofty principle which, like other forms of godliness, could only be aspired to, and never put into actual practice.

This explains why a sappy 1960s self-help book proposing a mild step further ("I'm OK – You're OK) was even more paradigm-flipping and gasp-inducing, and became a giant best-seller, though it struck me, even as a small child, as ludicrously banal.

No. That was the heavy advanced shit.


Here's a useful re-framing: You can normally walk down the street without being clubbed over the head and robbed or raped. Things are vastly better than in pre-civilization days, and we're incomparably more considerate and empathic than the animal kingdom we recently crawled out of. So just adjust your expectations and it will all be fine.

Shrunken World Scenario

I was in the hospital for scary heart stuff. It would be easily fixed with a stent, and I'd be cleared for exertions galore, though I didn't know it at the time. But I was cheerful. I'm a wave-rider. Tell me my limits, and I'll contrive a way to solve problems—and have fun!—within those limits.

There are always limits!

I will never be a point guard for the NY Knicks. I could be compelled to frown about that suspended dream if I were to focus on it. And I could descend into bitter basketball drama if I held it close day after day while making toast and tying shoelaces. In fact, that's what most people do. They obsess over limitations, suspended dreams, and suboptimalities.

People live in a world of What Isn't, and I, too, indulged in that self-torture until one night I caught myself flipping between the wonderful time I was actually having and a contrived notion of what could have been happening and should have been happening. It stunned me to watch myself struggling to determine the appropriate framing. As if there were a real quandary.

After that revelation, I found it surprisingly easy to opt out of What Isn't. And when the only game in town is to play the cards you're dealt, life improves tremendously. But that's not what this posting is about.

Back in the hospital, I waited to learn which hand I'd been dealt. Chipper in the cardiac ward, there was only a single fly in my ointment: The God Damned Charging Cord.

In that moment, my life revolved around my iPad, because it was literally all I had. Aside from one friendly nurse, there was little for me to curiously probe or engage with—certainly no eateries to explore—outside my bed, where I was firmly stuck. And in that twin-sized world were precisely two things:

1. My iPad (for entertainment, information, communication, cardiac tutorials, and fun games).

2. A body with an alien monster grumbling in its chesty regions.

Re: #2, I wasn't about to meditate, or mess with my breathing, or anything like that, because I was essentially covered with police tape. This body of mine was not cleared for tampering.

So my universe was the iPad, and The God Damned Charging Cord would not reach the outlet. So I needed to periodically charge it while it was poised on a ledge, and this required leaning over hard with an IV drip pulling at my opposite arm as it delivered the nitroglycerin keeping me (not to be melodramatic) alive. Plus, I needed to acrobatically bend over and around, as an unfamiliar internal voice, with the hesitance of an entity unaccustomed to speaking up, cleared its throat and politely questioned my life choices:

"Hey, uh, are you sure this is a good idea, bud?"

It took a few paragraphs, but hopefully I've persuaded you that, deep in the cardiac ward, I was plagued by one single legit problem. It was a "mere" charging cord, but its significance, both for peril and for deliverance, was gigantic.

Aside from that, I was ready for test results, and for a plastic squib to be pushed through my circulatory system to lodge open a critical artery. In fact, I was so amiably game that the head nurse (not the nice one) sent a social worker to attempt to ease the oblivious slob into accepting the gravity of his situation. If she had been aware of how The God Damned Charging Cord was oppressing me, she'd have had me sent straight to the psych ward.

---

A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm immensely adaptable about big things yet oddly petty about small things. Pondering this, I've decided it's about life scale. If your life is big—you're busy, or dreamy, or have lots of pots on the stove and irons in the fire—you live in a vastly different universe than if your life is more lifesized. A sufficiently small life can revolve entirely around The God Damned Charging Cord, however odd that might seem to a harried cardiac nurse, or to a reader unprepared by paragraphs of psychological self-explanation.

Since I don't occupy myself with what's not happening, or make myself miserable over contingencies, my life gets extremely small. Drama is for larger livers. Most of us swell with vexations, resentments, fears, and thirsts. These "big canvas" tools stretch life fabric to distant horizons, framing out expansive MacMansions of Hell, well-stocked with construction materials for more additions.

In the hospital, I stuck out among hordes of teary, petrified patients beset by emotional turbulence, but this represented the opposite of superiority. They were the ones with great big lives, undergoing monumental events, accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra, while I was left in the dust, plotting my ratty little tactics re: The God Damned Charging Cord which—in the absence of heroic derring-do and epic tragedy—represented my entire pathetic little universe.

Everlasting gratitude for my friend Dave who brought a longer cord on day two. After that, all was well. The stent's been fine, too. Heart stuff is not what you think it is.

Let's call it the Shrunken World Scenario. For one thing, it explains why small children get hysterical over lost balloons. Kids have fabulous imaginations, but they don't use them to contrive grand grown-up predicaments. In their small worlds, a balloon looms large. So they are not wrong to mourn it.

The Shrunken World Scenario also explains the elderly propensity for staring placidly into space. It's not always a matter of frailty or dementia. They've seen through fake drama, ceased obsessing over "what's missing," and begun wave-riding. Those internal processes reduce external engagement and shrink lives. We don't send a social worker when grandpa keeps his powder dry amid adversity, because it's normal behavior at that age. Yet despite the overarching equanimity, old people can be notoriously petty. I’ve explained why. Within small lives, a tablecloth stain or leaky faucet looms awfully large.

---

When I moved to Portugal, I discovered that the old friends I'd arranged to temporarily stay with were vicious late-stage alcoholics. I endured this (and other chaos) while living out of a small suitcase as my possessions slowly drifted toward me via the world's slowest container ship. For some mysterious reason, I'd brought along, as my sole discretionary object, my favorite baseball card of my favorite player (Tom Seaver, 1970), and as I spent countless hours sitting in my parked car seeking refuge from the madness, Seaver's confident countenance stared encouragingly from the dashboard. Within the minuscule universe of that car cabin, the petty token had real power.

---

From 1997 to 2005, I endured a very different sort of trouble. Big Life trouble, running an enormous web community without revenue or seed money or tech help or really anything aside from my wits and adrenal glands. Eventually, moderators volunteered, thank God, but by then I was working eight full-time jobs, unpaid, for the endeavor, with more pots on the stove and irons in the fire than any human being should endure.

In that predicament, no dumb charging cord could bother me, and no lousy baseball card could help.

Two Articles Way Too Essential to Recommend

Two pieces of writing I normally wouldn't recommend because they're so obvious:

Gay Talese's Esquire profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (with a memorable guest appearance by sci-fi author Harlan Ellison) is widely considered, especially among writers, to be the greatest magazine article ever.

Neil Stephenson's Mother Earth Board, explaining the history and technology of underseas cables, is - all 130 pages of it - widely considered a masterpiece of long-form magazine writing.

Some follow-ups to that Stephenson piece: this week, Meta announced "Project Waterworth", a global subsea cable project spanning 50,000 kilometers). And here's a fancy NY Times thingee about How the Internet Travels Across Oceans.

Finally, here's Kevin Kelly's 2010 list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever . I stumbled upon it while editing this posting, and found that it links to the Talese and Stephenson articles, because both are, again, too obvious to recommend.

I'd Be Happy to Answer Any Questions

I know I've said this before, but if you actually watch for it, you'll be astounded at how true this is...

Wait one second. Before proceeding, here's the all-time best example of something seldom-noticed which proves staggeringly true if you watch for it: the more egregiously another car cuts you off, the sooner it will brake to make another turn.

There are two sorts of people: people who are happy to answer questions, and people who are not happy to answer questions. People who are happy to answer questions never invite questions. It wouldn't occur to them. They just happily answer, ad infinitum. Of course you can ask questions! As opposed to what, "don't you dare ask me a question"??

So people who flamboyantly invite questions will tolerate one, possibly two, easy questions. The sort of questions that are already in the FAQ. If you ask hard questions, or more than a couple, or if you follow up, you'll summon the beast (most often in the form of glaring silence). Watch for it!

Obviously, I don't mean someone giving a public talk or hosting a radio call-in show who invites audience members to the microphone. In those scenarios, they're stuck. They must answer questions. It's a particularly obscure reason for people's fear of public speaking!

A gum dentist ("gummodentologist" is, I believe, the proper term) performed a gum graft and gave me his cell number in case of problems. He'd never mentioned how damned much it would hurt, due to 1. marketing considerations (i.e. he really wanted me to actually show up and pay), and 2. the fact that he'd performed these procedures for decades, so only a damned idiot wouldn't know this fact which is so obvious to him.

So I called his cell on a Saturday to tell him it hurt. He feigned concern, asking if any teeth had fallen out, or if blood was gushing, or if I was unable to remember my name. Any limbs fallen off? Gerbil flocks? No? Well, then fine, he'll get back to his picnic now with his family. The next day it hurt way more. Not just soreness; more like an army of demons stabbing me in the mouth. I called again, and he hustled me off the phone with minimal courtesy, and when I showed up for my follow-up the office fell silent. Here's that fricking guy who called Dr. Hsznftzmm's cell on a weekend...twice.

Note that this story contained an example of Expert/Layman Triage Fallacy

The Fish

The fish arrives at your table. It's beautifully, perfectly broiled. You beam brightly and tell the chef (who's missing a couple of teeth and whose eyes don't focus real good) that he's a genius. And because his customers view perfect fish as their entitlement, he's never been complimented in his life, so the acknowledgement means something.

But you take a bite, and it's a tiny bit dry. Just the tiniest bit, but it can't be denied: he over-did it. Slightly. Still delicious! Still within parameters! But he's no...no...

Your thought stream stalls. The sentence won't complete.

Are you averse to admitting your error? Would it scrape your ego to retract the mental assessment?

Or are you loathe to puncture your glowy sensation of virtue? Too self-satisfied from the dramatic vignette?

None of those things. The fish is dry, and he is a genius, and he'll nail it next time.

You go back another day, and he nails it.


Was I right the first time? Or did I make it happen with my beaming encouragement? Or did the flow work itself out while I simply waited? Or did I frame truth by my choice of start and end points?

The Moment Before

Now—the present moment—is terra incognita.

There’s nothing so "out there" about this observation. It’s scarcely some hippy proposition. We live in a world striving to be mindful; to be here now, even though that’s where we inexorably are the whole time. People with a keen sense of presence—on their toes and responsively ready to go—seem to possess a super-power, and also a dysfunction (Why so jumpy? Why so intense?).

As someone with that power/dysfunction, my fascination has shifted to the previous moment. We all time travel incessantly, but hardly anyone considers the previous moment, though its clearly visible receding face—the splash point of the Present’s ripples—should give it special status in our regard.

I'll bring this down to Earth with a solidly relatable example. Every time we're sick, there’s a moment where we announce it to ourselves. Were we perfectly fine a millisecond prior? Of course not. We were sick without consciously saying so. We knew, but without statement. And that’s interesting! Not for some exploration of (cue spooky music) THE UNCONSCIOUS, but for pragmatically understanding what this all is and how it all works.

Every conclusion, realization, thought, or action is the product of a Previous Moment. In the case of sudden lightning bolts—of Epiphanies, Eurekas, or Inspirations—the previous moment was occupied by a shift of perspective, fostering the bolt. If we were, in that moment, blandly unknowing, then what prompted the shift? We knew! We shifted because it tugged us because we knew, in a deeper, more visceral way of knowing. A moment full of juicy goodness.

But hold on. What about the moment before that Previous Moment? In that Penultimate Moment, before the shift preceding the bolt producing the epiphany, there was the making of the decision to shift. Even more profound! This Penultimate Moment might be the juiciest of all!

And if so, are we not compelled to consider the magical moment preceding that Penultimate Moment? The one where we chose to decide to shift?

Etc.

Europe, Step Up!

Europe, step up!

The era of smug complacency under Uncle Sam’s beneficence - of channeling governmental energies into nannyism and stale pettiness - is over and you must repel a third falling shadow.

This one’s weak and exhausted. Putin’s Russia enjoys no frenzied dark Utopianism; no inexorable thrust of momentum. On its last leg, it would steal a cheap Hail Mary delivered, inevitably, by its orange stooge.

The ball is teed up, the meat well-tenderized, the tyrants elderly and deluded. World War III will be a slam dunk, a brief ugly anachronism, if you can summon the will.

Europe, step up!

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.