The Seminal Facebook Post

The seminal Facebook posting follows. I posted it in reply to comments after my latest attempt to offer a sharp point drew, as always, nothing but slobberingly distant bla-bla-bla from my distressingly intelligent and savvy social media circle.  

I do realize that many people use Facebook by seizing upon a single charged term and unloading their general policy position on that term, regardless of the point being made in the posting. Sort of like kids gathered around a campfire and riffing on a theme like “storms” or “ghosts”.

I don’t mind that people do this, though I do mind greatly that because this is all people do now, they are increasingly unable to engage in on-point discussion of anything anywhere ever. I just find it surprising that someone would judge my feed just another place to plaster their random, keyword-triggered thoughts, when I take obvious pains to buck the trend and be thoughtful and specific, offering interesting thoughts deserving focused consideration and discussion rather than a campfire bullshit session of ghost stories and shit-that’s-been-preoccupying-you. 

I literally can’t remember the last time anyone took a point head-on, rather than sloppily and indulgently releasing their random iddy issues. Y’all couldn’t pass a Turing Test. 

So I’m not going to frame this as a warning or anything, but this might be a bit like musical chairs, because at some point I’m gonna blow my top, and the last person to be caught out might feel excoriated. This is not that, btw. This is me being cordial. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Reframing Pain

For younger people, pain is usually sudden and galvanizing. Your body is supposed to "just work", so pain is aberrational. A danger sign. But, being young, you heal fast and the pain goes away. So pain is rarely a big deal, yet always feels like one.

Around late middle age, your body begins to carry a rich palette—a portfolio, if you will—of pains, like a bunch of progress thermometers. Doctors and physical therapists do not find this aberrational, so they're usually trying to help with pain management rather than elimination. And when I was explained this in younger days, it terrified me, because I figured old age was a hell of non-stop galvanizing pain.

It's not, though. It's something you can mostly just reframe.

Two questions are always front-of-mind: 1. Is something horribly wrong? and 2. Will this pain keep getting worse?

Neither is unknown to youngsters, but age makes you more more prone to serious conditions, leaving you skittish about scary diagnoses and downward trajectories.

However, the moment you understand what’s paining you—how it behaves, what to expect, and assurance it won't climb to infinity—even substantial pain becomes easier to bear. Young people don't often have chronic pain. It sounds ghastly, but only if you're imagining galvanizing pain that never goes away.

When you reach the age where pain becomes informational rather than existential, it becomes viable to carry a pain portfolio without suffering much if you understand the situation, and know the upper limit, and have some fixes (however partial) close at hand.

For example, I have a sensitive tooth occasionally delivering toothache-level pain with no possible fix (my dentist generously offers root canal it if it gets unbearable, which is not an enticing prospect). But it's not jaw cancer, and I know the pain curve, and I have three creams, one of which usually fades it into the cosmic background pain radiation. Interestingly, I rarely find myself applying the cream, even when it hurts. My knowledge and self-stewardship make it so bearable that I don't usually need to do the thing. I know the bout will be short-lived, intensity-capped, and medicable. And that's usually enough. It's essentially sandboxed.

I know it's hard to understand. 20 or 40 year old me would have been bewildered by this explanation. But my point is this: while old age does indeed mean soreness and pain, it's not the galvanizing pain you feared while young. It's informational, not existential.

At least, for the most part. But when some fresh hell ignites, I scramble not for solution so much as understanding, collecting countermeasures and support to trim the crisis to a more realistic size for pragmatic management—at which point that management might become strictly optional.

Robert Mueller

Given the MAGA movement's insistence that Mueller's report exonerated Trump, why is he not being commemorated by them as a hero?

Why would they hate him so bitterly for exonerating their guy?

The Ideal Framing for Aging

I've struck upon the ideal framing for aging:

Try to squeeze all the toothpaste out of the tube.

That's it. Don't complicate further. Just that.


All postings on aging, in reverse-chronological order

Backing Up to Proceed

Many of the deepest and most persistent mysteries of the human world resolve with baffling ease if you simply back up an inch before proceeding.

• The term “soul” was invented by poseurs to identify the mysterious and unobservable part that’s not posing.
  
  
• Tai chi is the practice of embodying the natural flow one normally pretends not to be a part of.
  
  
• Spirituality is the process of learning to recognize and identify with the immutable subjectivity you are, rather than with the ever-changing persona you've been pretending (merely for kicks, at first) to portray.

• Here's why a loving, munificent god lets kids get cancer, and all the rest of the horrors: It's because we want it that way.

Misgivings

I had misgivings about posting yesterday's essay about sharpening comprehension and intuition via winnowing.

An epidemic has arisen out of isolation and narcissism stoked via the unholy trinity of devices, social media, and COVID quarantine: we prioritize our gut impressions, our flip assumptions, and our baseless conjecture above all else.

So a superficial read of my posting might make people think I'm urging everyone to trust their visceral impulses even more.

The world is not complex or subtle or surprising. You're fully on top of it, standing triumphantly astride the landscape, so stand confident, eschew subtlety, and go with your gut!

No. None of that. There is a vast difference between 1. Cursory dismissal of subtlety and surprise while brutishly elevating your ditzy mental noise, and 2. Canny, sensitive pruning of irrelevant choices in order to escape a state of confusion.

But even having explained this, the brutish will read my essay and shout "EXACTLY!"

Confusion Isn’t Infinity, it’s Twelve (or Three)

I'm reposting this from May 2025. It's not just a whimsical reflection, or some sort of allegory. And it's not really about music. It's a key. Not useful for everyone, but those moved to sit with it will find value here.


All professional musicians go through ear training. This is where they develop the ability to play back melodies, or write them out in musical notation, using only their ears. It's daunting for newbies, and while you'd imagine it gets easier with practice—and it does—the real key is reframing:

There are not infinite notes. There are only twelve.

This is a huge—and hugely useful—realization. What's more, these twelve notes are your friends. We've all heard all the notes umpteen zillion times. They are few, and they are eminently familiar. Like old friends.

Twelve is much much less than infinity. To be adrift amid twelve is a whole other predicament. You're already much closer to your goal, without a minute of practice.

But wait. Unless you're tone deaf, you can easily tell a small musical jump from a large one. So you don't need to consider all twelve notes each time. Even a wild guess will land you within a half-step or so. So you're really considering more like three notes. Not infinity. Not twelve. Three!

Like magic, ear training is transformed from an advanced skill to a matter of choosing between three candidates.

INFINITY -> TWELVE -> THREE -> ONE

That's the geometrical progression to hone in on.

There are innumerable scenarios where we feel awash in infinite possibilities. That's what "confusion" is. That's what it is to be "overwhelmed" or "ignorant". Massive, daunting unknowability is a familiar human condition. And perhaps needless, if you shift perspective.

A year after moving to a place like Portugal, one easily handles everyday encounters—ordering lunch, asking for directions, etc. I order with such casual aplomb that you might imagine I speak fluent Portuguese. But my problem is exceptions. If the waitress returns to ask—in rapid-fire Portuguese between bubblegum pops—"I'm totally sorry but the oven's on the fritz and we can't like do roast potatoes do you want a different side dish or whatever just lemme know what you want ok", I'm dead.

But the move is to recognize that you're not swimming in infinity. The waitress is not reminding you to change your car's oil. And she's not reporting Taylor Swift's latest song drop. Nor is she informing you that Komodo dragons mate asexually. The infinity in which you imagine yourself drowning is a false perception. There are probably more like twelve possibilities. Three, really, if you're reasonably focused, watch body language, and parse a few muttered, clipped, vernacular words.

Context is a Thing. It's nature's own constraining device, if you'll merely consider it.

Like every life strategy, the dealkiller for most people is the notion of paying any attention at all. The waitress must be an entirely real person for you, with recognizable and empathetic drives and processes. You need to show up and be present in reality.

The first move in any confusing situation is to fully register context, and let it calm and focus you. One can drastically trim down "infinity" to cull a manageable set of possibilities.

If you muster the clarity to register that you're in a restaurant, and she's a waitress, and something happened in the kitchen—or en route thereto—to make her reverse course and come speak words at you, then even rudimentary language skills should take you the final mile, more or less. No more than a half-step away.

I still find this planet confusing, but it feels like a tidy pool of friendly options—severely winnowed by context, which is where I focus my attention. Even heavy confusion doesn't feel like an oppression of infinity. At most, it's 12. Or, realistically, 3.

Celebrating Allies' Refusal to Aid

Reactions to Trump's call for help to secure Strait of Hormuz:

JAPAN Japan does not currently plan to dispatch naval vessels to escort ships in the Middle East, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said on Monday. AUSTRALIA Australia will not send naval ships to assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a government minister said on Monday. BRITAIN Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday he would not be "drawn into the wider Iran war" whilst reiterating he was working with allies to reopen the Strait. EUROPEAN UNION EU foreign ministers will on Monday discuss bolstering a small naval mission in the Middle East but they are not expected to discuss expanding its role to include the choked-off Strait, diplomats and officials say. GERMANY Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Monday that Germany would not participate with its military in securing the Strait. "What does Trump expect from a handful of European frigates that the powerful U.S. Navy cannot do? This is not our war, we have not started it," Pistorius said. ITALY Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Monday that diplomacy was the right way to solve the crisis in the Strait, adding there were no naval missions Italy was involved in that could be extended to the area. GREECE A government spokesperson said on Monday that Greece would not engage in military operations in the Strait of Hormuz.

Being profoundly anti-Trump, and recognizing the attack on Iran as an effort to drown out Epstein revelations, performed in a way to make freedom-seeking Iranians cling to their regime and recharge the bitter anti-American hatred that fueled their revolution, these reactions from foreign countries give me a heady rush of pleasure. Even leaving aside the deserved comeuppance after a year of spitting in allies’ faces for no reason beyond juvenile posturing.

However, when Republicans consorted with foreign governments to foil Obama's foreign policy, I was enraged by their anti-Americanism. And I've got a character flaw: I can't do the clean-wipe brainwashing my fellow citizens, both left right, have mastered. I repel from hypocrisy. Not just in my withering view of Them Out There, but in Me In Here. I hold myself to the same standard. I've got a screw loose.

Allies are steadfastly refusing to help the United States out of a predicament, and the left feels the same delight I feel, but they're gushing over it. They're basking. As if there were no other possible side to the story.

I wish there were a way to resolve 1: my insistence that citizens—while always free to disagree—must never work against American foreign policy or delight in its thwarting with 2: my thirst for this Iranian "excursion" to be thwarted, and my delight over allies’ refusal to help.

There's no answer —no right behavior—because the morality is upstream from our present moment, so all we can do presently is struggle in tempestuous effluent. The moral decision-making is behind us. We've sealed our fate and forced our hand. So at this point I can only shout backwards:

Don't eagerly defy norms. Don't be extreme. Stay moderate. If you find a politician (be it a Trump or a Bernie) vowing to tear it all down and rebuild from scratch in a way that feels satisfying to your more visceral thirsts, lean away from that movement, regardless of any agreement with policy proposals or tribal signalings. Stop seeking personal satisfaction in politics. Build a government that's competent, mild, and boring, even if you don't agree with everything and don't want to have a beer with the person in charge and s/he doesn't look/talk/seem like you. Find some other mirror to peer into!

We didn't (and won't) take that route because we're bored haughty aristocrats who have, alas, upgraded to luxury politics. Our stories must be tales of glory, leaving us feeling staked—or, even better, victimized.

Poor people don't need glory, they need food and safety. We've got those things, so glory's the sole objective. Trump represents one sort of cosplay glory, while the progressive left palpably thirsts for a demagogue of its own.

Will we ping-pong, or will we moderate? Americans were always known to course correct toward moderation, but we may have broken the bungee cord.

The Pain of Success

A restaurateur is doing great work at steep odds into a headwind with inadequate support in a poor economy with loads and loads of potential customers who simply don't get it. As her adrenal glands prove sickeningly inadequate long-term engines, she's beginning to panic. So I sent her this:


I understand that you feel like you're holding up the whole world. You're running a one-person operation, juggling more pieces than anyone could competently handle, so pieces keep dropping. You are tortured by the growing sense that you can't possibly keep this up for much longer. Let me share what I learned when I was forced to juggle more pieces than I could handle with my internal organs screeching deep survival signals that this is not viable.

I never grew comfortable with the balls I was forced to drop, which was why I never stopped trying not to drop them even though there was no choice. I never stopped aiming for perfection even while acknowledging its impossibility. And it never stopped feeling like torture. The survival signal blasted day and night.

Having spoken to a bunch of other people who've done one-man impossible things, I understand that this is How It Is. We all vary in our tolerance level to howling survival signals, but no one ever for a moment imagines it as long-term viable. Yet some persist. The ones who don't quit. The locos who keep going.

Failure becomes something to reduce and manage, not to eliminate, even while paradoxically shooting for perfection. To a perfectionist (and only perfectionists get this far) it's exquisite torture, and it's hard to do your best work under such conditions. Many would imagine it impossible, but that's why most people don't run great restaurants or do groundbreaking work. They dismiss even the possibility. And that's not unreasonable!

Greatness is rare. Groundbreaking is rare. When you spot it, there's always some tortured schmuck somewhere, fraught over inevitable failure. The quality of what they turn out stems not from superhuman competency. They've just learned to stabilize in chaos, and stick with circumstances that would make most people run screaming for the hills. They don't flinch.

They don't flinch.

This all might seem grandiose, so let me hastily point out that I'm also describing parenthood. At least, the good parents. And there actually are good ones! I've even met a few!

A parent can't control every detail, and must persist, in perpetuity, with very high standards inside an agonizing failure engine. The predicament is not so unfamiliar after all!

Of course, most people are horrible parents, "sticking with it" only in the most dialed-in sense, and with perfectionism long-abandoned if ever present. Nominally committed, they either draw very hard lines to forcibly try to stave off failure (think supermax prison management) or else shrug into lassez faire, figuring the children will find their way. The golden ability to hate failure...while accepting failure...while guarding against future failure...while knowing failure will happen anyway...and not flinching, is not common.

Great parents willingly stick with the impossible, declining the escape routes of supermax wardenhood or resigned wraithhood. Impossibly high standards somehow persist along with a grounded recognition that they're a distant and unattainable mirage. It's torture, but they focus not on the local climate, but on the doing. Unflinchingly.

If all this seems too horrific to consider, then don't have kids, don't open restaurants, and don't try to be a groundbreaker. At the other extreme, if you imagine you have what it takes to simply plow right through and make it all work, I hope I've splashed cold water over your cartoonishly false view. You're not so indomitable. No one is. There will be failure and there will be torture, but also perhaps a great result—for others, at least, as you hang your head in shame for the failure filling your visual field.

You can't accomplish while escaping adversity, and you can't endure adversity without unceasing survival warnings. Panic, even. The trick is to stop flinching. That's all. Keep doing what you're doing, but stop flinching.

So all this, really, was to reassure you that you're in good company and that all is well. Carry on!

'Better'

When I left CNET/Chowhound, I gave myself a couple months of yoga, meditation, and self-indulgent relaxation on a cozy porch in an idyllic village before taking out my trombone for the first time in many years and discovering that I couldn't make a sound on it.

I work like an ant, so I rolled up my sleeves and did my ant thing, playing long tones for a couple minutes every day, adding an extra minute per week. I drilled exercises. I started from scratch, rebuilding muscle structure and relearning fine points of control and endurance. When I could play for 15 minutes without bleeding, I started playing along with jazz records, slow at first, then building to medium up-tempo.

At a certain point, months in, I felt sufficiently recuperated to play in public, so I went to a local bar where a jazz trio played. I knew the guys, and had told them about my hotshot musician past, and they'd invited me to come play a tune when ready. And I felt ready.

Kindly, they called an easy medium-tempo blues. I began to play the melody, and a mere two notes in, I realized I had no business being there.

In one huge wallop, the realization landed that 1. my tone was thin and spindly, 2. my tuning was shaky, and 3. my tongue was spastically struggling to keep up with even the medium tempo. I played well enough to have convinced myself, in the shelter of my own home, that I could more or less play. But having spent 10,000 hours performing jazz in bars, I was calibrated like a Swiss timepiece to precisely gauge my lack of even minimal competence.

I could sense musicians' eyes rolling behind me, and could relate much more to their position than to my own. I wanted to be the groaning professional. That's *my* job!

It was sickening. Not in the cartoonishly tearful sense of "I'm not good enough!" or, the long sad story of abandoning my musical career to run a web site. It was sickening in the here-and-now, not in the propositional self-story-telling. I was like a cat stuck up a tree. I'd managed to get up, but had no idea how to get down. Ascents feel valiant, but, seeing where you've actually landed, you instantly understand what a fool you've been.

"Better" isn't "good". It's sickening to discover how easily you can mistake the two.

---

My dad suffered from major depression for years, but managed to move across the country and find a like-minded colony of Republican hippy artists to create with. He had a diner breakfast table full of buddies to linger with over coffee in dry desert air, and he was productive with his sculpting.

Better! Though one day I returned from a shopping trip to his new house and discovered him sitting alone in the dark staring glassily at the wall. "It's such a relief to have overcome the depression," he cheerily announced at breakfast the next day for his approving chums. And he meant it.

"Better" isn't "good".

---

I have healed a long line of maladies over the past two years, many of them supposedly irreparable (fwiw here are some self-healing tricks). I haven't even considered whether I feel "good" or "bad" in a very long time, with my eye on the ball of fixing this or that, honing methods, adhering to med schedules, and warily watching for reoccurrences of grave problems in stomach, heart, pericardium, intestine, eyes, ankles, feet, and shoulders which would require a swift trip to the ER. It's been my full-time job, and I don't bemoan it. I am an ant.

But the other day, walking easily across town, I felt an uncommon sensation: a glow of good health. This, finally, might be time to reschedule my long-delayed trip to Taipei. I haven't had a speck of Chinese food in years! It seems absolutely feasible. I feel BETTER!

"I'm not going anywhere," I declared to a friend. This time I'm wiser. This time I won't get stuck in a tree.

But nah. Taipei, here I come. Because comfort zones are for pushing, and complacency, in the long run, is more perilous than peril. Cats that remain sensibly on level ground are less than full cats.

Step-Down Definition: Weirdness

Weirdness is creativity for shmucks.


More Step-Down Definitions
Regular Definitions

Step-Down Definition: Obsessive

"Obsessive" is how numb normies characterize the deeply alive.

(Obsession can be a serious disorder, of course, but I'm talking about common parlance rather than psychiatric diagnosis)


More Step-Down Definitions
Regular Definitions

What if AI Arrived but the Humans Couldn’t Pass a Turing test?

Back in the day, I had stupid friends who used the Internet stupidly and pronounced it "stupid".

It's the exact same thing with AI. And in many cases, it's the same stupid people, being stupid in the same stupid way with this stupid, stupid AI.

Expatriating Within the Bounds of Reality

I'm echoing this posting, but expressing it better and more leanly, and adding an expansive footnote:


I've chatted with umpteen Americans who viewed some YouTube video where some preternaturally well couple hoisted goblets of wine toward the camera, inviting them to join them in The Portuguese Lifestyle™ and thought "Yes! I want that!"

"Why not me? Why can't I be the one hoisting my goblet from the golden embrace of Mother Portugal, smiling vibrantly for the envious rabble?'

Entire Facebook groups are devoted to "We're here!" photos of random American couples ebulliently emerging from customs in Lisbon Airport with loads of luggage. It's a big moment for all of us, naturally. They actually call Portugal their "Forever Home", like fairytale princes and princesses set to live happily ever after in a magic kingdom.

If I need to tell you that it will not go well for them, then this essay won't go well for you. But enough seek out my advice that I've honed my thoughts to a very sharp edge. Obviously, it extends well beyond Portugal. But here goes:

Portugal does not give a fuck about you. Portugal will never give a fuck about you. This is not a resort where you will be welcomed and congratulated. No. No one gives a fuck. No one.

At this point, if they're still listening and haven't thrown their coffee in my face and run off down the street to get away from the bad man, we can have a conversation.

If you treat Portugal as a fresh backdrop for you to be who you already are and do what you already do, without expectation of anointment, then ok. That works. If so, there are two approaches:

1. You can preen in front of the backdrop, extending wine goblet toward camera with a glorious smile, flaunting your golden awesomeness.

You'd better be that person to begin with, because you won't transform into that via the power of make-believe.

2. Or you can lightly enjoy the fresh backdrop, generally keeping up your normal activities, no big deal.

Me, I didn't come here to preen, nor to be transformed into a preener, nor expecting welcome, support, or congratulations. I write, I play music, I cook, I eat, I watch movies, I walk, I ponder. Just like back home, only with great food and weather, low expenses, non-existent crime, and low narcissism (if I avoid American expats). I like the sound of Portuguese and share their sense of humor. I'm not able to gab full spiel, but enough to seem like part of the backdrop, and not some dropped-in astronaut bobbing languorously in zero G. And that's about it. It's not a vacation wonderland, it's just where I live.

No activities director is tasked with stoking my glee. It's more akin to, well, to actual life. It's what you make of it. You've enjoyed a minor refresh, not a systematic reset. Humans don't reset, sorry.

There are other ways to modestly swap in a new backdrop. You might be raising a family, or trying to start an online business, or drinking yourself to death. Just don't expect to become some new you because you're standing in front of a new backdrop. If you are the type who can utter the words "it's like home, but with a new backdrop" without your face falling in aggrieved disappointment, then it might work. If you can say it with amiable perkiness, then you'll be just fine.

Happiness is a simple flip of perspective: Say "This is as good as it gets" without gnashing your teeth or throwing a tantrum or retreating under the covers. Say it with sighing relief and blithe surrender to the moment—which is always lovely if you don't tell yourself stories about it (e.g. deliberately ballasting your happiness via gratuitous lamentation of your late hamster, Freddy).

If you can do that and then swap in a nice new backdrop like Portugal, it's pure delight. If you're ok as you are and where you are, you can drop in a fun new backdrop without demanding that it slake your neurotic thirsts. Being real is always an option. And even in the year of our lord 2026, reality has its rewards.

Limping Heroes

When I was younger, if I saw someone limping, or hunched over, or generally struggling to perform normal functions, I'd feel sympathy. But after a few years of battling an almost amusing cavalcade of maladies, my view is transformed. Now I see triumph.

Their public appearance represents triumphant reemergence, not sad deterioration. To me, they look like champions. Celebrities. The struggle to walk requires the resilient determination of a Michael Jordan twisty layup. Both represent achievement past limitation.

There's no one more celebrated than a "Cancer Survivor", but while it certainly beats the alternative, and getting through that pain, grief, and disruption is certainly an accomplishment, such a person mostly just endured. But a limping, wheezing, drooling, and/or mumbling person walking down the sidewalk is an actual hero. You see losing while I see winning. In fact, there is no greater example of winning in the human experience than someone walking who does not take walking for granted. That's way better than whatever you're doing, even if you're going triple-speed.

Dysfunction can be seen through two lenses: 1. failure to be normal, or 2. refusal to be defeated. The defeated are not seen. They're off the table, out of the spotlight. Anyone you can actually see— even sitting forlorn on a plastic chair with cloudy eyes and walker close at hand — has defied defeat. They're not trying and failing to be normal; they're triumphant heroes.

Not "Aren't You Special!" patronized heros.

Not "Hey, buddy, you just ate that cookie like a champ!" heroes.

Bona fide heroes.

I'm mostly not limping most days, and it's been a while since I've needed to shift, mid-step, from "many errands to perform" to "how can I possibly get home without falling down and making a scene?" But when I spot people bravely making that calculation (you don't notice, but now I do), it's like watching a gifted athlete make an amazing play. Whatever they did to get out that door in the first place—overcoming situations severely impeding that escape—is great. The fact that they are out in the sunlight with the rest of us, is wonderful.

Not sad-wonderful.

Not chin-trembling, curve-graded wonderful.

Not "I guess it's come to this..." wonderful.

It's wonderful like a great symphony or a fantastic plate of lasagna or Willie Mays' iconic 1954 World Series over-the-shoulder catch.

Full-on unqualified wonderful...full stop.


ChatGPT insightfully observes: "Anyone upright and ambulatory is already negotiating entropy. Some are just doing it on expert mode."

The Janitor

Hiya.
I'm the janitor,
just as you suspected.

Not from my uniform,
as I'm dressed unremarkably.
Nor some badge,
because I'm not in your org chart.

See, I know the building,
The whole thing,
Including the crawl space.
So, so much crawl space.

You remain occupied,
with bold dreams,
scarcely registering enclosure
with such boldness to pursue.

The audacity feels real,
The building mundane.
Little stuff.
No match for aspiration and triumph.

Me, I'm earthy.
Simple.
Far less than captivating.
And yet...impertinent.

Not that I'm rude.
Oh, no, never that.
But I lack deference
Toward my betters.

The higher floors are HIGHER floors
While I'm consigned to basement—
Yet am at ease everywhere,
Which seems weird.

I'm never seen sweeping,
Mopping or fixing.
Though my presence
can be oddly reassuring.

Who is this guy,
Simple and floating,
Rolling his eyes in mild amusement,
While you all contain multitudes? 

The Puffy Parkas of Portugal

It's 72 degrees and the sun is shining for the first time in weeks (literally), yet all my neighbors are shuffling around in puffy parkas. And I kind of love it.

I'm in polo shirt and cords, and they're all gaping at the crazy foreigner, and I deeply enjoy the whole situation. Let me map it out:

I'm finally warm, which is great.
They're warm, too, so I'm in no position to gloat.
Yet they're in parkas, which tickles me.
Triple win!

Humans are irrational, even more so than they realize. And since sanity is not an option, one must seek the sort of irrationality one finds adorable. It's not that they're still cold. It's that they can't quite let go of the suffering so quickly.

The fact that spring starts here in mid-February is a nice fact to add to the spreadsheet of positive things about (southern) Portugal. And while the parka thing may not strike you as a significant decision factor, tiny stuff like this is what counts, not spreadsheet facts.

What can I say? I'm a devoted practitioner of nano-aesthetics.

Prediction

A prediction for the end of the decade, and I think it's dead-on.

When Democrats take power after the Republicans are trounced and repudiated (if that sounds unlikely, you haven't been watching polling and special elections), they must seek Republican support as they restore institutions, treaties, alliances, norms, etc.

It won't be hard to get, because most of them quietly value that stuff, anyway, and they'll have incentive to try to look reasonable.

Anything not restored in a bipartisan way will be cemented as a partisan juggling ball, and be wiped clear again whenever Republicans return to power. At which point everything will have broken irredeemably, and no American alliance or treaty will ever be taken seriously to the end of Time.

The problem is that the next Democratic administration—likely elected via a very clear mandate—will make the classic mistake of imagining permanent rule. And so progressives will scream their heads off if the administration invites even a whiff of Republican participation.

So we're basically screwed.

Dark Matter

There is nothing in Big Bang theory to rule out the notion of artifacts lingering from before the Big Bang. Cosmologists are in the habit of using the term "everything" here, but that's out of semantic convention rather than scientific necessity.

It is possible, though extremely improbable, that dark matter is an artifact from pre-big bang. There is nothing to support this, but there's nothing (to my knowledge or a chatbot's) to disqualify it, either.

It's impossible to imagine how anything could escape the singularity and the bang. But at this point, whatever dark matter is will be extremely unimaginable, because it doesn't seem to fit at all into anything we know (we've been working hard at it for decades, with literally no advance). Whatever it turns out to be will be highly unlikely and probably tear some big chunk of our understanding.

So if it's not as I suggest (and it almost surely isn't), it will be something equally outrageous. And once you pass a certain point of improbability, strange things happen. I wrote a paper on this (PDF link).

When there are no logical alternatives, moons really might be made of green cheese (to paraphrase the old logician's phrase). Past a certain threshold, it's most logical to ask "cheddar or stilton?"

The Prospect of Autocracy is Not Autocracy

A Portuguese friend called America a stinking hell because we're suffering a couple thousand measles cases per year.

I pointed out that In the 1950s, before vaccine, there were over 500,000 cases per year. And the US at that moment seemed like heaven.

"Yes, but these cases now are needless!" added my friend, helpfully bringing me up to date on the awfulness of RFKJR etc., of which I was well aware.

I noted that that even this awful awfulness is still vastly less awful than the weight of 500,000 cases per year of measles back when the US seemed like heaven. A few thousand cases per year would have made 1955 Americans drop to their knees in gratitude.

But, yes, of course the stupidity and awfulness are deeply galling, and must be fought against. it's a problem to work on. But problem solving requires rationality, and we've lost all perspective. In the recent past, we were blessed to transform into spoiled princesses increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas. And in our vexation, we are far more aggrieved and furious than any of our ancestors, who lie in their graves wagging their heads with disdain over our profound lack of appreciation for the impossible utopia in which we live....even with RFK doing horrendous things.

There are always horrendous things, but our demented reaction to them has created a vicious circle. In fact, the route to power for a RFKJR is a constituency of wealthy, comfortable, blessed people driven to dementia by the fury and grievance that inevitably accompany bored privilege. That's what fuels crazy stuff like anti-vax, which, in turn, stokes further rage. And, no, it's not a MAGA thing. My progressive, highly-educated niece refused to vaccinate her kids because she was angry and aggrieved at so-called medical authorities, etc.

Let me dare to utter the obvious truth: the prospect of autocracy is not autocracy. And the sober, non-delightful business of repelling the prospect of autocracy does not make us enslaved tormented ghouls. This push-back is something we should have been engaged in ALL ALONG. We dropped vigilance due to vast complacency from our vast blessings. We figured "participation" meant playing with our damned phones all day. The necessity to look up from those phones is an indignation that makes people frame themselves as storming the beach at Normandy against a hail of machine gun fire.

You are living in paradise. This right now is the safest, funnest, freest, most comfortable and healthy (even with the measles) moment any generation has ever enjoyed on this planet. It is a freaking miracle that we get to live at this peak, even with the lingering suboptimalities so deeply offending our asymptopic sense of entitlement.

The only unpleasantness is coming from everyone dementedly framing themselves in Hell. The only thing we have to rage about is rage itself. That's the dynamic. It's not some certain bad person or group. It's broader than that.

My explanation for the lack of evidence of advanced life in the galaxy is that an idyllic level of wealth, comfort and technological ease makes life forms predisposed to struggle light their hair on fire and go ape shit crazy. Spoiled princesses increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas AND WIELDING FLAME-THROWERS. That's how it all ends, pardon the spoiler.

All you need to do is reframe. It starts with you, right here, right now. That's how the center holds.


I didn't move to Portugal to escape the hell. I moved here to escape the priveleged aristocratic ninnies conjuring an imaginary hell by conceiving of themselves as being damned with nothing left to lose.

Step-Down Definition: Shmucky Heroism

Shamelessness is the shmuck version of heroism.


More Step-Down Definitions
Regular Definitions

Spending Your Savings

I hesitate to be whimsically anecdotal here, since it might signal that my more serious pieces are for light amusement rather than thoughtful consideration. But I’m hoping I’ve earned the rare indulgence. In fact, this posting itself is about spending hoarded capital.


A month ago I shared the bashful, mild, awkward, thin-sliced prayer I sent out to oblivion and parts unknown, and, weirdly, it actually seems to have worked.

There's been markedly less gratuitous friction and adversity in my life—including, I just realized, an endoscopy revealing a perfect stomach no doctor could have deemed possible. And per my intuition about how my prayer was received ("Oh, sure, ok; I thought you liked it like that!"), things have indeed been a little boring. But that's ok!

Human nature being what it is, I'm back for more after a mere four weeks, and it's embarrassingly puny.

For the past several years, every month or so I get surprisingly severe pain in one or the other nostril. There's inflammation, there's sneezing, and there's pain so intense that it's uncomfortable to touch my forehead or cheek. It always lasts about five days, just long enough to feel baked-in. Two or three day pain is a much easier thing, while a week is an ordeal.

I also have a sensitive tooth that screams from time to time. Like now, by coincidence. And I juggle a host of other issues. It's all manageable, and (if there weren't quite so many of them, and if I were ten years older) might even be chalked up to normal aging. And, once again, my stomach recovery was remarkable. Also: my calcified, arthritic shoulders, which are unanimously considered unmanageable without heavy pain pills or surgery, have been nicely managed without either. Not so much as a Tylenol for 18 months.

So it's all going well! But give a human being a responsive hotline to heaven, and he'll wind up using it for anything and everything. Hence yesterday's prayer:

"Uh, hi again. Me. Sorry. So you've been toning things down, which I appreciate greatly. Belated thanks for that. And I'll try not to pull your coat for every remaining malady, symptom, or karmic play-out. But since you intervened once, I'm wondering if I'm annoying you by popping in again just to say that if my nostril could possible hurt a little less, and for fewer days, I'd be grateful.

If anyone right this moment is requesting relief from, like, cancer pain, please stop listening and go attend to that. Don't ignore misery to work on my nostril. And if I'm using up freebies with these requests, then leave my damned nostril as-is.

But if this is something you can just kind of flick away, and the pain could be relieved without unintended consequences, or depriving anyone, or using up all the remaining freebies I might have stockpiled, I submit the request for your consideration. No hard feelings if not.

Also: I'm not sure how to thank you for reducing my oppression level. I'm already doing everything I can think of to be of service down here. Would a bit of fear feel nice for you? I'm told people fear you, so I can try to muster some of that [dramatic shuddering sound]. Or anything else that occurs to you, just send me a sign. Ok, enough. This is idiotic, ugh."

The nostril problem has never subsided in less than five days. But I woke up today with zero pain at day two. So I'm just sayin'....

It doesn't escape me that I addressed my ghost roomate with this same tone. I suppose this is my stupidly-shouting-into-oblivion-with-just-enough-self-awareness-to-feel-ridiculous voice. Honestly, aside from these three instances (my non-oppression prayer; my ghost roommate welcome statement, and my nostril plea) I never realized I even had this voice.

Anyhoo, this isn't about spooky stuff. It's about spending credit. Two other examples:

1. I once explained how advancing age brings less desire to spend. It's smart to loosen up and have some extra fun about a decade prior to that point. Like I said, "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."

I see loads of 60-somethings desperately clutching their savings just out of lifelong habit. They live tight-assed lives to preserve savings at all costs. Then, at 70, they wind up sitting gloomily in a chair, realizing they should have enjoyed while they still had the strength.

Draw-downs—when you really need them—are, after all, what you've been bankrolling for this whole time! Was I wasting my stored cred (I never really asked for anything before) on this stupid nostril thingee? It depends on your perspective. For me, after severe health issues, a bit of fingersnap pain relief feels as gleeful as a junket to Maui.

2. If you find yourself in a group discussion with intimidating people, and have the sense that it would be futile to force in your opinion, the trick is to wait, wait, and wait some more. Choose your battle and only chime in when you have something essential and fresh. Insert it quietly, calmly, confidently, and surgically, and you'll be surprised at the weight you carry by virtue of having stored up your capital.

Tim Cook is a Brazilian Bus Driver

I am not anti-billionaire, anti-capitalist, or anti-business.

I understand preservation of shareholder value, and I know that Donald Trump could break Apple with the stroke of a pen by placing prohibitive tariffs on iPhones.

I don't believe Trump's authoritarianism will be successful, much less enduring, and I think he'll be gone soon, so it is not worth the immense economic and cultural damage of Apple being crushed so its CEO could make a futile statement about how much he hates the politics, when politics is not even his remit.

I understand that Cook is in for a pound after the requisite penny, and there's no easy line to draw. And I may have been the only one to parse that Apple's news about successor arrangement was Cook's hostage statement—and as far as he was able to go. I also recognize it wasn't much, and that his successor will also be forced to preserve shareholder value come what may, and not let his freak flag fly by freely telling some future shit president to go to hell for doing something awful that he's angry about.

So I am an APOLOGIST.

And yet, this statment from Cook was like bleach in my eyes.

The Republicans are broken. I realize I'm supposed to keep my eye squarely on that, but, honestly, I saw all I needed to see with "they're bringing crime; they're rapists" atop the escalator, in combination with his two election victories. I've fully factored in the brokenness of the Right since 2016, so when people come up to me to complain about how *awful* and *racist* Trump is, I stare blankly. It's like "the sun came up today!"

Ever the contrarian, I've been watching the *other* side. And I've seen massive breakage there, too. But something about this greasy, soulless bit of compensatory platitudinous bullshit hit me like a gut punch. Though it goes without saying that Cook is, somewhere in the back of his head, genuinely aggrieved.

This is breakage. It's not that he should have cursed Trump or come out "more strongly against". But cram some iota of soul into the couple dozen vague words which are all that circumstance allows you to say, for christ's sake.

I once wrote about how Brazilian bus drivers, who perpetrate no evil but are forced to merely associate with it, have soulless hollowed-out eyes. Tim Cook sounds like a Brazilian bus driver.

Nothing Happens to “Me”

This will be very entertaining for any jazz musician karma yogis out there. Everyone else can skip it.



Nothing Happens to “Me”

Obviously I'm making no effort to fit the meter. This is more of a Vedic commentary on the lyric.

I make a date for golf,
But who can predict the weather?
I try to throw a party,
8 billion earthlings, all complaining; really, what’s one more?
Who is to say a train is "missed" just because I’m not on it?
Nothing happens to “me”.

I never miss a thing, so I direct my focus with care.
My partner always "Trumps", but we don't talk politics.
If I looked before I jumped that would just make me witness to the fall!
Nothing happens to “me”.

At first, my heart thought you could break this jinx for me
Which means you did! Thanks!
But now I just can't fool this heart that thinks for me
and I'm enormously proud to have managed that cognitive hand-off after years of meditation.
I've mortgaged all my castles in the air,
Which were nothing but absurd drama in the first place.

I've telegraphed and phoned, and sent an air mail special too
Your answer was goodbye, and I wish you a great trip!
I fall in love every three seconds, and was happy to include you.
Nothing happens to “me”.

Showing Up Is Literally Everything

At this point I could sustain myself intellectually by playing Mah Jong with previous postings.

This...explains this

People "don't do anything" because "showing up" is the pinnacle. Presence. Parsing. Attention-paying. That's our contribution. That's our "doing."


In response to an embedded question in my previous posting, people don't hit the "like" button on YouTube videos because, for Christ's sake, they've already shown up and did the thing. They watched it.

I have a friend who's a huge fan of indie music. He goes to gigs every night. And he never, ever claps.

A Dystopia of Weaponized Friction

Years ago I wrote a post titled "Filtering the Zombie Army".

Most people do nothing. If they sign on, they won't show. If they pledge money, they won't pay. If you hire them, they'll sit in their cubicle and sip coffee. You know how most soldiers never actually shoot at people? How as few as 30% perform all the kills? I've decided that this isn't a saving grace of humanistic morality. It's just another example of how most people do nothing.

It wasn't the freshest of insights, but not one often spotted clearly (my specialty!). People don't take action. Not when they've promised to, not when it's easy (how many decline to hit the "like" button on a YouTube video that can make the difference between success and failure for creators whose work they'd presumably want to continue?). Not even when it's in their own interest.

At the end end of that essay, I offered an aikido move to turn this predicament to one's advantage:

I've developed a technique to cope with this. I call it the Zombie Filter. Whenever I find myself poised to sink hope and trust in a person, I assign them a trivial task, knowing non-doers will reveal themselves by not doing.

If I need to hire someone, I'll pay scant heed to their resume - the list of accomplishments every zombie is able to produce. But I'll offer them a solid page of vitally important reading material, and I will embed an instruction, à la "Send me an email with the phrase 'Rice Chex' in the body". A very low percentage will notice the direction and actually do it.

If you don't filter the zombies, you will curse yourself to endless recurring frustration. The zombie army will wear you down. They will annihilate you and they will absorb you, turning you into a black hole for everyone else's hopes and trust.

Years later, I'm seeing this move everywhere. And it's wearing me down to a stub.

The most common use is by tech support. Write in with a question and you'll likely be asked some random question to continue the conversation. They'll ask you if you're on a Mac or a PC, even if you just told them. They'll ask you how much RAM you have on your system, though it's completely irrelevant. They'll ask for a screenshot when your problem is easily visualized. You'll be put through this rigamarole even if you know they've received the same complaint a thousand times this week alone.

We used to account for this familiar pattern as blunt officiousness. But at this point, it's become common enough—and flagrant enough—to reveal a deliberate process of attrition. We are being eagerly trimmed at with busily snipping scissors by lazy shitheads hoping to reduce their workload.

And there are more chilling examples, as morally neutral tools metastasize to nefarious usage. This move is being applied by cold-hearted bureaucrats to evil effect. Here's a chilling example:

For whatever reason, Portugal has been unable for a year now to renew residence visas. Tens of thousands of legal residents carry expired residency cards, making travel outside the country perilous and raising stress all around. The agency is so crippled by this queue that apparently not a single applicant has been renewed. The process is well and truly stuck.

And many of us are receiving curiously random requests. We're asked to upload documents previously uploaded, or to answer questions already answered. The requests are vague and officiously stated, and they come with ticking clocks. Your renewal will be null and void if you don't reply in x days. What a shame if it means you're forced to vacate that Lisbon apartment you've sunk your life savings into.

A conniving bureaucracy has figured out my aikido move and is using it to torture multitudes in the hope that confusion, spam filtering, and errantly deceased applicants might trim its queue by an order of magnitude.

As this move continues spreading, be aware. Learn to hop nimbly over a profusion of boulders deliberately rolled in your path to reduce the workload of unseen strangers—even if you're no zombie. Consider this notice of a stiff raise of ambient friction tax—at least until AI (which can be reasoned with) starts handling all this stuff.


One might fret that AI's "handling all this stuff" carries the unhappy downside of human irrelevancy, but I'd argue that we've already done that to ourselves.

How I Fixed My Stomach, Baffling Doctors

I was on aspirin therapy for years, but no one ever told me to limit alcohol. Aspirin therapy (yes, even little baby aspirin) erodes your stomach lining. Drinking along with aspirin erodes your stomach more. So an endoscopy eight years ago revealed the war zone of my stomach. I was prescribed Pantoprazole (aka Protonix), a brute force drug best known as an antacid (it makes all the acid go away, so there's no more acid problem). It is also the go-to cure for stomach erosion.

Eliminating all stomach acid sounded extreme. We have acid for a reason (beyond punishment for late night pizza binges). But my doctor did not want to discuss risk. Millions of people are on Pantoprazole. It's fine. Safety in numbers, etc.

I pulled way back on my alcohol consumption, and after a few years, tried to wean off the Pantoprazole, still leary about eliminating all stomach acid. I had some medical guidance for the wean, but it didn't work. There was sharp stomach pain. "You'll be on Pantoprazole for life", my doctor told me four years ago.

Two years ago, I suffered seven severe food borne illnesses in 18 months. Campylobacter was the culprit, and while it's normally no big deal (it's the most common cause of "traveler's tummy"), it was hitting me worse and worse (40 lb weight loss; kidneys full of micro stones due to extreme sustained dehydration, updating my will, etc.). Having lost all ability to fight it off, I had to take a series of antibiotics, putting myself at risk of resistance (and the dreaded C. diff).

Doctors couldn't account for the infections, but I eventually came back to my earlier thinking: I'd lost my gut's first line of defense. There is no literature on risk of food borne illness from Pantoprazole, but most Pantoprazole patients likely don't eat as adventurously as I do. Anyway, to use the medical term, "Duh". Of course that was the culprit.

I could wean off of Pantoprazole or else permanently renounce travel, restaurants and prepared foods. Gastroenterologists are busy with cancer and really don't want to chat about your stupid antacid medication millions of people take every day without problem. And family doctors have only superficial understanding, i.e. "For erosion, prescribe Pantoprazole."

One of the many mystified family and emergency doctors who'd been treating me agreed with my logic and urged another wean attempt, but didn't have much advice to offer. The others thought my theory was nonsense. There is no literature about increased risk of food borne illness due to acid cessation from Pantoprazole, etc. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but doctors often lack this basic logic. Sometimes you have to use your brain.

ChatGPT discussed my theory at length. It was worth a try to get off this drug with superhuman diligence and caution . I became a professional Pantoprazole weaner for 3 months. It was "what I do". Here's my protocol, thanks to extensive collaboration with the chatbot.

---

Pantoprazole Dosage 2 weeks alternating 40mg/20mg
2 weeks 20mg
2 weeks 20mg/0
Then full cessation
I extended each step until symptoms stabilzed.

Support Protocol (3 Months during and post wean). Note: none of this makes a lick of sense to doctors

Wake up
Take B. longum 35624, a patented, tested, expensive probiotic that may be the one probiotic that actually does anything.
Wait 15 mins
Taurine 500 mg
Wait 15 mins
Light breakfast

At least 90 minutes after breakfast, and 30 mins before lunch: take PepZin GI (zinc-L-carnosine), 15 drops of  Iberogast in a little water with 1/2 rice cake to buffer the bit of alcohol in the Iberogast, and chewable DGL (Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice Extract).

Note: Iberogast is a panacea for any sort of indigestion. It's nothing but essential oils, and I'm no health store hippy, but if Iberogast were a woman I'd marry her.

2 hours after lunch: take Magnesium (Glycinate/Lysinate Chelate 200mg—Magnesium citrate is better, but it caused side effects for me) and a multi-strain probiotic containing Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, Bifidobacterium longum, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium bifidum (all this is available cheaply from yogurt. But tablets ensure quality, consistent dosage and timing).

30 minutes before dinner, repeat pre-lunch trio (Pepzin, DGL, 15 drops of Iberogast in a little water with 1/2 rice cake)

60 minutes before bed: another multi-strain Probiotic, plus 15 drops of Iberogast in a little water with 1/2 rice cake

Just before bed only when needed: Gaviscon Advance (Sodium alginate & potassium hydrogen carbonate).

---

This was all 1. very expensive (I've probably paid close to $1000 on these supplements), and 2. hugely labor intensive. For the first month or so, it was pretty much my daily focus, though it eventually became more second nature.

Last week, four months after weaning from Pantoprazole, I had another endoscopy. The gastroenterologist studied my chart and previous endoscopy results, and said "Going off of Pantoprazole was a mistake. I expect to see far worse erosion."

But no. My stomach and esophagus are perfect. Perfect. Also: I've had no campylobacter for months. I can even eat spicy food once per week and drink moderately.

Note: I actually dropped aspirin therapy one year ago. European cardiology protocol says to take either Clopidogrel or aspirin to support a medicated cardiac stent once the stent is fully settled. The Clopidogrel is still erosive, but I'm obviously tolerating it...with the help of these supplements. I'm still taking most of them, and will drop them individually and slowly.

Though stunned to the point of disbelief, neither my GP nor my gastroenterologist has the slightest interest in my protocol (ODPGFY seems to be the attitude—"One data point? Go fuck yourself"). But I'm leaving it out here in case someone finds it useful.

How to Be Accepted Where You Don't Belong

The title reflects my signature move. It's pretty much all I've ever done, from my youth hanging out in ghetto jazz bars to a music career as the only white guy in the jazz or latin bands, to my chowhounding in restaurants of every stripe, earning respect and friendship from waiters who normally roll their eyes when people who look like me walk in. In fact, this is a primary chowhounding skill: finding acceptance where one doesn't belong.

There's a trick for it (which, like all my tricks, is crazy-easy though super-counterintuitive). Let's use "an American in Portugal" as an example, since that's my current circumstance. There's a convivial place where everybody's a regular. Their sandwiches (with meat grilled on a tiny hibachi just outside) are great, but outsider might wonder how to gain entrée, given that the joint falls silent when they set foot inside.

In this scenario, 99% of people go one of two ways. They:

1. Stay the hell away, or

2. Strive to conquer

#1 is the way to protect one's comfort zone. No gain, no pain.

#2, where one blusters in with one's big personality and tries to make friends, is one of those propositions we might envision in our cartoonish imagination but which fizzles in reality. To be sure, there are rare people who can actually do this, but I'm not certain they're the healthiest people, or that they can stand the test of time if this is more than a one-off.

The first thing you need to recognize is that you don't need to prove yourself. None of those regulars became regulars out of worthiness. That guy telling stories while the rest laugh uproariously didn't get this gig because he's the funniest guy who auditioned. They all just settled into roles. No one earned any of this. They became regulars by being regulars. So that's the route you'll take.

Venture in, calm and kind and polite, with no entitlement or pressure. Peaceful and relaxed and not drawing attention to yourself. Be a happy, satisfied odd duck. Enjoy being among the disdainful skeptics, as a minor color in their larger painting (a fine example of the "turn-the-cheek" move which has been largely misinterpreted).

You're an odd duck, but you're not compelled to act like it. Embrace your outsiderness, but be a comfortable, pleasant, happy outsider. Comfortableness is a framing choice, irrespective of external circumstance. So choose comfort. With that tiny shift of framing, you have completely changed the reality, like magic. You're now a disamingly comfortable odd duck.

Now keep coming back, continuing to be pleasant and low-maintenance. Don't seek engagement. Don't assert your big personality or vie for attention. Don't try to join the reindeer games. Your very familiarity already makes you a part of those games, though it's not consciously noticed. You are slowly becoming wallpaper, morbid though that might sound. Don't hear seconds or minutes or hours ticking. Think in weeks and months and seasons, as you glacially absorb into the decor.

Soon, you will become the odd duck, rather than merely an odd duck, though this transition will be invisible for you and them both. And, one day after that, someone who doesn't belong will venture in, and your antenna will prick up along with the crowd's. This person will strike you as an odd duck. And you'll realize with astonishment that you've become an insider. Even if these people are not your best buddies, and don't slap your back when you enter. You're now our odd duck.

Don't solve for the wrong problem. You don't need to cop the culture or painstakingly "fit in". Remain the odd duck you patently are. Just become, via sheer passage of time, "our" odd duck by showing up. A lot (see "Win By Not Quitting"), letting the engrained human faculty of familiarity work its magic over time.

You may not have stoked what feels like real warmth and active belonging. It may remain a more passive belonging. But passive belonging can be better. Active belonging has requirements, not all of them immediately apparent or appealing. And active belonging brings responsibilities which might not be entirely agreeable. Passive belonging is just fine. You may be a non-belonger, but you're "our" non-belonger. The non-belonger who belongs!

I can assure you that there are very few places in the world where an odd duck can't achieve passive belonging by simply showing up. Regulars, it turns out, become regulars entirely by regularity.


I played greasy trombone in a few crack houses at the height of the 1980s epidemic. I didn't need these measures, because musicians get a pass. They inherently belong. It's one of the things I liked best about being a musician.

But I became familiar enough with the social fabric in such places to assure you that a newcomer, from a completely different context, and even one who never consumed the, er, product, could have come to belong in such a place, just by sitting quietly and calmly nursing a beer night after night. It's just matter of time of picking up momentum as "the white guy who comes in for a beer", spoken with very mild affection. It's that easy, if you don't make it needlessly difficult.

I can't overstate how well this works even at extremes. A guy in a yarmulka, following these instructions, could, if he were perverse enough to want to, make friends among white supremecists (without debasing himself via ingratiation). The vast majority of biases—even hatreds—are conceptual, not personal. That's not to say you'll be well-received at first. But when a racist insists "Some of my best friends are..." that's not just a risible trope. It's often true. And me, I like being that best friend, because I'm the rare bird (odd duck?) who can accept without approving.

Feeling vs. Being, Again

If you really hate to think of yourself as someone who eats like a pig, you have two choices:

1. Not eat like a pig, or

2. Eat like a pig and attack anyone who notices.

#1 is the sane choice, though #2 is vastly more popular.

It's the same choice people make when they choose whether to feel smart or to be smart. Feeling smart locks you into stupidity, but at least you feel smart. Being smart locks you into feeling stupid, but while you scarcely notice your smartness, at least you won't actually be stupid. And nearly everyone chooses feeling smart over being smart.


We're all aristocrats now, and every naked Emperor feels entitled to affirmation.

AI is Not Hype

I remember when the Internet hit big—so big that people inevitably went anti on it. It's a passing fad. It's overblown. It's stupid. I had friends who refused to buy a modem or reserve an email address. Sit tight, it will all pass.

That didn't happen.

It's also not going to happen with AI, either, though the anti takes are spewing at the exact same point in the hysteria curve. AI is vastly more transformative than the Internet was. Don't ignore it, and don't bet against it. It's here to stay, and is already way better than people realize.

Extreme Hypocrisy

I will never fathom how the Right went from "Don't tread on me" to "Comply utterly or be killed."

But, to be fair, I also will never fathom how the Left looked back at the Moral Majority movement of the 1980s (when an extreme faction tried to impose its narrow, rigid doctrine on a heterogeneous nation) and thought "Hey, let's do that!", becoming the new sanctimonious enforcers of moral rectitude. I'm old enough to have whiplash from conservative moralism snapping into liberal moralism. I don't remember a breather, just a distant, foggy memory of the Before Times—of hippies and guitars and Manson.

Hypotheses

Scientists are notorious for their disdain toward new proposals (ideas, explanations, connections), especially when they come from outside science. This deprecation has nothing to do with scientific method, which makes no demands on hypothesizers. Experimentation requires rigor, and conclusions require training, but hypothesizing actually benefits from a dilatory big-picture—even poetical—approach.

Hypothesizing can't be trained. It's a creative flexion for which some people are more suited than others. And the precise, linear style of thought of those who choose careers in science is not known for fostering creativity and insight. Scientists can be outstanding hypothesizers, but it's despite their training and milieu, not because of it. Many are conservative to the point of hidebound.

Just as it's risible that politicians are expected to not just garner votes but also run things, it's odd that we expect scientists to dream up hypotheses. A poet—anyone versed in disciplined dreamy speculation—might be better suited.

This exclusion has been willful but made necessary by limited bandwidth and poor signal-to-noise. It would be impossible to triage (much less test and prove) every daft notion streaming in from outsiders. But a poor signal-to-noise ratio does not augur a low ceiling. The lost gems might have been immensely useful. Some people are immensely creative and insightful, and most of them don't go into science, so their contribution is lost.

LLMs could perform this triage at scale, uncomplainingly, with deep knowledge and institutional skepticism approximating a trained scientist. Such hypothesis mining could make a profound impact.

Self-Driving Cars Work

Every once in a while I get the idea to tally my predictions, right and wrong. The problem is I can't remember any of them.

I don't fancy myself a predictor. I just muse, in a particularly earnest and relentless way, spiked by the clarity of 50 years of yoga and meditation and seasoned with my experience in seven distinct careers, coming up with ideas, theories, connections, perspectives, explanations, and, sometimes, predictions. To me it's all of a piece. I'm not aiming to be Nostradamus, I'm just trying to penetrate my own confused disorientation. 

But here's one I got flat wrong: self driving cars seem to work.

My issue was always driver/pedestrian interaction. As a native New Yorker, I'm aware of the stalemate in the war between pedestrians and drivers. It's a virtuous stalemate, because if either had the upper hand, traffic would never flow. 

Ideally each would simply use its allotted right-of-way (that's what the traffic lights and stop signs are for), but you can only go so far with legislation, restriction, and organization. People are sloppy, inattentive, selfish, and batshit crazy. So even if 90% diligently played by the rules, the remaining 10% is reigned in solely by fear of violent death.

Their own violent death, for pedestrians, and the death of some litigious stranger, for drivers. And there's nothing like a car sweeping through an intersection with verve to shut off the "maybe I'll try to cross real quick" impulse.

But self-driving cars will smash on their brakes, and all parties know it. This rational caution can be gamed and leveraged to a degree that cars driven by drunken crazy randos can't. Stalemate lost, pedestrians win, traffic no longer works. If one wave of an umbrella at an oncoming car makes it screech to a halt, everyone with an umbrella (or a baby carriage or an arm) will become the High God of Traffic and cross whenever they bloody well want to. And isn't that the pedestrian dream? Can't we sense (at least in east coast urban centers) that this is only tenuously restrained by a wholesome violent death fear?

The only solution would be to separate roadways from pedestrians (raise them, lower them, etc), but that would cost trillions in city centers. So I predicted self-driving would be impossible.

But that scenario turns out to be an edge case within an edge case.

First, "belligerent pedestrian encounters in East Coast urban centers" represent a tiny fraction of driving scenarios, overall (though it's not for nothing that Waymo only operates on the West Coast). Edge case!

Second, so long as there's still one single car out there being driven by a red-blooded human, pedestrians can't count on mercy. 10% self-driving, 50% self-driving, or even 95% self-driving means pedestrians must watch their asses or potentially die. We're far, far away from 100% self-driving, and by that point things might be different in any number of ways. So this is the edgiest of edge cases within the greater edge case, not the impassible hindrance I'd imagined.

There are other edge case considerations with self driving cars.



Watching this video of self-driving in Manhattan, I kept squirming as the car did things I wouldn't do. Like barrelling down 7th avenue at 30 mph, just inches from a long row of school buses parked to the right. I knew—but the algorithm doesn't know— that kids sometimes venture into the road from between buses to, say, chase a ball. So you slow down, you hug the left side of your lane to give extra room (or move left to another lane). You put your attention there, and if you can't, you slow down even more.

I've assumed I'm superior to algorithms because I entertain a wider range of scenarios. But two things occur:

1. Most other drivers (in fact, probably 90%) would blithely barrell down 7th avenue at 30 mph just inches from a long row of school buses parked to the right. They wouldn't imagine the edge case. So the algorithm is behaving perfectly normally within the bell curve.

2. In that same video, a bicycle whips by obliquely from out of the driver's blind spot, and the self-driving noticed and compensated. Me? I did not see him coming. I'd have had a much nearer-miss, and my startled over-compensation might have gotten me rear-ended even if I'd avoided the bike.

So my vast experience and diligent carefulness protect against extreme edge cases. But my human perceptual limitations make me vulnerable to common dangers.

That's why self-driving wins. I was wrong.

My Miracle Shower

I have a miracle shower. It's blocked in by thick glass panels, and there needs to be a door swinging open, which means there must be cracks, and you can't seal them because then, obviously, the door wouldn't swing open. You can actually see air through the cracks to the left and to the right and under the door. What's more, the shower head faces those cracks, spraying them relentlessly. This should not work. It's non-viable. It's impossible. And yet—and yet!—my floor stays dry. Luxuriously dry.

I don't understand how it works. Water spraying relentlessly on cracks should create leaks. That's basic science. Yet it does not leak. Hence "miracle shower".

What's more, I enjoy a truly great bath mat. Whatever you're imagining, it's better than that. As I exit my miracle shower, my feet are welcomed by a generous rectangle of fresh fluffy clouds. There is music. There is a sense of a life lived to its fullest.

Delight is fragile. So I was not surprised when, one morning, I stepped out of the shower and discovered that my mat was drenched with water. As my foot touched down, it made a "sploosh" sound.

Three problems at once:

1. My impossible shower had finally fulfilled its Wile-E-Coyote-suspended-in-mid-air-past-the-cliff-edge destiny, and was leaking the way it was always meant to,

2. The primacy of my bath mat was made a mockery of,

3. It being the cold/moist season in Portugal, nothing dries till springtime. We are in the Age of Mold. So I can hang this mat on a line until the (fluffy) sheep come home, but it will...not...dry.

When the problem continued, I consulted with contractors and chatbots, gathering enormous knowledge of sweeps and dams—silicone strips and such to glue to the door's underside to minimize the crack. And I ordered them from China, where—good news!—vendors stood ready to rush me this stuff in absolutely no more than five weeks, max!

Awaiting my silicone workarounds, and having swapped in a fast-drying piece-of-crap bath mat (oh, how the mighty have fallen), my shower began to leak worse and worse. I kicked the mat four feet from the shower, and still it drenched in pooling run-off. Finally, I tried something, purely by whim: I tilted the shower head a random one millimeter to the left.

Complete dryness ever since. Nary a drop of water, anywhere.

In the aftermath, I'm left rubbing my eyes and pondering What Happened Here. What can be learned. I'm not normally one for auguries, but this is so "on the nose" that I can't avoid the feeling of being force-taught something life-critical.

First of all, it reminds me of the time when I was a kid and a New York Mets pitcher (Ron Darling?) was in the midst of a horrendous slump, with no end in sight. Tom Seaver traveled to Shea Stadium to offer him the following advice (I'm paraphrasing): "You feel like you're a million miles away. But you're actually not. You're off just the tiniest little bit." That image stuck with me, and I refer to it whenever strike zones start to seem unhittable.

But while this circumstance echoes that, this was less about resilience than about premature conclusions about fragility. Just because you know what's wrong doesn't mean you Know What's Wrong. It's another "Cousin Manny Thing", where "knowing" is a map, while "experiencing" is ownership.

And this makes for a particularly bright example, because the entire shower situation is shrouded in mystery. None of it is truly sealed, nor could it be, so every dry shower has been a bona fide miracle. And whatever shower head movement had produced a unicorn trajectory to break everything was another miracle, as was my random adjustment returning it all to impossibile functionality. It's been raining miracles. Showering them, if you will.

This all presents a rich field to harvest for insight and revelation, but, really, I'm drowning in that, already. Especially the confusion and catastrophe which give rise to it. I don't regret what I've gone through to learn what I've learned, but, going forward, I'm out of the market for life lessons. Adolescent me would have eaten such lesson-teaching for breakfast, but, at age 62, I understand more than I want to about the world, so the catastrophes feel needlessly obtrusive and exasperating. Really, I'd just like to take a shower, please, thanks.

If you find yourself unwittingly embarked on a long, grueling adventure with no clue and no user manual, and finally return, battered and scarred, to find some glib wizard eager to finally dump all the secrets, it won't feel like reward. "Too little too late," Gandalf!

That said, I must confess that I'm far more delighted now, stepping out of the shower to a bone dry floor and my unimaginably fluffy bath mat, than even before. This brings to mind, yet once again, the very first joke I learned as a child (from "The Bozo the Clown Show"):

Q: Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?
A: Because it feels so good when I stop!

Bozo really knew what's up.

Over the last two years, I've endured twelve trips to the emergency room, seven campylobacter infections (leaving me with risk of antibiotic resistance and a permanent ban on street food and third world travel), six severe orthopedic conditions requiring immediate surgery (which I'm managing via yoga), and way more. I withstood it all smartly, and am able to walk and eat more or less normally, which feels awesome. And having achieved this respite, last month I made a brief prayer.

I normally avoid prayer, because 1. I don't want stuff (I'm the sort of guy who's impossible to buy presents for), and 2. I fear unintended consequences, and 3. other people need way more help than I do, so I hate to occupy attention. But after ceaseless catastrophes (health and otherwise), I amiably requested "no more tough-love lessons." Also: if The Powers That Be get entertainment value from watching Jim narrowly evade peril, maybe they can maybe wind that down just a smidge.

I'm not someone who hears voices, but the gist I picked up by way of response was something like "Oh, sure, ok; I thought you liked it like that."

But now this.

Yes, it's just a leaky shower. And the lessons were rich. And the outcome was pure delight. So...I guess I do "like it"!

Choose a lesson! They're everywhere! Like with serendipity, it's all a question of which you choose to tune in to—which you choose to frame. I'll start with this unassailable observation:

A dry bath mat is no small thing.

Post-Covid Narcissism

The data is beginnning to support my observation (see all postings tagged "Post-Covid Narcissism" in reverse chronological order) of a profound and enduring increase in narcissism since quarantine.

From Wall Street Journal: