Dylan on Aging

Bob Dylan squeezed gobs of mileage out of his poetic license. He was so palpably gleeful to let listeners Rorschach his lyrics that he could came off like Exhibit A of the old slogan "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

But I must concede that some of his thin, vague images — like "the answer blowing in the wind" — do stick with a person. Useful framings are made more accessible. And that's a high aim of art, so I oughtn't complain.

A new NY Times interview upon Dylan's 85th birthday shows that he remains gratuitously ellipitcal, but the points he's slipperily encircling seem more fully-formed. Even, shockingly, kind of sharp.

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t; it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

The Needlessness of Kübler-Ross

Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable. So maybe the problem is in the red lines we draw, rather than in our outcomes.

If you sit with this realization, and apply it as you go forward, you may find that you no longer need to laboriously struggle through every one of the Kübler-Ross levels to reach acceptance. You might find that you can perfectly well accept on the fly.

The thing to bear closely in mind is that acceptance is not approval. As a society, we've lost the ability to make that distinction. Acceptance doesn't mean a lovely day. Acceptance doesn't mean being totally cool with it. Acceptance just means opting out of performing theatrical resistance to the inevitable.


Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." - Anthony de Mello

A Realm of Skinner Boxes

A friend asked me the meaning of life. Here was my answer. I also threw in God, as an extra:

Skinner boxes.

You know, those lab experiments where you offer a chicken a red button that produces treats and a blue button that produces punishments. The chicken slowly learns.

That's what this is. A realm of Skinner boxes.

The world is nothing but Skinner boxes, though we don't frame things that way, because it's like trying to get a fish to understand water, which to a fish is just EVERYTHING, so it's essentially invisible.

This immediately explains an enduring mystery: Why do we jade?

The moment someone gets what he wanted — his dream come true! — it's only a matter of time before his joy fades into colicky sourness and he pines for some other thing; dreaming some other dream. Most billionaires never stop wanting more money. Most people with extremely attractive partners never stop seeking other partners. Etc., etc., ad infinitum.

It's not because aspiration is the wind beneath our wings, nor is it because we're spoiled children. The counterintuitive truth is that we're right to quickly turn tepid, because the rewards are never so great.

The unrecognized truth of Skinner boxes is that while they are surefire ways to fire up enthusiasm, they are, by their nature, pretty meh. Pretty "mid". The rewards aren't so great. They're mere trinkets.

And the punishments aren't so bad, either. Mostly propositional, often a matter of "standing". Abstract score-keeping. Fluffy stuff, as punishment goes. That's why we're sloppy and incautious, and even self-destructive. Of course, the other players, watching along, are horrified to see Hugh declining to PUSH THE RED BUTTON! Earn your PELLET, Hugh!!!!! C'mon!!!!!

What's wrong with that guy?

Lots of mental health problems strike me as flailing responses to a dawning recognition of this predicament. Depressives find it all tedious and dreary (which it kind of is). The anxious over-dramatize their win/lose stakes (which seems natural). Manic-depressives dive in way too deep on both ends (understandable). Addicts desperately seek something to cling to for a sense of dependable constancy while riding this crazy-making happy/sad, good/bad machine (who can blame them?). And psychopaths shortcut to reward by disregarding or manipulating anyone in their way. Given how encouraged we are to give winning all we've got, you could make a case that psyhopaths are the ultimate players. To them, we all look like Hugh, needlessly leaving money on the table.

Let's consider addicts a bit more. They're trying to do something sensible: to find something to hold on for a sense of level constancy as they careen through the ups and downs. It might be healthy if they'd chosen something less harmful than drugs, alcohol, shopping, gambling, etc. In fact, this explains the basis of Alcoholics Anonymous, which proposes swapping in a less malign stability. A "higher power." "God".

You needn't visualize some bearded dude on a cloud. A far less specific stability point can suffice. In fact, the mere intimation that there might be something behind the omnipresent Skinner Boxes is extremely helpful. One can be restored and stabilized by a mere ray of hope that that's not all there is. So it scarcely matters what attributes you assign to that other realm.

It needen't be a fleshed-out scenario of angels and clouds and virgins. Just some silence beyond the game; some spaciousness amid the pressure. Any shift of attention away from the reward/punishment cyclotron represents Liberation. And that's the gateway to beauty and love and happiness and all the good stuff (way better than trinkets) lying close at hand though we frame them as distant rewards we must paddle towards.

God is what's not Skinner Boxes.

Stability

Stability is manufactured calm.

Bifurcated Absurdity

Earlier this week, pretty much all of Portugal went on strike because the government was considering bad new labor regulations. The president had already promised to veto if it ever reached his desk, but the unions went on strike anyway just because the whole thing upset them terribly.

The country, which is poor and struggling, lost tons of commerce and tax income, and the people, who are just trying to hang on, were severely stressed. But the president cheered the action, saying it was essential for unions to “strongly express themselves.”

Conservative kooks make me want to start a vegan commune, but Liberal kooks make me want to don (no pun intended) a red hat. It's no wonder things are becoming so bifurcated; everyone is radicalizing in reaction to the "other" side's absurdity, which is actually quite symmetrical.

We don't have a "them" problem, we have an "us" problem seen through two distorted lenses.

Pretending You're Not Enlightened

Every one of us is enlightened, though most of us are remarkably committed to pretending not to be.


Throw it on the pile along with these.

---

Spirituality is a subtractive process. It's not about attainment, accomplishment or enhancement. Quite the contrary, it's about dropping vast useless weight — posing, contriving, dramatizing, self-centering, and rote striving.

Once you've released your obsession with such exhausting ridiculousness, it feels great, but it's hard to take pride in the relief. Consider this, the very first joke I learned as a child:

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

Zeno's Jazzy Xerox

When Scott Hamilton (a minor but well-respected player who's been in and out of the limelight for decades) entered to play the melody here (I've queued it up to the right point, but fyi it's 2'40"), I felt conflicting emotions.

First: NICE! Like, yeah, that's the feeling! That's the craft! No bullshit, just proper thickly-spread jazz tenor saxophone butter. Nice!

But then, as he kept going, it grew uncanny. I knew everything he was going to do. It was jazz butter, yes, but the pre-portioned Hotel Bar butter we've all experienced umpteen times with not one iota of surprisingness or spontaneity. Like taking the standard postcard shot of Mt. Rushmore, shamelessly gratifying expectations. Not really personal.

I mean, it sounds incredibly personal, though, because the first guy who first played like this was full of personality. But Hamilton's imitating that guy (Prez, or maybe more Ben Webster). Imitating uniqueness and simulating spontaneity.

Yet it feels great to me. Like a breath of fresh air.

Finally, I've figured out my ambivalence.

Hamilton is playing like a xerox copy. And in a world with few if any originals left, and also few Xerox copies, and where the xeroxes-of-xeroxes are leading lights and the xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes are acclaimed, and there is no shortage of xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes-of-xeroxes, a first generation Xerox copy feels like the *real thing*. Sweet authenticity!


Note that the problem is not just imitation, per se. It's framing.

See also my Open Letter to Jazz Musicians

The Cotton Candy Machine

Paul Krugman recently wrote that the never-die MAGA kernel appears to be 19%. That's the number still insisting, despite mounds of evidence, that the economy is terrific.

It's an interesting number, because political scientists have long estimated the MAGA base at 31-33%. These are the full-throated supporters — the rally attendees, etc. Many of them believed that Trump would improve the economy, reveal and prosecute Epstein participants, and avoid forever wars, so they are peeling off at a decent clip...revealing the white-hot inner core of 19% who'll stick faithfully forever.

I played a jazz gig in Galicia, Spain on Francisco Franco's birthday in 1990. The guy (native to Galicia) had been dead 15 years, and it seemed to be the unanimous consensus that Franco's reign had been a nightmare. Evidence was glaring; while Spanish youth were tall, well-fed, and sophisticated, a great many older people looked like pygmies, stunted by malnutrition, and were nearly as provincial as their great-great-great-grandparents.

As we drove to the Friday night gig, we passed crowds of elderly, tiny Spaniards in the streets, dressed in their Sunday best in silent celebration of the long-gone tyrant. This was not some subversive column readying to mount a coup. Many had embraced the subsequent changes with varying reluctance. But they couldn't entirely let go of the cult.

In 2024, 49% voted for Trump, including many of whom didn't like Trump much, and/or were largely apolitical, but preferred to vote for a madman rather than pull a lever for the dreaded Other Side.

Regarding the 19% kernel, John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that 13% of Americans believe in Bigfoot as a real, living creature. This is not much less than the 19% MAGA inner core, and while I'm not claiming it's precisely the same cohort, the scales support my view that Trump is best conceived as the cocky, deluded lunatic at the end of the bar:

Let me share an image I've been returning to since Trump was first elected. It explains his presidency pretty well. Not perfectly, but quite effectively:

You're sitting at a bar. Some stupid gin mill. And Frank, at the end of the bar, is a mouthy know it all shitbrain old dude who dominates conversations, so most people ignore him, which bothers him not one bit. Frank brashly spouts (to whoever will listen, or even to empty space) conspiracy theories, racist poppycock, and bitter criticism of those asshole politicians, knowing with all his heart that he could do a far better job than any of them.

From Frank's perch at the end of the bar, and 6 drinks into his late afternoon tear, that last part seems completely reasonable. Even though he's stupid and feckless and childish and undisciplined and ultimately just two balls and a mouth. Just because he's, y'know, Frank.

Say, through a series of screw-ups and accidents and lucky breaks and Frank's feral refusal to ever quit or acknowledge any limitation of any sort (plus loads of money from his Dad—or at least whatever's leftover that he hasn't squandered—plus a superpower of absolutely zero shamelessness or empathy), Frank gets elected president.

1/3 of the country looks at Frank’s climb, and says “He’s just like me!”, and for them, it’s a glorious shattering of the glass ceiling. They’re in love.

Maybe it was 1/5 of the country, and the rest were just hanging on — and, now, peeling off.

The lunatics sometimes manage to organize (as is their right in a democracy). As momentum is built, they pull others into the gravity well. An additional 14% was pulled in early in the process to forge the MAGA base enjoying the spectacle and tribal inertia (the term "conservative" was being used as a banner — though nothing about this movement was conservative — and, hey, that's a word for me!). Then, like a wand accumulating cotton candy, another 16% glommed on loosely for the presidential election.

That outer 16% peeled back off early, unhappy with masked, badgeless goons committing summary executions, kamikaze trade wars, and a gaseous administration full of unserious buffoons.

The 14% "mantle" are awakening after a very loud party to discover themselves, to their horror, on Team Pedophile hellbent on forever wars.

And the remaining 19% white-hot core will, decades from now, occasionally whip out their nostalgic MAGA hats long after this demon has been thoroughly reviled and repudiated.

The latter are troubling. But a similarly-sized slice believes any bullshit one can imagine. Even without Murdoch, Bannon, et al, they'd have been riled up by some other nonsense. They've always been here. It's not that yahoos were created; it's that they were organized.


And God bless them. Democracy is not about you aways getting your favorite result. That's the other thing.

Abraham Lincoln in Portugal

I was recently asked why I don't hang around with American expats in Portugal. And for once I came up with an apt reply:

"I can't be friends with people who talk about their 'Forever Home'."

This is a standard conceit among Americans in Portugal. Like children in the Pashtun border zones radicalized by jihadi madrases, they've had their brains warped by cursed, infernal YouTube videos — in this case, videos produced by comely middle-aged couples brimming with wellness, inviting everyone to come live your best life in Portugal!.

Something clicks and hordes are transformed into Disney princesses seeking — with dilated pupils — their FORRRRREVER HOMES, and they require constant affirmation. You did it, Thelma! (more on this here).

In my teens I played music to entertain the residents of an insane asylum. And while there were a few I got to know a bit, I discovered that friendship is impossible with a person who thinks he's Abraham Lincoln. Not because I find it deviantly distasteful, but because it's insufficient to merely tolerate their view. To be friends, you need to agree. To buy in.

And I have way too much Bill Murray/Bugs Bunny DNA. On a good day, I can politely suppress my wince, my gurgle, my aggravated sigh. But only as a one-time thing, not as an ongoing service.

Scramjets and Gratitude

Japan's New Hypersonic Engine Could Make 2-Hour Flights To The US A Reality )

A team of engineers from Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and several Japanese universities has completed a successful ground combustion trial of a ramjet engine designed for a Mach-5 hypersonic aircraft. The test simulated a flight at five times the speed of sound. It was focused on validating the aircraft's heat-shielding, control surfaces, and engine performance under extreme conditions. The project's goal is commercial hypersonic passenger service by the 2040s.

It won't come online until the 2040's, so I will, alas, miss this. And it's been a life-long preoccupation.

But I lived through rise of the Internet — which everyone, at the time, thought sucked because there was spam, and dial-up was slow — which I still deeply value, though the rest of the world never made their apology as loud as their disrespect.

...and the revolution of digital media — which everyone, at the time, thought sucked because paper and vinyl were beloved and synth tracks circa 1985 were super-cheezy — which I still deeply value, though the rest of the world never really acknowledged the vast perqs.

...and the arrival of artificial intelligence — which I deeply value, though everyone thinks it sucks because idiots use it poorly and post their slop everywhere.

So I do feel a pang for scramjets. But it's ok. I got an awful lot.

Ken Peplowski

Ken Peplowski, widely considered the best jazz clarinetist of his generation, passed away this year, far too young.

I didn't know him as a clarinetist. He was originally a great tenor saxophonist, and gravitated to clarinet later because that's where the gigs were. Musicians don't really make career decisions. They don't have the control or power to choose a course. Their careers are decided for them, however they might deny it.

I knew Ken from Mr. Hick's Place, the tough organ blues joint in Roosevelt, Long Island where Eddie Murphy, who grew up around the corner, had done his first standup (there was an autographed glossy in the manager's office, signed "To Mr. Hick's Place, where I lost my comedy virginity, love, Eddie"), and where I had that unfortunate incident with drum legend Roy Haynes.

Ken was a wonderful jazz and blues sax player, but he started getting more work playing swing, and then more work on clarinet. Soon he locked in there, and hardly anyone knew how much more he could do. When Ken and I occasionally crossed paths in subsequent years and I told him about the bebop, free jazz, klezmer, salsa, and other wide-ranging styles I was playing, he'd seem a little wistful. He could have excelled in any of those scenes. He had similarly free-wheeling DNA, but success can lock you firmly into a narrow space. Me, I had the great good fortune to be starving to death, and playing anything I wanted.

Another player our age back in the day at Mr. Hick's Place was modern jazz saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, also wailing the blues at the time. We never shared a stage; Ellery and Ken played weekly like me, but we each had our own night. Ellery was also versatile, and might have wound up a swing guy like Ken, or a miscellany guy like me, but we all took such extremely different tacks that today it's almost impossible to believe we all converged so early on doing that.

Come to think of it, it's probably weirder still that I became a food critic and Internet entrepreneur. We didn't diverge, we careened.

Fast forward a decade from the Mr. Hicks years, and I'm playing with the Lionel Hampton big band. One night the great Benny Golson is substituting for Hamp. Golson is a sophisticate, a glass of fine cognac, very harmonically advanced but he played with a velvety ease that made it easy to forget how modern he actually was. The band, which had been Clockwork Oranged by Hamp and his manager to play with an intensity that could best be described as desperate/frantic, goaded Golson into uncharacteristic bluesiness that turned rambunctious and, finally, screamingly rambunctious. I almost couldn't believe my eyes and ears. Imagine Tony Bennett yelping like Sid Vicious. Of course, Benny sounded great.

While I was waiting on the bus to be driven back to town, Benny boarded and settled into the seat across from mine. “Will a recording of this evening’s performance be issued in Japan as 'Benny Golson, Hootin’ and Hollerin’?” I asked with a grin.

Benny cackled smoothly, his cool very much regained. After staring dreamily into the distance for a moment, he focused his eyes and turned his head back toward mine.

"You know, we all got our start doing that. Playing that music. Walking the bar. Any musician from my time who claims he didn't is a liar."

"Same," I replied, amiably.

How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government

A reader unwilling to click the "further reading" link below my previous posting, "The Posing Tourist, Revealed", graciously and politely requested that I flesh out my point more fully. Here you go.


What I’m criticizing here is not people adhering to tradition, convention, discipline, or even rote repetition. A great baker may bake familiar bread. A great singer may sing within a familiar form. A great speaker may use ancient rhetorical tools. None of that is the problem I'm describing.

The problem is framing.

We've all been to bakeries offering perfectly competent pastries assembled from all the standard shortcuts. Their goal is to seem like a bakery; signal as a bakery; do bakery things. Not one bite delights, because it's 100% presentational. "Look at my bakery! I'm the guy running a bakery!" not "Taste my scone into which I've poured my heart and soul."

There are fewer devastating heartfelt scones today than previously, and more role-filling bakeries, not because people are greedy, expedient, or talentless, but because they're scarcely thinking of baking. They just want to run bakeries.

The issue is framing.

Music can affect and inspire when musicians show up to PLAY, rather than act like musicians doing musician things. Sing a legitimately soulful note without trying to hammily seem like The Soulful Singer.

This is not a plea for originality. Artists who frantically reject discipline and tradition to come off as innovators are the worst tourists of all. “Look! Now it’s me breaking the rules!” is still posing in a plywood cutout. Originality is just another image.

Sing, play, paint, or write something because you actually have something to say, and do so with heartfelt talent and care, and it will seem original — or, at least, personal — in a deep way even if you're working firmly within tradition.

This is also not an objection to inhabiting social roles in everyday life. Human beings naturally adopt recognizable styles and identities. That’s fine. The problem begins when this mentality invades matters of substance: leadership, thought, communication, art. The role-playing has leaked into those areas until there's blessed little reality left. We have leaders who speak entirely in the prefab language of leadership; weak, unserious men snarling about strength and seriousness.

People doing substantial or creative work should aspire to more than merely occupying an image of a person who does the thing. But people lacking any such aspiration have flooded into the spotlight purely to seem like thing-doers. The result is a world drowning in their canned fodder.

Yet reality still leaks through. Sometimes the bakery is awesome. Sometimes the singer truly moves you. Sometimes someone says something in a way that cuts through all the prefab cadence and reaches you directly. If this became a broader norm (even just an enduring 5% slice of the pie), we'd live in a fabulous world.

People do know the difference. Yet society is headed the other way.


My previous posting explained how this happens. How it goes off the rails. I don't see anyone else out there who's spotted what's happening, and why. And it's slippery to try to explain because 1. it's subtle, and 2. a world of poseurs is ill-equipped to discuss reality (it's like explaining the atmosphere to a fish).

The Posing Tourist, Revealed

Virtually every so-called creative artist in the world at this juncture does the equivalent of thrusting their eager grinning face into a cut-out hole in a plywood tourist tableau and saying "Look! It's me! I'm doing the thing!"

Whenever you hear the nth singer sing that bluesy note singers always sing to signal bluesiness, it's precisely that same impulse. "Look! Now it's me doing it! I'm the soulful bluesy singer!"

It's most flagrant with political speeches. Every politician gives the same speech. The words scarcely matter, because the politician has nothing particularly important to say. He's there just to be That Guy with the haircut at the podium giving The Speech. "Now it's me! I'm giving the speech!" At rare moments where the words actually matter, they can't rise to the occasion because shallow preening is all they've got. The posing tourist, revealed.

I've often noted that most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

But this is not really about singers.

Also, I'm getting ready to nix "most".

Further reading: "The Crux of Creativity"


Followup posting: "How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government"

Yogis

I've never met a yogi.

I've met many people performing yoga theater, but not one yogi.

How do I define it? With unusual tolerance. Just two simple asks:

1. You invest 99% or less of your energy into ego gratification (with — and this is critical — a downward trend), and

2. You spend 99% or less of your time posing (with a downward trend).

Instead, they grow egomaniacal about their glorious egolessness (awareness of pride ---> pride of awareness), and they strike a flamboyant pose of non-pretension. In other words: yoga theater.

When someone informs you they are "spiritual", it's helpful to hear the opposite. All you know for certain is that a pellet of gluten might fucking kill them. And if they've metastasized to the point where they display perma-smiles, soften their voices to a velvety hush, and thrust forward the deep, vast, profound pools that are their eyes in the same way a stripper would proffer her tits, best to steer clear. Spirituality claims to renounce image-signaling, while such people run the opposite way, full-speed. Which is scary.

Last week I visited a vegetarian cafe run by a stern, authoritarian, gaunt older woman with white-lady dreadlocks. A sign was hung front and center for all those entering: "This is a sacred space."

I tried not to grin, or to smirk, or to laugh uproariously, but failed miserably in a cascade. After surveying the plates of food, which looked unloving and harsh, I quickly beat it out of the space of her sacredness.

Imagine announcing to the world that you've created a Sacred Space. What are you saying about yourself?


The great teacher Nisargadatta, author of the classic "I am That," stressed, above all, sincerity. Funny how none of his many followers ever seem to talk about that part.

The Plain-Sight Secret About Investing

I'm replaying this posting from April, 2021


99% of investors have no idea what the bet is that they're making. It's shocking.

"Elon Musk seems super smart, and he's had so much success in the past, and his future plans sound exciting. Tesla seems like an awfully good bet!"

No. Don't do that. The purchase of Tesla stock is not a bet on the company, like betting on a horse in a race. It's one level more sophisticated and abstract: you are betting on the underestimation of Tesla by other investors. That's the bet; the only bet. You're never betting on a company, you're betting against other investors' sentiment about that company. And those people are all aware of Musk's history, too. That's not privileged information.

Have you ever noticed that many people imagine that when they say the same old shit we've all heard a zillion times it has a special ring? "Now it's me saying it!" In everyday life, this daffy mental miscalculation is annoying. In the stock market, it pays for the 1%'s Lear jets.

This is, oddly, terrifically difficult for nearly everyone to grok. Small time "retail" investors misunderstand because they're naive (naïveté is the single greatest impediment to clarity). Day traders, who grok this in theory, lose touch with it amid the bustle of their manic and complicated trading (complexity is the second greatest impediment to clarity). And professional financiers, who understand this better than any of us, are distracted by their smug self-confidence (ego is the third greatest impediment to clarity).

Most of all, it's a framing problem. If you're an addicted gambler (as most investors are, at all three levels), you do not possess a lithe perspective (see this for how addiction is a framing problem). You are rigid and stuck. You are compelled to see things like a horse track, and can't find the calm latitude to reframe to a more sophisticated, subtle, abstract perspective. Your attention remains riveted to "GO TEAM,” in all-caps. 

We all have an opinion as to whether Amazon still has room to grow, or if Tesla can maintain profits with big automakers getting into electric. Opinions are like assholes; we all have one. And yours may even be correct. But that's not enough. Because your bet is not on Amazon or Tesla, but against titans infinitely smarter and better informed than you. They effectively set the price, and that price already reflects their (smart) consensus opinion. And there's not a single thought in your head that's ahead of them. So you will not only not win against them; they will, over time, eat your lunch.

So don't read annual reports. Don't try to be a smarty. All info is already baked in to the price by people way smarter than you (if you assume no one's smarter than you, then I have good news: your impending poverty will divest you of that delusion). Again: You're not betting on a company, you're betting against the market's estimation of that company. It's not a proposition of predicting business success.

So why would anyone bet against billionaire geniuses and their office towers stocked full of MIT educated analysts? Wouldn't that be crazy?

Yes. Yes it would. Which is why people should invest in index mutual funds, which rise (and, alas, sink) with the market, often bringing even better success than the outcomes for individual twitchy billionaire geniuses (because the latter are limited by ego and an addict’s perspective).

The only exception is if you have some sort of an edge. Which 99.9999% of the time you won't.

Patience is a potent edge. The billionaire geniuses need to be constantly hitting home runs. They can't patiently wait stuff out. They're twitchy. That's why my strategy of buying Apple in its downturns has worked. I can park my money for a year, and those guys can't. Neither can day traders, who are equally twitchy. So, often, it's only sad little me buying on downturns and selling on peaks, while everyone else spazzes out, flocks irrationally, and goes foolishly the wrong way. They’re pursuing bazooka home runs this quarter while I’m content with 25% gains next year. I gobble up discarded crumbs.

Specialized knowledge can also be an edge. A friend runs a genetics lab, and told me TXG's technology would one day be ubiquitous. He could hardly wait to have it, himself. I bought at $54, and it's now $188. Of course, it might just as easily have crashed. Maybe the CEO is a dork. An edge is not a superpower, it's just a way to marginally de-shmuck oneself. Billionaire geniuses also know people running genetics labs. Mostly, I got lucky. But a little luckier than if I'd flown blind, trusting my own puny acumen.

Years ago, I wrote breathlessly about SIGA, a company with an entirely effective (and no side-effects) smallpox cure. It’s a bio-terror countermeasure (it works on weaponized versions), and it also works on cowpox and monkey pox, which are both still out there. I'm still hanging on to half my shares, and at $7 I've made out decently with my $2 investment, though it's sat listlessly for so many years that it's no jackpot. This year I expect at least one big foreign government sale, and/or a sale to US gov with a different formulation, which should hopefully pop the stock back to $12-15. At that point, I'll sell (there's time pressure: their patent on the drug actually runs out in a few years - insert bug-eyed/astonished emoji - and soon I'll be so old that I'd only enjoy a jackpot by gold-plating my walker), and it will amount to good profit despite the ridiculous time lag. In this case, my patience was my edge, then my stubbornness was my edge, then my religious faith was my edge, and, at this point, my stupidity is my edge. All these things are unavailable to billionaire geniuses. I stay in my lane.

It’s hard to understand this maxim, and harder still to live by it. And it’s almost impossible to find an edge for yourself, and harder still to maximize that edge without being clouded by ego or by addictive glee over successes. 

I seem to be at that latter stage. I’ve been beating the market (I bought in low to CRIS, PRKR, BCRX, and the aforementioned TXG and SIGA, in addition to cultivating Apple’s periodic lulls). But it’s more than likely a blip, like flipping “heads” a few times more than likely. So I’m keeping my outlay prudently low. 

Infinite Wealth, Baby

I'm spending very little here in the land of 12€ lunches, 30€ doctor visits, 200€/month health insurance payments, 50€/month condo fees, 4€ 15 minute Uber rides, 35€ grocery bills and 1€ wine carafes. And my health, while stable, isn't such that I foresee 20-30 years of hearty functionality. So, per this posting about the non-linearity of spending with age, I've been trying to enjoy a little more and relax my spending limits. All the saving and sacrifice I've done (more than most people, I believe) ought to lead to something while I'm still able to enjoy it. Now's the time.

The result has been surprising. I had to be in Lisbon for a 7am appointment, so I booked a hotel. And I chose a really nice one (paradoxially, in one of my most impoverished eras I was put up by promotors at five star European lodgings while on jazz festival tours, developing a taste for nice hotels). It was...nice. Oh, and my favorite film director just released a blu-ray in USA only, so I paid Amazon an extra $30 to send it across the Atlantic. And....that's about it.

Sometimes when my socks feel unfresh I switch mid-day, knowing it will increase wear and tear (having been quite poor for a long time, that will never not set off mental alarms). "Spendin' money!" I boast cheerily to the empty room, a big shot flinging slighty wilted footwear into the hamper.

So, figuring a dollar's depreciation on the socks plus blu-ray and hotel, I've lavished a splendid 331€ on myself this year above/beyond basics.

I decided to try harder. "I am infinitely wealthy," I announced to the audience previously awed by my sock performance. But nothing's happened. Though I feel no deprivation aside from the ironic let-down of finally removing dampers only to discover that the engine needn't race.

Me & You

If you evade the commands of a control freak, they'll see you as trying to control them.

Similarly, egomaniacs view assertion as challenge.

I used to wonder why a book explaining "I'm OK – You're OK" needed to be written, much less sell 15 million copies to readers stunned by the gleaming insight.

But I've also wondered why the Golden Rule is widely seen as loftily unattainable.

Rebel Conformity

Political extremists often criticize moderates for being dull and boring. My experience is the opposite.

Every progressive and every MAGA sings pretty much the same song. But while moderates sing less flamboyantly, they often have unique views they express in freshly personal ways.


Millions feel genuinely maverick for their interest in "indie-rock" or "independent cinema". I don't even understand how those terms can be used unironically at this point, but the culture has pivoted to accept flocks of dull slobs grasping at formulaic banality to feign nonconformity.

My Own Internal Portugal

Portugal is a country of charming, acceptable sloppiness where there is no patience whatsoever for YOUR sloppiness because everyone's entirely fed up with the pervasive sloppiness (including, of course, their own). Any gaffe you make will break the camel's back.

And I'm experiencing my own internal Portugal as old age increases my likelihood of creating problems for myself in direct proportion to my impatience with self-created problems.

Instagramism

I'm finally reaching a point of clarity after 40 years of avid chowhounding — tens of thousands of restaurant meals in two dozen countries plus three years coming to grips with having gotten "what I'd wished for." Having landed on point in the epicenter of sublime grandma cooking, I've been increasingly desperate for cooking with precision and refinement.

I devour amply soulful €11 lunches daily, cooked by octogenarian Portuguese grandmas in the country's one happy town, enduring unpeeled fava beans (extract with your teeth, like artichoke leaves), un-cored baked apples (cut around it), well-done meats, and a staunchly limited repertoire referred to, in hushed religious tones, as "comida tradicional Portuguesa".

In my desperate seeking for precision and refinement, my impulse is to up-pay. Will someone who's actually trained as a chef please charge me egregiously so I can get a break from this unremitting flood of precisely what I've always wanted?

I haven't found this in Portugal. The swanky places in Lisbon feel...off. They're like photocopies of imitations of real restaurants. Thinly unconvincing attempts to wow via presentation, while the cooking has no extra nuance or touch at all. They'll gladly scoop wads of cash from your wallet, but the value-added is drizzly sauces, track lighting, and snazzy tall stacking. In a word: Instagramism.

I figured this was because Portugal is so steeped in grandma cooking that anyone aspiring to charge over 11€/cover skips other options and goes straight to Instagramism. Deliciousness means grandma, while fancy means photography.

But I'm finding this even outside of Portugal (but without the strong "grandma" stratum). And, come to think of it, this scenario was arising in America before I left. The world shot by me, and I'm only just noticing.

The age-old problem in food service has always been justifying premium. We all know that ingredients are cheap and fire is free, so the entire history of dining can be told as an increasingly elaborate effort to coax the johns into paying extra. So, really, Instagramism was present all along. Starchy linen tablecloths, well-attired fawning staff, careful plating on fine china and swanky jazz soundtracks "set a higher tone" long before the Internet arose. Such psy-ops were contrived in late 19th century France, and photogenic allure is just the latest gambit for spellbinding diners into up-paying.

But the food in linen tablecloth places used to at least sometimes be skillfully cooked, because at least a few customers — beyond preoccupation with status, trendiness and sensation — were also tasting with discernment. Now, much less so. Diners want to "bag" their photographic scores and display them like trophy mounts. While they still use the language of ingestion, it's flattened into "yum," the mindlessly visceral assessment one might translate from an eager hog deep into his feed.

Grease, check. Salt, check. Great photo. Yum!

So it's not that I'm caught in a uniquely Portuguese dining trap. It's that I'm experiencing gastronomic phantom limb pain. Because the choices now are 1. sloppy soulful (or less soulful slop), or 2. food that looks totally YUM. Ambitious operators are, naturally, drawn to the current luxury signifier: making food shiny and photogenic.

Jesus' Phone Number

I was suggesting local restaurants to a Portuguese friend. Suddenly, he had an idea to bounce off of me.

"Isn't it a shame there's no app that gives you surefire food tips wherever you go?"

I winced painfully and told him that I'd created that once. I gathered an unusually expert group of food lovers to swap tips and answer questions, and it eventually scaled so large that a staggering number of obscure nooks and crannies were explored and accounted for. He asked me for a download link, and I told him this was all a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

It would never work for Portugal, I explained, because here people mostly eat at the same lunch hole for decades, and the same special occasion place their parents and grandparents frequented. Lunch is at the place closest to home or work, and no one here would ever try the place two corners down. I work very much against the tide by exploring the full landscape of options. Since hardly anyone chowhounds (understandable, given that no country more richly rewards dining complacency), there are no savvy opinions to create an app around.

I didn't expect him to register that he'd received a reply from perhaps the most qualified person to answer that particular question. But I figured my response was reasonably interesting and persuasive. And here's how he responded:

After listening politely, he waited a beat and continued. "But, yeah, no, wouldn't it be great if there was an *app*—you know, like a smart phone app!—which would tell you the good places to eat?"

Is this mic on? Can anyone hear me? Did I not just say words? I could swear I just said words!

This, alas, seems to be the new normal. Not just with food, I mean with any topic. Way back in elementary school, I recognized that communication was a suspension-of-disbelief proposition. But over the years, it's either decayed still further, or else I'm noticing more clearly what was always true.

In either case, I've reached an extreme Twilight Zone scenario where it feels as if the humans were swapped out with insensate wraiths so lost in inner fog that they can't parse a word. No one seems able to process new information. Like early computers, we process only stock statements phrased within rigid semantic constraints—and then output pre-fab answers. It's like punch cards (and it's hilarious that we find chatbots—which can actually take a point and reply on-track—fakely superficial).

If I were to offer a devout Christian Jesus' personal cellphone number, he'd stare blankly as I spoke the numbers, not bothering to write them down. Then he'd graciously thank me for the information with the words he customarily uses for gracious thanks, going on to say some of the canned things he always says...like a video game character ("Evening, friend! What's your pleasure?" pipes up the burly bartender as you scour his medieval tavern for hidden treasure maps).

I haven't had a conversation that could pass a Turing Test in a very long time. To be sure, I've exchanged stock statements within rigid semantic constraints and been offered pre-fab replies, whereupon I feigned pleasurable engagement. More often, people drift entirely past my point as I offer them exactly what they'd professed to be interested in. Even if they'd hit a sweet spot where I could offer an authoritative reply. Or Jesus' phone number.

Happily, there's a lot of delicious food out there. And terrific movies and TV. Plus all the free sunlight and oxygen we could possibly want. We are so free and safe and healthy and comfortable and entertained as to be the envy of our ancestors, who sigh from their graves at our good fortune. But even in their repose, they're better conversationalists than we are.

Redistricting, Disinformation, and the Aesthetics of Cynicism

Like most anti-MAGAs (i.e. those to the left of, say, Mussolini), it’s been deeply engrained in me that Republican gerrymandering in Texas defied a norm, and Democrats are simply aping that move, exploiting the same norm, only much more successfully (in Virginia and Florida, etc.), and that Republicans are shedding crocodile tears over it.

But just because the other side lies incessantly doesn’t mean “my side” is honest, honorable and sane. It doesn’t, alas, work that way.

In fact, my engrained understanding of the redistricting fight, though emotionally satisfying, might have been spinny bullshit. Argh.

So I had a talk with chatGPT...

---

The Dems insist that their redistricting moves in FL and VA were merely tit for tat after Republican redistricting schemes in TX a few months ago. Republicans are accusing Dems of leaving the voters out, but Dems say that’s exactly what the Republicans did in TX.

But I just saw a tweet saying “state legislature elections have different norms for citizen involvement”.

Can you flesh that out, and tell me if Democrats are making a false equivalence? I’m anti-MAGA, but also anti-bullshit.

---

Short answer: both sides are telling selectively true stories. The “different norms” point is real—but it explains the disagreement more than it resolves it.

There are three broad redistricting setups in the U.S.:

1. Legislature-controlled (e.g. Texas, Florida)
Maps are passed like ordinary laws. No required public vote.
👉 Mid-decade redraws without voters are procedurally normal here—even if aggressive.
2. Commission-based (e.g. California)
Independent/bipartisan bodies draw maps.
👉 Bypassing them violates the system’s intent.
3. Hybrid / voter-constrained (e.g. Virginia)
Legislatures operate under voter-approved rules, and structural changes can involve referenda.
👉 Voter involvement is part of the design.

So:

* Texas: legislature redraws mid-decade → normal process, partisan outcome

* Virginia: voters approve a change enabling a redraw → more participatory process, same partisan aim

Different procedures, same underlying move. Are Democrats making a false equivalence? Not exactly—but it’s slippery.

They’re right that Republicans normalized mid-decade gerrymandering. But they stretch it by implying: “this is exactly the same thing.” It isn’t—procedurally. It is—strategically.

Republicans, meanwhile, complain about “cutting voters out” even where voters were explicitly involved, leaning instead on a broader fairness argument.

The cleanest read: same game, different rulebooks, identical incentives.

---

I’m exhausted by all sides spraying untruths 24/7. “Everyone is lying to me incessantly” leads to Soviet-style cynicism—i.e. there is no truth. It’s a big reason I moved to Portugal.

---

That slide is real—but it’s also a trap.

There’s a difference between “everyone is lying” and “everyone is spinning from a position of interest.” The redistricting fight is closer to the second. It feels like the first because both sides are telling true things that are strategically incomplete. A few things remain solid:

• Mid-decade redistricting is now normalized

• Both parties use it for advantage
• States operate under genuinely different rules

The confusion comes from collapsing two axes into one:

* outcome (“it’s the same”)
* process (“it’s different”)

Both are true. Neither is sufficient alone.

---

Hey, one does what one can. But my unfamiliarity with Portugal keeps me planted in the immediate and not drifting out into the fluffy storyline strata of it all. Unfamiliarity plants you in the here-and-now.

---

That’s a useful constraint.

Operating in a second language narrows interpretation. You track what’s actually said, not the expanding cloud of implication.

---

Portuguese culture generally parses as adorable, largely because it’s unfamiliar.

---

What reads as “bullshit” at home lands more like “local shimmy” abroad—not because it’s purer, but because it hasn’t yet collapsed into a familiar pattern.

The downside: drift, missed expectations, the 11:00 that becomes 11:40.

The upside: less narrative inflation.

---

It occurs to me that I might have missed a critical axis in this equation: tedium.

Maybe I’m not sick of being lied to incessantly, but am mostly tired of being lied to in the same irritating way.

That tracks with cynical Russians I’ve met. They’re more bored than angry. I used to figure they were numb from long suffering. But perhaps it’s more about length and less about suffering. They’re fed up with the form more than the content.

---

That’s the sharper cut.

After repetition, the brain compresses: “I’ve seen this move.” Novelty disappears. Attention withdraws. What remains isn’t outrage—it’s boredom. Not “This is intolerable” but “This again.”

If tedium is the driver, then the opposite of cynicism isn’t truth—it’s novelty: encountering something that doesn’t instantly collapse into a known pattern.

So instead of: “Everyone is lying so there is no truth,” you get: “Everyone is running the same scripts so I’m exhausted by the repetition.” Less existential. More like creative bankruptcy.

---

Yeah. Nice aikido flip. And I think it’s apt, and not mere “copium” (i.e. just “a nice way to think of it”).

---

It helps—but it doesn’t absolve anything. A stale lie is still a lie.

What changes is the affect. Outrage energizes, while boredom anesthetizes

Systems don’t need to persuade you. They just need to out-repeat your capacity to care.

---

I guess it boils down to “Lie differently, please!” It’s an awfully odd stataement, but it wouldn’t provoke a knowing chuckle if there weren’t something to it.

---

Exactly. It’s not about truth—it’s about repetition.

“I know you won’t stop—just don’t run the same script.”

That’s acknowledged artifice. The joke lands because the pattern is seen.

There’s a catch: better lies can re-engage you without improving anything. You’re asking for better performance, not better truth.

---

It’s a huge shift to pin the problem on aesthetic considerations. Tonal considerations. Dramaturgic considerations!

---

Yes—that’s the turn. You stop asking only “Is this true?” and start asking “How is this being performed?”

Now you have three axes:

• Truth
• Power/Intent
• Aesthetic (alive vs dead performance)

Tedium is what aesthetic failure feels like from the inside.

---

Cynicism could be parsed as interest shifting away from some strata due, largely, to tedium. Even though it’s always attributed as a rejection of substance (“those bastards!”), due to projection. I.e. “The preoccupation that previously drew my passion has failed to hold my enthusiastic attention. My fallen interest must be their fault.”

---

That tracks. Cynicism often isn’t heightened clarity—it’s attentional withdrawal. “I’ve seen this scene too many times.”

That withdrawal gets recast as moral judgment, ala “they’re contemptible,” which preserves a sense of certainty. But the underlying shift is simpler:

curiosity → recognition → saturation → disengagement

Seeing that distinction prevents the jump to: “there is no truth”

---

If you have no fresh new stratum to shift to and absorb in to replace the one that dried up for you, you’ll wind up listless and defeated. But that’s not the inevitable outcome of cynicism, even though that’s how we imagine cynics. You can always reframe into some new enthusiasm or perspective or movement or general area of concern.

---

Right. Cynicism isn’t terminal. It’s local exhaustion. If you can shift frames, you don’t get stuck there.

---

Well, we’ve at least squeezed some epistemological takeaway from the current redistricting furor!

---

Not a bad yield. A messy political spat becomes a usable lens.

Impermeable Conviction

Even after a solid decade spent with our faces firmly planted in the thoroughly miserable psychological taint of a prodigiously wealthy and powerful man, our assumption that wealth and power constitute "winning" (and their lack compels and justifies aggrieved discontent) will remain fully intact.

Not a single nanometer of firm conviction will have been shaved off by this bitter experience.

Feral Cunning

Two things severely suppress intelligence: arrogance and ambition.

Intelligence flows freely through dilation, while arrogance and ego are constrictive. They pinch the pipes.

Self-pinching produces a certain sharpening: feral cunning. But while feral cunning is a mental phenomenon, I don't equate it with intelligence.

Humans, having comparatively recently come in from the fields and stopped crushing boulders, remain blurry about distinctions between different mental functions. Non-physical activity seems like a single blob, so "intelligence" sloppily covers everything not involving brute strength or steady hands. Feral cunning is done with the mind, so it's lumped under "intelligence".

This reconciles Donald Trump's stupidity with his shrewd flair for survival and dominance. As pinched as any human alive, he possesses extremes of both stupidity and feral cunning.

Going the other way, reducing constriction boosts intelligence.


One can smell constriction. Especially at extremes, it stinks. Literally rank stupidity. Dilation, by contrast, smells like perfume. This is what yogis and shaman mean by "purification".

Frank, the Cocky Loudmouth at the End of the Bar

A friend was bewildered as to why Trump appointed a clown like Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary. My reply:


Let me share an image I've been returning to since Trump was first elected. It explains his presidency pretty well. Not perfectly, but quite effectively:

You're sitting at a bar. Some stupid gin mill. And Frank, at the end of the bar, is a mouthy know it all shitbrain old dude who dominates conversations, so most people ignore him, which bothers him not one bit. Frank brashly spouts (to whoever will listen, or even to empty space) conspiracy theories, racist poppycock, and bitter criticism of those asshole politicians, knowing with all his heart that he could do a far better job than any of them.

From Frank's perch at the end of the bar, and 6 drinks into his late afternoon tear, that last part seems completely reasonable. Even though he's stupid and feckless and childish and undisciplined and ultimately just two balls and a mouth. Just because he's, y'know, Frank.

Say, through a series of screw-ups and accidents and lucky breaks and Frank's feral refusal to ever quit or acknowledge any limitation of any sort (plus loads of money from his Dad—or at least whatever's leftover that he hasn't squandered—plus a superpower of absolutely zero shamelessness or empathy), Frank gets elected president. Who does Frank appoint defense secretary?

Does he put in the work, flipping through binders of disciplined, stony civil servants and defense experts to determine someone qualified and competent?

Frank? Are you kidding?

No. "Who," thinks Frank, "is that pugnacious guy on FOX who's nearly as loud and cocksure as I am, who goes on and on about how we need to be TOUGH and stop being PUSSIES and HURT THE ENEMY and not be distracted with being NICE to people (gays, minorities, women) when we need real manly men who will SLAUGHTER REMORSELESSLY?"

Frank gets the name, and circles it with his Sharpie. "He seems perfect to me! That's my guy!"

Because of course he does. What else would you expect from Frank? Frank doesn't know anything. He's just that shitbrain from the bar. So of course he appoints the poser hair gel tough guy from the TV. How would this baffle you? What do you expect from Frank? Hey, you voted for Frank, suspecting that he was a paper-thin mouthy shitbrain running entirely on balls-in-your-face cocksure brio. And you're surprised he'd make this move?

For a sightly more satirical version, see Peter Seller's "Being There", a great film about a simple-minded gardener who keeps rising and rising.

---

And 1/3 of the country looks at Frank’s climb, and says “He’s just like me!”, and for them, it’s a glorious shattering of the glass ceiling. They’re in love.

Meanwhile, the Left hates Frank, but they're at least as devoted to this sort of political ego projection. According to their doctrine, every identity group pines for, and ultimately deserves, a politician who “looks like me.”

Me, sure, I’d vote for a Jewish president. But if a Presbyterian were an even slightly better candidate, I wouldn’t even need to blink at the decision. I can’t generate a nano-calorie of extra enthusiasm for a president who belongs to some group I belong to. How about someone smart? And competent? And hopefully, god willing, boring? Maybe that’s the way to choose a leader, rather than get one’s ego and victimhood (every American is an aggrieved victim) and self-story-telling all wrapped up in it. That’s how Franks get through!

We need to stop making politics a narcissistic mirror. That’s what frickin’ Instagram is for.

Don’t blame Frank. He’s just a disturbed opportunist. Blame us!

Working Around a Missing Feature in Apple Notes

Annoyingly, you cannot make a Note in MacOS read-only (i.e. unalterable). So if you have a note containing important information which you frequently open in mobile, a stray hand movement might alter its content and you might not notice in time to perform an "undo", leaving you "screwed" as they say in the tech world.

The standard workaround (until Apple finally solves this) is clunky:

Create a new Notes folder

Share the Folder with yourself

Set permissions to View Only

Move the note into that folder

That's a lot of work. And I can't anticipate all the consequences, some of which will inevitably be painful in some unforseeable way.

I'm a fan of lazy, dumb, good-enough solutions one might miss while trying to find a non-existent perfect solution. So here's my move:

Control/Left-click the note in the sidebar of the Notes app.

Choose "Duplicate"

Rename the newly created note so it sorts, alphabeticallly, just beneath the original version, but append the name with "(xxxxBACKUP VERSIONxxxx)".

And never ever open that one.

Dumb. Inelegant. Lazy. Sloppy. Welcome to my world!

On Clobbers and Velvet

When, in an otherwise peaceful, comfortable moment, your mind spasms into the not-here/not-now to present some gratuitous blast of fear/loathing/contempt/sadness/regret/bitterness/trepidation/etc., there is only one sane response:

"That's not here and now. That's gratuitous."

We confuse whims with clobbers—a tiny error that compounds titanically over a lifetime of indulging the mistaken interpretation.

Hardly anyone draws this distinction, even though it's a magic button. Why? For the same reason they conjure up all that immaterial strife in the first place. They wish to torture themselves a little, because the peace and comfort of the current moment feels vaguely troublesome or inadequate. It's unlike them.

"I am not a peaceful, comfortable person who basks in peace and comfort. I am a tough guy, or a punk, or a sullen adolescent, or a weary bitter cynic, or someone who craves sharp sensations—the very opposite of the velvety embrace of the current moment."

In one of my most popular postings, "Ballasting Happiness", I wrote:

If you know a worrier, you've surely discovered that such people play a perpetual game of "whack-a-mole". Alleviate a worry for them, and they'll instantly find something else to worry about. It's all about the mindset, not the worries themselves (if there are no real worries at hand, silly ones will be manufactured). They think they're plagued by worries, but, really, they're plagued by the desire to worry.

When you try to alleviate the circumstances that make an angry person angry or a sad person sad, nothing is accomplished because circumstance doesn't create the mindset, it's the other way around. The mindset comes first. Slings and arrows are sought out and eagerly grabbed at.

Your Uncle Louie is not an Aggravated Person because things aggravate him. Things have aggravated him because he's an Aggravated Person.

How does this happen? Everyone, at a certain point, decides how happy they will be (as with most such choices, cues are taken from the happiness of family members and others around them). This decision becomes a bedrock part of identity - the "I am this kind of person" inner narrative we all maintain.

I trimmed a couple of paragraphs, but recommend reading it all.

Some people can clear their slate—distinguish whim from clobber—if coaxed to simply notice the gratuitousness and the immateriality. They won't do it themselves, for the same reason they deliberately lead themselves needlessly astray. But the lightly gripped can often see clearly for a moment, and let go back into velvet.

Others are more far gone. They cannot perform this reset under any circumstances, because they're way too committed to the bit due to long reinforcement.

"My beloved deceased guinea pig Floyd is NOT something I just pulled out of the recesses of my mind. Floyd was REAL and my grieving is REAL and you can't tell me I don't MISS him every second of every day. The Hell with you and your "reframing". I loved Floyd in a way you'll never understand!"

Sometimes it's said with a near-wink. They recognize their self-indulgence, and are reasserting their whimsy, expanding the storytelling field to include the shmuck who foolishly tried to help. It's like raising a bet—"Not only will I not recognize reality; I will yank you into my delicious and turbulent unreality!"

Of course, the whimsy soon drops away, and one can find oneself locked into a hell of one's own imagining, unable to reverse course and make more grounded choices. Fancy quietly congeals into peril.

I can understand how children and adolescents might be unsettled and knocked off-course by incoming blasts from their mental noise, assuming it's real. It's harder to understand how someone might spend decades in such conditions without at least examining them.

Me, I stuck with the bit until age 47, when I found myself locked in profound oppositional conflict between actuality (a peaceful night planted on a comfy couch drinking sumptuous wine watching a great movie on a vast TV) and incoming blasts from my inner mind (it's Christmas Eve, and, having failed utterly to live up to expectations, I am revealed as a pathetic wretch—all the more so given how plumply and disgustingly self-satisfied I'd momentarily felt amid my pitiful failure).

Read the story here

Back and forth; back and forth. I was so lost that I could not tell which side of that coin was true...even though one was patently, well, true while the other was pure mental confection. Not exactly a mystery for the ages!

After spending entirely too much time grappling with the patently obvious, I literally came back to my senses, recognizing that the desperation, shortfall, shame, and thirstiness were entirely fabricated, while reality is the velvety embrace of the current moment. Reality is a point of return that's always available amid our incorrigible flights of fancy...if we don't lose all touch.

You may dispute my observation that the current moment is always a velvet embrace. Things, after all, do go wrong.

Yes, they do, but only for a moment. 99% of the pain and emotional confection are pre- and post-tremors. And the problematic moment doesn't seem problematic, because (if it's a real problem, and not just some storyline you've created) you're occupied with acting—with solving the problem!

If someone, right now, suddenly pointed a gun at you and demanded to know "where the money is," then, ok. That's not velvet. But you won't know it, because you're not checking. You won't be sensitively dipping a toe into your emotional waters to gauge how far from perfection the temperature's drifted. You'll be entirely occupied with dealing with the situation, not fussily weaving it into your narrative of pain and woe. It only frames as a problem once it's no longer a problem—later, while poised in velvety embrace. That's how you know you're at peace: when you start manufacturing stress.

Agitation is the hallmark of comfort, peace, and velvety soft embrace. And thus an eternally easy flip.

Further reading


Dreams and whimsy are a wonderful human perk. There's no need to use that faculty for self-torture. Creative dreaming leads somewhere good. Buying into gratuitous misery does not. We can be selective with our whimsy, opting out of the sort that doesn't help.

Entitlement

There is nothing more exasperating than to watch someone with a shitty job do a shitty job at their shitty job out of the unshakeable conviction that it's beneath them. They deserve so much more!

Never do they notice that that they're presenting incontrovertible proof that they barely deserve even the woeful predicament they lament.


Related:
Martin Luther King on street sweepers
"Billions, Millions, Thousands"

Standards

Doing a thing 5,000 times, you'll be rewarded with one of two possible magic tricks:

1. If you try to do slightly better each time, your output will come to seem like more than the sum of its parts. At first, only subliminally. Your cookies "grow on" people, or your prose is "hard to put down". Over time, greatness arises.

2. If you try to maintain quality, you'll nail it even on bad days and under poor conditions. Your magic trick is consistency. A sort of heroism.

But if you don't set a standard to maintain or to push, results will be scattershot, and you'll often find yourself impatiently awaiting inspiration. Magic appears to arrive, erratically, "from above".

This applies to all human action, not just one's center stage activity.

Exceptionalism

Rick Wilson, inventor of the immutable political axiom “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, writes (regarding the Noem and Bondi—and, soon, Gabbard—firings):

You’d think after a decade of watching the Rick Wilson School of Applied Political Thermodynamics, these people would understand the phase change from “loyal foot soldier” to “discarded husk” is an absolute, an inevitability for anyone in Trump’s crapulous orbit.

I mused, as a kid, about how guys who’d stolen girlfriends from other boyfriends always assumed they’d live happily ever after with said stolen girlfriends. What makes them so certain the same fate won’t befall them, given their paramour’s fickle track record?

It’s because everyone, in their heart of heart, thinks “I’m different.”

This, just like “ETTD”, is a peephole into the gargantuan self-superiority and narcissism quietly lurking within the *average* person. Everyone’s exceptional. Without exception. We fail to grasp how narcissistic everyone is, because we’re all far too narcissistic to notice.

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.