Sharpening

Many people can guess the current time to the minute whenever they pop awake in the middle of the night. It feels like a superpower, but it's not.

Whenever a cashier adds you up, flash a total. Don't calculate. Don't try to be right. Just quietly flash a number, with zero effort. Pretty soon you'll get super good at it.

Whenever you check anything, flash a result. Nothing obsessive or emotionally fraught. Don't be like a daft compulsive gambler trying to game absolutely everything. Just flash a result, calmly, and see how you do. Then don't give it another thought. Let subconscious calibration happen.

Keep this up as a long game, and you'll get like Nostradamus.


This seems like kid's stuff. Unserious. But kids internalize all of human civilization in a few short years, while adults can hardly read a book. Maybe it's time to stop deprecating childhood tactics?

How to be Healthy While Sick

Last week I presented my ludicrously long list of ailments. I've been coping with them far better than I'd expected, and feeling pretty healthy, having baked a little limping, a little pain, and a little vigilance into my expectations. I've accepted a few limitations while happily doing the myriad things I can still do. Since medical issues have been flowing at wholesale levels, I've developed a procedure, which I'll share.

Really, we're all (per the title) "healthy while sick". Even if you have a clean bill of health, you most likely have a few issues back-burnered — plantar fasciitis, hay fever,, myopia, tennis elbow, lower back pain, ad infinitum. And since you've already learned to back-burner them (even though they present as very real and needful issues), then, great! You don't have to learn new tricks! Just use that same function for literally anything that comes up. Even if it's scary-sounding.

All your issues were scary at first, though you've forgotten, having handled, normalized and back-burnered them. So I'm suggesting you consciously keep that same process up and running, despite the 20th/21st century conviction that we must constantly torture ourselves over every suboptimal circumstance until we've thoroughly and maturely accepted it, lest we (yeegads) repress.

Acceptance doesn't require you to be thrilled with the situation. That will never happen, nor does it need to. Acceptance is an easy toggle. "Ok, that happened!" is all that's needed to proceed blithely.

If you're in such perfect health that you can't name any back-burnered condition, good news! You're actually a wreck! If you had the cash to image and test every part of you, you'd see a frightful array of worrisome problems.

None of us drives a gleaming perfect car off the dealer lot. You carry undiagnosed defects and malformations, plus a wide portfolio of dormant propensities. You, my friend, are an absolute mess. But if you're having a perfectly nice time in your fantasy of excellent health, I won't disturb that. In fact, I'm urging the opposite. Learn from how great you feel despite how bad it is! That's solid gold!

The mechanics of coming to feel like a “Sick Person” are far more complicated — and fluffy — than we imagine. We feel compelled to inhabit the role circumstance seems to suggest. But should a medical issue have the power to alter our sense of identity? Circumstance can't force us into role-play. We can choose our framing — it's volitional! As the Buddhists say, "pain is inevitable, but suffering is by choice", and we have ample unrealized freedom to tinker with parameters.

But even if you can't escape the urge to respond to circumstance by playing some new role, the remarkable thing about circumstance is its extreme richness. It can support a vast range of role-playing options. Ample reasons to feel sick or healthy. To paint ourselves as tragic or triumphant; victimized or unduly blessed. No matter how we slice it, it's all about pretending. So why not pretend better?

Enough philosophy. Here's the gritty how-to for making yourself a factory for the conversion of medical bad news into a sensation of wellness and balance.

Something new is happening, health-wise, that's strange and/or scary. Here's my flowchart, refined from a bewildering amount of experience:

Is this an emergency? If yes, handle it. If not, move to next question.

Does it require medical attention? IYHI;INMTNQ

Does anything need doing right now? IYHI;INMTNQ

Does anything need doing soon? IYHI;INMTNQ

Is there anything I can do to relieve symptoms? IYHI;INMTNQ

Is there anything I can do to hasten recovery? IYHI;INMTNQ

If I'm stuck with this long-term, can I do anything to shave off some pain and symptoms? IYHI;INMTNQ

If doctors have little to suggest, are there any self-healing moves I can try? IYHI;INMTNQ

Can I rearrange aspects of my life so the condition affects me less? IYHI;INMTNQ

Can I change my framing so the condition affects me less? IYHI;INMTNQ

What do I need to vigilantly watch for? Loop this one, and back-burner it, and enjoy your life. Seriously.

Notice what's absent: Absolutely everything else. All the gratuitous fuss. Cut that stuff to the bone and be like a jet pilot. Flinty, frosty, efficient. Just work the checklist.

And other than that, enjoy your life without footnotes or asterisks. Even if you're limping, drooling, and/or wheezing. Put away your cosplay props for playing "The Sufferer" and be stubbornly yourself, regardless of how it looks. Every human has that right! For me, to be out there tearing down sidewalks, regardless of stride elegance, is a badge of honor, regardless of how others view it. Work within limits. That's what life is. That's what they're all doing, and you can boast of working at a higher difficulty rating!

Every moment of your life has been lived within innumerable limitations. You've always played an imperfect hand. We can't fly, or run time backwards, or pass more than a couple of days without fainting for umpteen unproductive hours into snoozy oblivion.

So you've added another one to the zillions of limitations you were scarcely aware of because you'd settled into them so smoothly. So settle smoothly into this one! The only obstacle is the temptation to welp about it, or to weave dramatic narratives around it. You don't need to laboriously trek through all the Kübler-Ross levels. You can skip right to "blithe." Opt out of juicy potential attention or sympathy, and short-cut straight to a sensation of health and balance. Come on in, the water's fine!

Every word of this has been obvious common sense. Yet the number of people I've seen follow this course is approximately zero. I, myself, spent decades not doing it. But after being pummeled by a crazy profusion of maladies, I had to find higher perceptual ground. And now I'm virtually untouchable.

Ironically, I feel more stable now than ever before, at least in the current moment. It occurs to me as I write this that it comes at the expense of any expectation of ongoing stability. In the next moment, anything's possible. I've traded an illusion of ongoing stability for the reality of present stability. Which is actually the good stuff.

So while I'm not in perfect health, I do have perfect framing. And this leaves me with an impression of great health...at least during the long stretches where nothing's beeping or throbbing! :)

Trump and Putin: A Spiritual Take

Everyone’s trying to understand Trump’s mysterious bond with Putin. There may indeed be kompromat, but I propose that the following is equally significant:

Trump lived in a realm of comparatively modest transgression. Petty extortion, fraud, sexual coercion. As a psychopath, he was always capable of far worse, but in his world, deeper evil wasn’t part of his in-game experience. By thinking too small — by needlessly narrowing himself — he’d been leaving money on the table.

Then he met Putin, who murders flagrantly and shamelessly to secure his position, and has bankrupted his own nation via unbridled banditry.

Having never considered how far his own “gloves off” approach might go, this must have struck Trump as revelation. Putin made him see how much larger he could be, how much more space he could fill, how needlessly narrow his previous approach was.

Putin was like Trump’s guru, helping him achieve something like self-actualization, by modeling the way to a vastly enhanced sense of enlargement (all Trump ever sought).

Inside and Outside the Station Wagon

As a child, I once mistakenly pressed the "B" button in the elevator in my grandparent's Miami Beach apartment building, and found myself intruding on the custodial staff at lunch time. There was an absolutely revolting smell I couldn't identify. It felt like a violent attack (if you told me it was mustard gas, I'd have believed you). I mashed the "door close" button, desperately trying to escape.

It was garlic.

As a child, my parents would drive around the Lower East Side looking for parking so we could eat lunch at Ratner's. We passed malevolent-looking people lazily hanging around on the sidewalk. So these were "the mean streets!" How fortunate I was to live where things were NICE!

I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life on such streets while suburban douchebags gawked from air-conditioned station wagons.

As a child, Ricky Ricardo's band always sounded alien and a little corny. "Not our kind, dear."

I just hit a link and got a live audio page blasting intense salsa music. I'm not on this particular recording, but my friends are, and I didn't just enjoy it. From here in Portugal, far from that vibrancy, it was like a booster shot of essential missing vitamins. It reconnected me with my deepest heritage.

I'm not describing changes of taste, or even of mind. These were something more than that: reframings. And frames are strangely uncanny things. They can't be reconciled, because, obviously, they're differently framed! A framing is a distinct universe.

I chose, early on, to dive in to the full gamut with unashamed promiscuity. Not just emulating The Other, but becoming wholly part of it. I.e. reframing. There's plenty of upside. I can't imagine life without garlic or salsa, and my writing and musical careers both hinged on this. But the downside is that, at age 63, parts of me don't match up with other parts. I've been people with no connection whatsoever to other people I've been.

Sky Babies and Capuccino Foam

Behold the Hovering Sky Baby
Medical specialists — pediatricians and proctologists — probably believe themselves to occupy a higher plane than general physicians. Their extra training feels like a badge of specialness. They're the specialest! We cling to what makes us feel special and ignore the rest. And it's that second part that I'd like to discuss.

In the long arc of their education, an orthopedist's specialty training is barely an eye blink. From 30,000 feet, they are 90% doctor and 10% specialist. From 50,000 feet, they're 95% educated humans, 4% doctor, and 1% specialist. And from the interplanetary view, they are babies who came an unimaginably long way before learning the word "orthopedist." The banal stuff was the miraculous accomplishment. The rest is frosting.

We talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, but we all stand on the shoulders of our younger selves. One's specialness is just a thin extra layer. We accomplished much more before, but we casually dismiss all that because it's common. Entranced by our thin frosting, it's easy to view common accomplishment as a blank — as no accomplishment at all.

The barista never acknowledges the complex chain of expert exertions that brings beans, machines, and techniques to his café. For him, the clever little clover he creates in the cappuccino foam is the elevated part, because it required two intense hours to master, and feels like his "signature". The rest of his day is just coffee stuff.

We deprecate the vast work of getting up to par, simply because it's par. And we massively overemphasize the top layer. The foam. The frosting.

The aforementioned baby, who internalized human civilization in a few quick years, hovers massively overhead like Kubrick's sky baby. Not that we'd notice. But we're all that baby, no matter how we fuss over our foamy clovers.

Dunning-Kruger, Dunning-Shmooger
Dunning-Kruger proposes that low competence people tend to overestimate their abilities because they lack the competence to recognize their own shortcomings. And, conversely, competent people tend to be underestimate themselves, astutely recognizing their capacity for error.

But both low competence and high competence people have mastered human civilization. They've learned tens of thousands of words, and to drive, use chopsticks, and pick up babies without breaking them. This immense mundane achievement dwarfs any shiny power-up. Those who've added a jazzy ribbon stand a micron taller, if that.

This explains the puzzling phenomenon of ordinary-seeming people showing swaggering pride, seemingly unearned. No, they're right; they earned it. That's their frosting, even if we mis-frame it like a neurologist sneering at GPs taking pride in their teeny tiny medical skills. Coddling our foamy clovers, we miss the contour.

Flip things over and we all look like clods. How many distinguished neurologists can take a punch, or play the viola, or speak Swahili? But if we're going to focus on accomplishment, we must acknowledge that anyone functionally present in day-to-day life has done impressive work.

The vaunted Dunning–Kruger distinction collapses into a tiny calibration error — a microscopic distinction between grand masters and slightly jazzier grand masters. The supposed "incompetents" have PhDs in human civilization, even if they type "your" instead of "you're".

Why Hacks Think They're Geniuses
In 2019, I wrote "Why Hacks Think They're Geniuses". It explains why people in the creative arts are so stuck-up even when they seem to have no talent at all:

It's super hard to write a lousy book, compose a lousy symphony, direct a lousy film, or paint a lousy mural. It takes ten years of instrumental training plus another decade of improvisation experience to even begin to call oneself a jazz musician - far longer than med school! - so it's little wonder that every unexceptional player considers himself some sort of genius.

Every purveyor of crap feels - with good reason! - like they've made the Big Sacrifice.

This explains not just creativity, but the whole world.

You're Not Going to be on TV

I am an old hand at not being on TV. There are more of us than you'd imagine. Let's survey the whole field from top down, from the perspective of someone who was actually a prospect.

At any given moment a handful of hit TV shows make lots of money. So much money that they shower down nourishment for the entire TV ecosystem.

There are also a few dozen (I'm making up numbers, but the gist is correct) TV shows simply holding on, chugging along, and making good money. And in TV world, "good" money can make a bunch of people wealthy. You can become a mogul producing decent TV shows that merely chug along for a while.

Then there are failures that disappear without a trace. Hundreds of them, and even here there is money to be made. If you're on the air, you're being paid TV money. A C-list actor (or producer, editor, cinematographer, etc.) who does a succession of dismally unpopular projects is "working" all that time, and getting paid TV money for that work.

The largest part of the iceberg is below the water line. It's called "Development." Your hypothetical show is not on TV, and almost surely will never be on TV, but someone views it as a prospect and can afford to keep it on the back burner. Scripts are written, casting is done, and dealmaking remains in some mode between "frantic" and "moribund", but even the latter feels dynamic. Everyone and everything in development has the patina of dynamism and excitement if you're a newbie...and the pallor of death if you're experienced.

You feel like you're moving forward toward bright lights, but are really caught in warm storage with slim odds of escape. In fact, it's damned near impossible to tell whether you're imminent or you're stuck. Here's the really weird fact: an entire population of people work their entire lives in development, never once making something friends and family could tune in on their teevees. And these people live in pretty nice houses and drive pretty nice cars.

At the bottom of the barrel, there's the trawl. A vast gamut of agents, producers, and handlers gather sardines and decide whether to pack them into development queues from which a lucky few might eventually move on to make actual shows which almost surely will fail. And, oh, look! There's circa-2000 me in that net! Wave, everyone! Hiya, Jim!

The trawl is unmappable, but I can assure you that if you do anything prominent and have any heat behind you, someone sometime will wave the prospect of TV magic at you, and you, newbie, will feel on the verge of mainstream grandeur. But no. You're not going to be on TV.

People mistake “I’ve entered the pipeline” for “I’m on my way." They don't realize that the pipelines have loading chutes the size of continents.

If you're not even being trawled, there's a 0% chance you'll be on TV. If someone reaches out, there's a .1% chance. If you're in development, there's a 5% chance. And if your stars really line up, you might have the privilege of failing with a crappy show no one watches that swiftly disappears. Meanwhile, in the heady stratum above you, you periodically glimpse the shadow of titans hanging on to decent success.

So, you lucky incipient superstar you, it's not what you think. You're best off remaining more of a blasé Bill Murray than a delirious yapping poodle. Because you're not going to be on TV. And if you are, it won't be like you imagined.

---

I have unaccountable pleural effusions (like the ones that killed my mom and grandfather); a cardiac stent; arrhythmia and AFib; profound campylobacter vulnerability; diverticulosis; shoulder calcification periarthritis; wrecked unstable ankles; weak/scarred plantar plates; osteoarthritis; tendinitis; vertebra rotation and pelvic torsion; vitreous detachment; sleep apnea; 50% hearing loss; tinnitus; positional vertigo; kidney stones; and middle-term memory issues. I can boast of being in the top percentile of medical torment, though I lack any star turn, i.e. some horrendous cancer or stroke, knock custom-machined aluminum alloy.

Each of those diagnoses made me feel like my life was forever changed. But after so ludicrously many, I've had plenty of experience with that impression. I'm no newbie. And perhaps you see where I'm going.

The moment someone says, “We’d love to develop this for television,” your life suddenly feels like Act Two of a movie. Likewise, the moment a cardiologist says, “We found something,” your life feels like you’re in a medical drama.

First of all, my bundle of issues is, of course, Unthinkable. But you know what I think about Unthinkability. We draw red lines out of the entitled conviction that the universe must respect our wishes. "I'm no fifteenth century farmhand or street sweeper! We're not Dickensian waifs! We are modern people of substance and worth, so when we say 'This shall not pass,' the Powers That Be had best pay attention!" Or at least that's the conceit. Our hilarious, baseless conceit. When we're all old hands with experiencing the Unthinkable, not that we frame it that way.

And almost none of these afflictions is "happening" in any palpable sense at any given moment. They're propositionally imminent — just like getting a TV show produced! As with TV, there's just enough vague evidence (sometimes I need to reset an ankle, eschew certain foods, endure some fleeting bit of pain, or have a physical therapist address my tendinitis) to stoke a sense of progress toward the inevitable. But they're not foreshadowings of massive transformation, though, on paper, sure, one could draw that connecting line. Development is, by any logic, a solid step closer to being on TV!

Having opted out of melodrama, things feel normal. We adapt like champs, and it's fun. Adaptation is the same old you blithely navigating fresh terrain, and terrains can be approached agnostically. We don't live on food, air and sunlight so much as on yadda-yadda. Realizing this level-headedly is how you avoid getting funnel-punked. Bill Murray, not yappy poodle.

If you return to your senses and simply let processes play, things seem far less hyperbolic. "Letting processes play" is what life is, anyway. Ask any streetsweeper or farmhand!

Yeah, I'm stuck in medical development. But the funnel's a head-fake. We're almost certainly not going to be on TV. And even if your TV show reaches air, you'd just parse it as "just more terrain". You're always you.

No newbie, I can't be punked. I'm not on the verge of becoming some other person. I am not inexorably fast-tracked to doom any more than I was fast-tracked to television glory. To be sure, I'm diligent and vigilant with health issues, and cleverly resourceful about self-healing. That's my daily terrain, rather than plowing or sweeping. Which is to say that my divergent trajectory already happened, and I hardly even noticed until I wrote this paragraph!

Open Letter to the Ghost of Richard Dawkins

One can't deny an assertion without a reasonable understanding of what's been asserted. To deny an assertion because "it sounds wrong" would be sheer intellectual arrogance, no?

"It's wrong because it doesn't pass my smell test — and I am the smeller-in-chief!"

Are you quite sure you understand what people are talking about when they use the term, "God"?

I've previously suggested that your style of atheism rests on a Straw Man argument:

Much of atheism amounts to a straw man argument decrying the absurdity of the notion of some higher-powered dude sitting on a cloud. Who, aside from pinheads and atheists, thinks any such thing?

But I'm not sure you've made even such flimsy an effort to understand. What, exactly, do you refute, sir? When a devout person prays with a full, poignant heart, kindling a profound sense of peace and consolation and a firm, ongoing present guidance far steadier and wiser than what they know themselves to be capable of, is that something you have personal experience with? If not, then what licenses such confident dismissal? In fact, precisely what are you even dismissing?

To wave such experience away as "mere emotion" is to pretend the label drains the reality. But the thing about the universe, as you know, Dr. Dawkins, is that labels don't have that power. Innumerable essential human experiences which can't be explained by logic could be bundled under that shallow catch-all term. Deliciousness, beauty, forgiveness, insight, et al. Many real phenomena resist logical dissection. This doesn't make them illogical.

A cookie is not delicious because of its 9 grams of fat, 10 grams of sugar, and adequate recipe. All cookies have similar ingredients, and most recipes are adequate, yet a rare special one makes us groan. Given that groaning is possible, why does the overwhelming majority not kindle this effect? Why has it not been formulized? Companies with billion dollar research and development budgets have failed to bottle the lightning, yet the world makes us groan in non-random ways that are impossible to dismiss. And it all makes not a lick of sense. 

There are groans you've never groaned. With arrogant tautology fully engaged, one might summarily dismiss all experiences one hasn't experienced. But how could you characterize such visceral dismissal as serious refutation?

I hear the skeleton of your objection as "I haven't experienced it, and it doesn't pass my smell test, hence "NONSENSE!" And this sort of oblivious haughtiness is the epitome of foolishness — and of comedy. Which reminds me to add "funny" to the list of real things that can't be touched, probed, or catalogued — nor flippantly dismissed as "mere emotion".

Perhaps, along with deliciousness, beauty, and forgiveness, humor should be waved breezily into a drawer marked "Emotion". I suspect, though, that you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss "insight" — an essential phenomenon in your day job, despite its uncanny mysteriousness.

One personal note, if I might. I've watched videos of your science lectures, where you stand before classes scrawling nonsensical symbols (most likely runes and incantations representative of your "beliefs"). You fill entire blackboards with ridiculous nonsense that makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Mark me down as a non-believer. Good DAY, sir.

Making Hay

Sometimes I'm fast-smart and sometimes I'm slow-smart (the rest is an uninteresting morass of confused incompetence).

The fast-smart part is talent. I can't really account for it.

The slow-smart part — the larger part — is, paradoxically, where I do my best work. Slow-smart really means stupid-but-tenacious. It's a much better faculty, though very few people discover this (I'll explain why in a moment).

The fast stuff is dangerous, and must be closely supervised. It's so facile that it can effortlessly churn out vapidity and wrongness (at age six I announced to my family that "smart people have no sense."). I've trained my slow self to vet my fast output in order to weed out bullshit. Meanwhile, my slow stuff requires no vetting. It's slow because vetting's baked in.

I constantly see people burying their slow sides, steering clear of entire realms to avoid even contemplating it. It strikes me as a tragic waste. I don't avoid butterscotch candy because it takes time to melt. "Painstaking" is good, so intellectual slowness — i.e. stupid tenacity — can be more deeply rewarding. More...intelligent?

Yet people twist themselves into pretzels to avoid contemplating their slow side, much less channeling it. We all want to feel super fast and super sharp.

---

It took me 25 years to touch my toes in yoga, while the bendy ectomorphs simply bent over and dropped. I gleaned volumes of wisdom from every millimeter of progress, and now when I perform a forward bend, the vibe in the room changes a little.

See also:
The obscure Vedic story told here

The Infinite Potential of Slow Learners

Samson

Naughty or Nice

Some people can't be in pain or inebriated without being mean to others. Their kindness is a fragile facade that shatters under duress.

Others aren't like this. They may grow less coherent and be less heedful of courtesies. But their deep-seated kindness remains intact, come what may.

I dislike flat umbrella terms like "good" and "evil". But however you might care to define those terms, this seems as good a test as any.

Debriefing Encounters with the Unthinkable

"Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable"

Why does that read fresh and surprising? Why does it jolt us into shifting perspective (aka reframing)?

Because we don't normally consider it. We're blind, subconscious, essentially asleep to this. Per dream logic, we perpetually find ourselves caught, Groundhog Day-style, in a fraught game where we MUST NOT TOUCH THE WALL, because it's REALLY REALLY HORRIBLE IF YOU TOUCH THE WALL, yet we touch the wall every single time (only scoring points by delaying the inevitable). We then hit "replay" so compulsively that we never hover thoughtfully above for a broader view. We're too busy stoking our petrification about the dreaded wall.

Let's consider two especially horrific and extreme examples of apocalyptic events that would have made any sane person pull the world's emergency brake:

When Russian invaded Ukraine and began perpetrating all those bombings and barbarities, it was expected that Ukraine would soon be essentially ruined, even if they managed to fight on bravely. Four years later, there's still a Ukraine, not a demolished killing field. Not that there hasn't been massive loss of all sorts (I'm certainly not making light!), but the people there are not post-apocalyptic wretches resorting to cannibalism. After four years of pummeling and atrocities and civilian targeting, the country is not ruined. Even leaving aside its remarkable military turnaround, it's somehow still Ukraine.

---

A great many people stopped working during Covid lockdown and survived with nary a yelp. A relatively small number went through foreclosure, but there were not vast mobs caught between grind stones of Dickensian poverty. No starving to death. No hordes of impoverished wretches living in Hoovervilles. Before covid, it would have been unimaginable to survive any such thing. And while it sure wasn't fun, here we all are. Still us.

An injustice or a cruel word can grate for decades. But survival and continuity are scarcely noticed. We just draw a new hard red line of unthinkability.


It's particularly hard to parse the daylight between doomed expectation and mildly suboptimal outcome. If I’m terrified there's a burglar in the house, and discover it's just a window swinging in the wind but stub my toe on my way back to bed, some deep visceral sense pipes up to holler “I KNEW IT!”

The Curdled Master

A musician recently died, and there is testimonial after testimonial about how he was the kindest, most wonderful person.

I've read a number of books about spies. Their trade secret is homework. Every action that seems to go right with a mere shrug is made possible by unimaginable hours of unseen preparation, backup preparation, and backup-backup preparation. A spy's edge over the rest of us is that they're willing to do that work, and we never expect it because we imagine we live in a world where people aren't capable of it.

This musician went so far out of his way to wrong me on multiple occasions that it defied all expectation. He "put in the work" whenever our paths crossed.

Was I rude to him? Did I steal work from him? Had I wronged a friend of his? Nope. My sin was that I was overly familiar and friendly with him once on a gig a very long time ago. I'd spoken to him with an easy camaraderie that he didn't believe I'd earned. That's it. Yep, that small. I noted his reaction immediately, an experience I haven't had before or since. There was a contemptuously curdled sneer that didn't appear on his face. It filled the room. His capacity for sour contempt was.....enormous. It was scored like a movie scene. It came with cellos.

I wasn't actually important to him, strangely enough. At all. A mere blip on his screen, so his efforts against me weren't constantly ongoing. But whenever I appeared on his radar, he'd get busy. I think he was a guy constantly on the lookout for radar blips.

I don't know how many blips he tracked, but I've observed, at a distance, several others. And I know for a fact that even one of his peers/friends saw him clearly. That musician (let's call him "Seth", not his real name) is a solemn part of the chorus of Facebook eulogizers. While Seth was never tortured by the guy (because he holds a prominent position in the business, so this guy was obliged to kiss up to him, not kick down), I once quietly complained about him to Seth, who rolled his eyes in displeasure at the sound of the name. So at least one knew....but kept it quiet.

I'm not uttering his name, you'll notice, and I'm no shrinking violet. Some people exercise an uncanny level of control. A guy who can curdle the whole room is someone you innately know not to mess with. Even after he's gone.

He taught me that there are predators moving among us, managing not to be recognized or explicitly acknowledged despite their egregious behavior. It's a horrifying thought, but at least today there is one less of them.


Sidebar
The above is, I think/hope, interesting even for non-musicians. And it's intended as a stand-alone. But I can't resist adding, as a sidebar mostly for any musicians reading along, this extra bit of color:

Truth is, there are plenty of awful, nasty-assed musicians near the top of the food chain in NYC. More garden-variety assholes, without the supernatural predatory component. I always tried to steer clear — easy enough, since Broadway pits and Nestle's Quick jingles were never my targets, even though that's where the money is.

As I sold my web site, which had grown beyond all intention, to a silicon valley corporation, I ran across all sorts of Silicon Valley characters. Guys with $100 million in the bank, who do enormous deals and drive super cars. Guys people have heard of. Guys so powerful that they can afford to be super-friendly and cool 100% of the time, because if they don't like something about you, they can simply eat you....and, as they do, they'd never stop grinning. Everything goes their way! Life's so great! :)

See the tale of Vrtra within the larger story of my sale of Chowhound.com

They each had reason to bully me or lie to me, because, for a cosmic five seconds I'd appeared on their radar because community web sites were the rage among the Big Boys and I had the most prominent food one. From one perspective, I briefly joined their league. But from a more realistic perspective, I'd become chum in their water, and thus imperiled. Just because they value you, or even "like" you, doesn't mean they want to do well by you. I, after all, love chickens and potatoes.

I got through it and receded back into obscurity. And while I never really got back into the music scene, I did briefly brush by a couple of the old music biz assholes, smelling their distinctive musk and remembering how they act — their malevolent gangster ways, hypercompetitiveness, and lavish self-importance — and it just made me laugh and laugh. Which was not what I expected.

Remember "Lil Archies"? The comic books where Archie, Jughead, Veronica, etc., are all 1/4 size because they're little kids? The music gangsters looked like "Lil Gangsters", and they just seemed absolutely ADORABLE. I wanted to pet them like bunny rabbits.

Why Everyone Seems Irrational

Every single person I've ever met is dumbfounded by the enormous irrationality of other people....even as they themselves are obviously irrational much of the time.

It stems from each of us feeling robustly capable from our experience operating in some narrow realm with clarity and competence. We feel comfortable forgiving our failings outside that realm. An otherwise competent person is naturally prone to err a bit, so it's forgivable!

It only feels like "a bit", of course, because the 98% of life outside our remote islands of competence and clarity feels like a junk drawer. Our self-image remains intact, so self-forgiveness is generous.

And we most often see others outside their remote islands of competence and clarity — especially on social media, hurling confident nonsense about politics, epidemiology, international relations, economics, etc.. We disregard their narrowly-earned self-respect as they rave on, aware only of the raving itself. And we do not share their inclination to forgive it.

Random interactions most often catch others outside their expertise. And we have more discretionary time than ever to pay attention, and to judge. We also have far more time to wander outside our own corridors of rationality.

---

I hired a really expert retired auto mechanic as a handyman once. He had no experience with home improvement, but he felt that nothing could come up that would be harder or more complex than his previous experience, so he felt qualified to do anything mechanical. He then proceeded to pretty much wreck my house.

Reverse Engineering Intellectual Humility From Fruit Selection

Choosing oranges is easy. Heavy = good, light = bad. Heavy is juicy. Light is dry. Water weighs more than dry pulp. Duh!

Yet I’ve never seen anyone perform this check. They poke, inspect, admire color, avoid blemishes, compare shapes. Even in Portugal, where oranges are everywhere, I watch shoppers deplete the various bins evenly, even if one contains noticeably heavier fruit.

How can anything so obvious remain so utterly invisible?

Even stranger: it took me six decades to see it, myself.

We should be trained by now. We choose heavy oranges and are sensually REWARDED. We choose light ones and are PUNISHED. Even mice can be trained. Why not us?

The orange trick is like a spooky invitation from an invisible dimension to consider what else we're missing.

It feels like we've nearly filled in the map of knowledge, so at this mature stage we are simply adding minor details to First Principles which feel like solid bedrock. But what if the "unknown unknowns" are far, far more numerous than we imagine?

We never knew we were walking around unable to choose oranges. No one knows the orange trick until they're told, so the rest don't perceive a gap. In our ignorance, we feel reasonably whole. What if, despite our blithe confidence, it's a landscape of gaps, and we never notice because the thing about gaps is that there's nothing there?

Is it possible that we have not, in fact, done anything like filling a map? Have we, instead, been plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched? Missed truth, leaving no evidence, can't be weighed. And yet we imagine — both as individuals and as a species — that we have some real sense of "where we're at.”

As a side note, even those spindly lines — our proud "First Principles" — might not be broadly foundational, after all. What if our First Principles are nothing but a tentative first try? Maybe our "First Principles" are more in the sense of First Batch of Pancakes? Idunno, I'm just asking questions.

Recognitions of missed truth do tend to accumulate in daily life, don't they? And if we're intellectually honest and not comically over-proud of human accomplishment, we might wonder whether the total mass of overlooked a priori "duhs" — the myriad latent epiphanies — might titanically outweigh everything we've figured out from a few centuries of plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched.

---

I have not devised some brilliant new orange choosing system. I have simply pointed out the obvious. So obvious that one absorbs it without a sense of prior absence. My point here is that there are many widely-know things no one knows.

Let's call them A Priori wormholes. Latently obvious insights that remain utterly invisible until they suddenly become boringly inevitable. Assimilation erases subjective evidence that they were ever missing.

Cosplay in Oppositeland

Truly competent people embrace challenge and correction. They never assume they've got the best or the only solution, and this makes them good managers and leaders.

Incompetent people despise challenge or correction. Whatever solution pops into their head is instantly canonized. It's not just stubborn vanity and over-self-confidence. They’ve mistaken the performance of leadership for leadership itself.

There is a clear but underrecognized pattern in the human world: Every loud THIS is a compensation for some uncomfortable THAT. So as one gains experience, this gradually begins to feel like Oppositeland:

Selfish people feel overly generous, while generous people feel overly selfish.

You can be smart or you can feel smart, but never both.

Super patriots have a magnetic attraction for tyrants.

Bullies become bullies because they're terrified.

Machos act macho because they're sexually insecure.

Smiley people can be the most vindictive.

Pomposity and arrogance are hallmarks of the dimwitted.

The most artsy-seeming people are almost never the most creative.

Flamboyantly aggrieved victims are usually coddled aristocrats.

Homophobes seldom recognize that straight people usually don't spend much time thinking about gay people.

And people never seem so low-class as when they try to act high-class.

It's mostly about the pose. The peformance. Let's try flipping the framing and see if the point settles more clearly:

Secure heterosexuals don’t try to act flamboyantly heterosexual.

Secure non-racists don’t try to act flamboyantly anti-racist.

Kind people don't plaster on flamboyant smile masks.

Genuine people don’t flamboyantly project genuineness.

Honest people don’t flamboyantly project honesty.

Smart people don’t flamboyantly project intelligence.

Helpful people don't flamboyantly offer to be helpful.

And great singers became singers because they wanted to sing, not because they wanted to be singers.


See also "Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You"

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 come 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.

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...

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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