Spending Your Savings

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. I once explained how advancing age brings less desire to spend. It's smart to loosen up and have some extra fun about a decade prior to that point. Like I said, "You will absolutely want clean clothes and healthy food and a roof over your head when you're 85, but there will be vastly less interest in gadgets and vacations and fine copper cookware."

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

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

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

Tim Cook is a Brazilian Bus Driver

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

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

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

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

So I am an APOLOGIST.

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Happens to “Me”

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



Nothing Happens to “Me”

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

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

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

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

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

Showing Up Is Literally Everything

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

This...explains this

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


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

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

A Dystopia of Weaponized Friction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

How I Fixed My Stomach, Baffling Doctors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

How to Be Accepted Where You Don't Belong

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

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

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

1. Stay the hell away, or

2. Strive to conquer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Feeling vs. Being, Again

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

1. Not eat like a pig, or

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

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

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


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

AI is Not Hype

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

That didn't happen.

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

Extreme Hypocrisy

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

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

Hypotheses

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Driving Cars Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are other edge case considerations with self driving cars.



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

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

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

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

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

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

My Miracle Shower

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

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

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

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

Three problems at once:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bozo really knew what's up.

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

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

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

But now this.

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

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

A dry bath mat is no small thing.

Post-Covid Narcissism

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

From Wall Street Journal: