Un-Priori

My physical therapist told me I'd need to ice my knee for a few days. I asked if it would need more than one icing per day. "More than once per day? I should hope so!" she chortled. It was ridiculous to imagine any therapeutic effect at all from a mere single application. I was told to ice three times.

I'm sure she was right, and I of course followed her direction, but here she was making an a priori argument in a situation that couldn't support it. If 5 icings were required, or 20 or 150, one might just as easily ridicule the notion of three daily icings.

Years earlier, a friend invited me along to a Wayne Shorter concert. He had an extra ticket. As we filed into our seats for the performance, I asked how much I owed him. "$100" he said. My mouth fell agape. "A hundred dollars? Really?" He looked at me like I was a boob. "It's Wayne Shorter! A legend! Would you really argue that Wayne Shorter isn't worth $100?"

"Why not $13,000?" I replied. Is Wayne Shorter not worth $13,000? Honestly, a mere thirteen grand sounds like a steal to hear one of the all-time greats!

Ice is therapeutic and Wayne Shorter is great. In these cases, they're indisputable assertions. But neither assertion, on its own, supports a particular numerical conclusion.

I hereby coin the term “Un-Priori Argument” for arguments where the conclusion is presumed to ride along on the self-evidence of an undisputed premise. It’s a form of non sequitur (where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise), in which the conclusion tries to borrow authority from the premise. And now that I've pointed it out, you'll see this everywhere.

Thank You

The rigidly taciturn manager-cashier at the one good Chinese grocery in town, who tersely speaks in minimal Portuguese, and who doesn't know a word of English....

One of the first signs of a newbie traveler is the expectation that Chinese people speak some English, like the oldsters in Chinatown back home.

...rigidly declines to show any indication that he recognizes me, though I know that I am a VIP customer, being the only one asking for holy Thai basil or fermented tofu or obscure Chinese versions of senbei.

It's the sign of a merely accomplished foodie to be surprised that Chinese know about Japanese senbei at all, when they've earned a firm and enduring spot on the Chinese snack pyramid.

But this time, he rang up my stuff, handed me the bag, and there was an almost imperceptible sotto voce "thank-you."

It was so quiet and bashful and slippery that I may have imagined it. And like with the Voice used, hypnotically, by the Bene Gesserit in "Dune," I felt restrained from remarking or reacting in any way. I could only walk out the door, making a loopy, asymmetrical face of utter disorientation.

Has he been working on it? Knowing a thing or two about taciturn Chinese cashiers, I know it is entirely possible he's been practicing for months.

Bad Back Fix

This is part of a series of postings on self-healing, which you can access via the "Self-Healing" tag which appears in the Slog’s left margin below "Popular Entries".


Does your back sometimes "go out"? Here's something incredibly easy and painless to try which can 1. prevent such crises (if you do it a few times a day while feeling ok), and 2. help relieve the crisis.

The things I normally need to do to fix my back when it's out are so agonizing, expensive, and annoying that it's almost outrageous how swiftly and easily this works, considering that it's damned close to doing nothing at all.

Of course, we all have different bodies, different back issues. So no promises. It's for garden variety recurrent back pain — the kind so many suffer from — rather than anything unusual, for example new injuries or unexplained pain. If this is a long-standing problem your healthcare peeps have evaluated, this is for you.

This should not hurt. At all! If you experience even a slight twinge of pain, stop. This isn't for you. The following is not a "no pain no gain" proposition. Also: I'm counting on you to be aware and careful about balance issues while standing on one foot. I'm assuming you're in decently fine form, and reasonably conscientious.

This is a bit wordy, just to be sure I'm clear, but the action itself takes one minute, tops, once you've learned it.

Preparation and Adjustment
Lie down on your back.

Flex your feet, so your toes point toward the ceiling.

Staying nicely relaxed, playfully extend one leg a fraction of an inch. Wait a second or two.

Pull back that leg, and extend the other leg for a second or two.

Slowly, calmly, continue this motion, one leg at a time for ten repetitions.

This next part will take some searching, but it's not hard! Repeat the same shifting action in the hips without moving the foot. You'll need to experiment a bit, but the goal is for the foot to remain still, while the hips slightly tilt, just like before. It's more or less the same action, but with a motionless foot!

Hold for a second or two, then repeat with the other leg.

Continue this motion, one leg at a time. Stay relaxed. No effort, no big "stretching". Just an easy, gentle, playful movement. It should feel very "no big deal".

Come back to it later. You may need to start from scratch, first with moving foot, then re-learning to keep your foot motionless.

Once you are familiar with the movement, you're ready to try it while standing, which is where the therapeutic effect happens.

The Move

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Stand facing a wall. Reach with your left hand to gently touch the wall with a finger or two. This is just to help maintain balance.

Bend the left knee slightly. Slightly! If you over-bend, you may get lots of knee clicks as you do the exercises, which you want to minimize. Very slight bend (if you get repeated clicks, try bending less).

Lightly raise your right leg from the floor a little.

Check to make sure you're straight, and not leaning to one side. Make sure your chest and neck and head are upright — i.e. properly aligned with the wall in front of you. The fingers on the wall are light, just for balance (if you're frail or have balance problems, find something to hang on to or don't try this).

Perform the hip tilt, slowly and calmly, both ways, for 5 repetitions.

Bend your raised knee to bring that foot in line with your standing foot. Your trunk may lean; correct back to straightness, and perform the hip tilts for 5 repetitions.

Lower the raised leg, straighten the knee.

Repeat on the other side.

---

Feel better? Everyone's different, but for me, this is like magic.

Note: if, at some point, the hip motion becomes a bit foggy for you, return to your back. It's easy to do the motion where your foot pushes forward, and, in the second version, with planted foot, you'll restore focus on the exact hip motion. Stand up at that point and try the exercise for real.

Note that this is not a permanent fix! You'll need to repeat this! But an easy, painless one minute go-to exercise (which you can do literally anywhere; I did it at the grocery yesterday, and no one noticed) beats hours of pain, trips to an expensive chiropractor, pain pills, hot baths, etc.

Advanced Additions
Here's a slightly more advanced addition. It has a stronger effect, and for me (maybe not for you!) it works well even in the midst of a crisis. But note that heavy pain can make your balance more precarious, so be smart and don't take chances!

Perform the above, adding in two more positions for your raised leg:

1. Bend and point the knee of the raised leg forward, with your thigh parallel to the ground (don't change anything else about your body position), and do the usual motion, but a little slower and, if you're in pain, perhaps a few more repetitions.

2. Bend and point the knee of the raised leg down toward the floor, with the foot tucked behind hips and thigh nearly perpendicular to the floor (don't change anything else about your body position). No deep stretches, no extremes. It should feel like no more than a light stretch (and the hip motion is what's important, not the stretch). Proceed with the same advice as above.

So what's the idea here? You're teaching your body that its stubborn desire to make itself assymetrical is not necessary. You're giving your body its bearings.


As with all my self-healing postings, I'd appreciate notes and feedback, whether it works for you or not. Feel free to comment below, or via email

Christianity

You can substitute in that quote, instead of Christ, "negative space", and it still works well. By negative space, I mean all of Everything that's not you.

Everything actually is you, but in order to feel that, you need to integrate what you've needlessly rejected and separated yourself from. And we can conceive of that as Christ.

I think everyone could potentially get behind that. Even atheists.

Steal This Bait!

Back in the golden era of Chowhound, when it was cranking with great tips, and thousands of experts stood ready to generously answer any question, I would occasionally take a moment to feel satisfaction. This monster was the ultimate answer machine, more useful than any food info trove previously imagined.

But those moments were short-lived, because I had friends who knew how good Chowhound was, and how much work it took, and how little juice I had left over, who'd email me to ask "Hey, Jim, I'm going to Prague. Where's good?"

It drove me nuts. I'd spent 10,000 hours, all my savings, and the majority of my hairline building a machine to answer such questions far better than I could. But they figured, being friends of mine, they could do even better by scoring a tip from the man himself. You know: the good stuff!

I might have never been to Prague. And if I had, it was likely years ago. And I certainly don't have comprehensive knowledge of the place. Plus, I'm exhausted! Exhausted from building a divination engine standing ready to answer your question nearly as well as it could possibly be answered, all for free! But it's like none of that ever happened. The machine was hand-waved into irrelevance.

"Fun web site, buddy. Now tell me where to find pizza. I'm a VIP."

I'd go round and round with them, but their response was always the same: "Sure, sure, I get it, Jim, but just give me one tip. One fabulous tip! Like only you can do!"

I'd explain how it didn't really work that way; that one inherently limited dude couldn't possibly compete with the aggregated knowledge of a million insanely devoted chowhounds. But they’d hear only dismissal. Mr. Food Celeb has no time for you.

The truth, of course, was that it felt like too much damned work to consult the divination engine. It had removed the need to buy and read guidebooks, or to shlep around endlessly. But checking a web site was still too much effort. Baby chicks agitatedly await mama bird's sweet, sweet vomit.

Remember the scene in the Jetsons where Jane pushes a button, launching a fleet of vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning robots, and then mops her brow in exhaustion from all the housework? Props to Hanna-Barbera.

---

Nowadays I get messages from acquaintances who've caught a Slog posting or two, or teasers on social media, and imagine I might have some insight re: sanely surviving the whole human-life-on-earth thing. They want to get together and "talk." I know what will follow: "Explain framing!" "Tell me useful stories!" You know, exactly what I've been knocking myself out to do here all this time.

I tell them that I've spent a lifetime pondering and eighteen years struggling to articulate my observations as clearly — and as entertainingly! — as possible. But they imagine that I merely dash this stuff off ("Fun blog, buddy!"), which is insane. No, I write dozens or hundreds of drafts each time until the writing is as clear and sharp as possible.

Just as Chowhound was a passionate kiss for food lovers, this is the very best I can do at making accessible the very best I can do. If you can't parse the effort, it's because I've applied still greater effort to make it effortless. Because that's how proper kisses work.

I've labored to develop whatever I have to offer into a form that's eons better than my raw output as some hapless blabbing dude. And, as with Chowhound, the thing I built must be worth something, or they wouldn't be approaching me!

But approach me they do, unhappy with my demurral.

C'mon, Jim. Just shortcut me to the good stuff.

Again, reading takes effort. But if they dove in, for even an hour or two, they'd likely catch the drift and be on their way to surpassing my own insight. In fact, that's the point! I'm not here to show off what I figured out. Like with Chowhound, my hope is for people to steal the bait, leaving me irrelevant! But the raw, simple sincerity of that proposition seems to make people chase a hidden greater win.

Declining Haughty Gamesmanship in Favor of Butterscotch

In my previous posting, "The Rip-Off", I described how I won — along every conceivable parameter, really — while making the most loser-ish real estate move possible. I claimed that this changed everything. But I just remembered that I learned this move ages ago.

A dysfunctional girlfriend who constantly complained about everyone in her life being out to destroy her accidentally sent me an email intended for her best friend, in which, to my non-surprise, she described me as out to destroy her (when, in fact, I'd spent years working strenuously to fill her with the same vitality and love as I was lavishing on my young web site). Coming after a long series of hair-raising indignities, my patience was exhausted and I severed contact.

Some time later, I mentioned on Chowhound how sad I was that butterscotch had become an endangered flavor, and a package arrived shortly afterwards containing butterscotch candies. I don't remember if there was a note or return address, but it was obvious who'd sent them.

The normal thing to do would have been to snidely throw them in the trash. "Good riddance!" That's the movie scene, right?

But that seemed like a waste of perfectly good butterscotch, so I kept the candy, I ate the candy, and I enjoyed the hell out of the candy noncontextually. It was pretty easy, really. You can choose this outcome, though you’ll never see it in movies. It's a reframing thing.

The moment of realizing my freedom to reject the conventional movie script was similar to another time I recognized that I'm not compelled to play out cinematic clichés at fraught junctures.

I'm free to frame as I'd like. The candy was delicious. My apartment is great. I suppose this sounds selfish, like I always go for high-testosterone wins regardless of circumstance. But nothing like that. If I can win without creating losers, and the movie script says I'd lose by "giving ground", I'll gleefully give all the ground in the world...and take my win. Consideration for others ought to be reserved for generosity, not haughty gamesmanship — and certainly not haughty gamesmanship that leaves me needlessly worse off. Why not just eat the damn candy?

The Rip-Off

I'd planned to spend my first months in Portugal renting a room from two of my dearest, oldest friends, but they turned out to be late-stage alcoholics who flipped between two modes:

1. "We hate that you're here and hope you drop dead", and 2. "Why are you so skittish around us? What's wrong with you? We're your friends and we love you!"

I found every excuse to get away: travel, chowhounding (familiarizing myself with every restaurant south of Lisbon and north of Alentejo), park visits and cafe hangs, but I discovered (this is actually useful information!) that you cannot fill up all 168 hours of a week like that. So I spent 6-8 hours a day sitting in my car. There was a tree I liked, so I parked in front of it. Good times!

I had to accelerate efforts to find my own place, so I auditioned a series of realtors, each worse than the last. As ditzy as they may be in USA, here it's worse. They're like used car salesmen. There's no code of conduct local realtors even pretend to uphold. I settled on a French guy, a moody chainsmoker who, once I'd signed on, didn't conceal his contempt. His cracked phone screen showed how desperately he needed his commission. At every gross place he showed me, he'd stare at me, willing me via psi-powers. Please buy. Please. You want this.

My living situation had become unlivable, so Frenchie found me a rental which turned out to be adjacent to a marble cutter, who started at 7am, the whole house shaking and fine stone dust pluming, triggering asthma that hadn't recurred in decades. This is how you force a client to buy ASAP. Clever Frenchie!

In my haggard state, I managed to mess up my ankle and could barely walk. And just around then began a series of food-borne illnesses (I'd developed an inability to fight off campylobacter) which eventually stripped 45 pounds off of me, leaving me dehydrated to the point where my kidneys filled with tiny stones.

Half-dead — and inclined to use my remaining energy to drown the realtor — we walked quite unexpectedly into a soulful, super-nice, perfect apartment. But it was 70,000€ too expensive, and the owner shrewdly noticed that I was geared up about it and refused to budge. For weeks. I actually begged at one point, but no dice. My realtor was so galled that he actually counseled me—against his own interest!— to keep looking. Everyone in my life begged me to tell the owner to go to Hell. There are other apartments, after all!

Nope. I bought it.

The owner couldn't stop grinning at the closing as I limped around coughing and making bathroom detours. But I bought, moved in, and swiftly began recovering, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I now live in a soulful, utterly comfortable apartment which, after three years, has appreciated above its sale price. A win by any standard. Asthma's better, stomach is mostly sorted, and Señora Vanessa is making great progress on my ankles.

I don't know many people who'd have bought. They'd keep viewing properties with the contemptuous Frenchman, limping, coughing, and faint from a diet of white rice and toast. The price was WAY too high, the owner was WAY too much of a prick, and this was a scene you'd have been delighted to walk away from...even though it was a really great apartment.

But that last part was the only part that mattered for me.

I can't say it involved any high-mindedness. I didn't forgive anyone, or keep a "positive attitude". I merely followed my self-interest — like everyone does all the time! — in the presence of considerable gall. The ultimate example of not cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Now, having discovered the massive rewards of losing face (it's like a superpower!), I'm a changed person. In such scenarios, I deny myself nothing on principle. I'm not normally selfish, but this is my sole exception. I garland myself with the luxury of doing what's best for me even when the situation calls for haughty self-denial.

The best revenge is living well, though it may take forbearance to get through the initial degradation. It absolutely made sense to shower money at a seller who wouldn't stop grinning because he'd made a killing by killing me...because it was my best shot at living. He won, but I won more!


Here's a follow-up

A Marginally Better Presbyterian

I was recently musing that a lot of people supported Trump because "he's a pugnacious shithead just like me."

Liberals would smirk at that. They'd nod their heads ruefully. So true!

But they support that sort of thing to their very core. After all, what screams Democratic Party more than a soft-focused video of a minority child entranced by a speech proclaiming in voiceover, "I want a president who looks like me!"

Yeah! That's the stuff! Beautiful!

Most people in this binary of binaries (well, Palestine/Israel is still marginally worse) have trouble parsing what, exactly, centrism even means. Here's a taste:

If a terrific Jewish presidential candidate were to run, I'd vote for them enthusiastically...but only because they were "terrific", not because they were Jewish. But if a Presbyterian candidate were only marginally better, I'd support that one even more enthusiastically. And I find it very hard to empathize with any other view. To me, you'd need to be so completely adrift in storybook bullshit and pure narcissism that you'd lost all sense.

Grace Me Up Right Now

This meme seems like such a mild, reasonable request. And yet, few humans until a couple decades ago would have imagined any entitlement to mercy when showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. We easily recognized that even if you're there by invitation, with a mission of helping, even that wouldn't earn you a guaranteed pass ("No good deed goes unpunished!").

The notion of deserving grace is quite new, but it's so thoroughly baked-in that I seem like quite a jerk, objecting to a nice plea from a nice person who just hopes to be treated nicely. This only proves how entitlement has swollen to a point where all perspective has been lost.

Perhaps you'll see my point better if I diagram it for you:

"I didn't kill a bug once. I ask in return that I be allowed to waltz through life's landscape in a state of elevated grace". Hey, not too much to ask!

FWIW, your kids and grandkids won't even parse that stark diagramming. The point wouldn't penetrate at all. Entitlement, you see, is self-sealing.


Note, I originally posted this on my Facebook feed, where I tacked on this parenthetical comment: "In 1997, i invented food blogging. In 2026 I invented reposting treacly memes to rank on them. I am like a fountain of fresh obnoxious behaviors."

Never Coddle the Coddled

Solicitously deferring to attractive people only feeds privilege the rest of us lack. As with a black person gallantly yielding her 1958 bus seat, there are limits to gallantry.


See also "The Immense Stature of an Attractive Person Making Idle Small Talk"

Frame-Stuck

The Anguish of Señora Vanessa
I've avoided several orthopedic surgeries via yoga and weekly therapy. I am my physical therapist's Big Project, and results have been remarkable. She's been working so hard to put Humpty together again that if she spots me wearing the wrong shoes or moving the wrong way, she becomes distressed, exhorting me to do better and stop messing up her project.

At such moments, I consider her directions for a moment, and readily agree. New shoes will be ordered. And I won't angle my knee that way. Done! Will do!

But then she keeps on exhorting me. Exhortively! Greater and greater force and volume are applied until, finally, she collapses from the futility. Setting her jaw, she hisses "Do what you want. It's your body. What do I care."

It's very strange, but, hey, it's a strange country.

One day, in a flash of realization, I understood what was happening.

"Señora Vanessa, is the problem that I'm agreeing too quickly?", I asked.

She frowned and was silent. Señora Vanessa needs time when someone asks a question she's never been asked.

I continue: "Would you be more satisfied if I grunted, struggled, weighed, and only gradually passed a psychic kidney stone in my journey toward grudging acceptance? Must I clench and flail to show that I'm painfully digesting your instruction and committing to an actual behavioral change?"

Señora Vanessa was blushing. She'd never thought of it like this, but couldn't deny the truth.

I explained that I trust her, so when she tells me something, it slots right in. Done! Will do! She peered down at me on her massage table, marveling at my alien ways. It was like Merlin had appeared in her clinic.

My explanation would require laborious processing. It would hardly feel prudent to simply accept it, true as she knew it was.

Which, of course, is her point.

The Fine Line Between Acceptance and Insincerity
Señora Vanessa imagined that I'd been patronizing her all this time. My lack of flamboyant struggle meant I was being glib. Making light of the value of her substantial expertise.

"Sure, honey. I gotcha. I'll get right on that. Meanwhile, hey, can you work on my left calf a little?"

Merlin's Little Secret
I've gradually come to realize that other people don't reframe as easily as I can. People think that shifts of perspective happen spontaneously. While we dimly recognize that we can sometimes play some minor part, for the most part, the world seems to compel our interpretation. When our world and our gods choose to induce a shift, we find ourselves in a new mental place. We have reframed.

The truth, though, is that shifts of perspective are always easily and instantly accessible. Freedom is like a smartphone feature we forgot we own.

This, by the way, explains the event that inspired my "Surprisingly Uplifting Examination of Suicide" . Readers have asked what actually happened in that situation. Was it some cosmic revelation, or heavenly consolation? Nah, I just remembered I could reframe. It's always easily accessible for all of us. We own the faculty!

As I wrote in this terse posting , we imagine that we control our thinking, though that's ludicrously obviously untrue (try not to think of a pink elephant). And, conversely, we imagine that the world controls our framing, which is equally crazily untrue. We have it backwards on both sides of our functioning. The truth is that we're saddled with thoughts that simply arrive, but we are infinitely free — this is our free will! — to pay attention to them and interpret them and contextualize them and react to them per our choice of perspective/framing/point of view. It really is a choice, and it's far more powerful to choose the framing than to try to control the thoughts.

Perhaps I am a sort of Merlin, though not via special tricks. I just stopped ignoring the big trick we all possess. We work perversely hard to deny, ignore, and inhibit the faculty, occluding it more seamlessly than a solar eclipse! But it's slippery to try to reclaim it. The sticky wicket is that an ability to reframe is prerequisite to grokking reframing! It's the ultimate bootstrapping problem.

Sidebar
Let me step out from the curtains for a sec. Hi, I'm Jim! Writer of this essay! It's not yet the polished gem you're currently reading, but I'm realizing it will inevitably feel a bit foggy and slippery, like some of my other postings here [frowny face]. The problem is in this line you just read:

"The sticky wicket is that an ability to reframe is prerequisite to grokking reframing!"

You can't frame reframing without a facility for reframing...which requires a facility for reframing. Even though it's tantalizingly easy, innate, and immediate.

So this is nothing like explaining calculus or music theory. You need to stumble into it yourself, and all I can do is to get you in the mood via metaphors, anecdotes, and contagious enthusiasm.

We reframe countless times per day, but don't realize we're doing it. It feels imposed. This misapprehension makes us forget that we are completely free to reframe. We think we're following when we're actually leading.

Some people suspect this, and are ripe to flip into full recognition. So I'm working like a summagun to coax them from a variety of crafty angles. Or at least offer some visceral sense of things so that the next time perspective shifts, they'll have some perspective on their perspective.

But I can't neatly hammer this home, because it's visceral. It's about your subjectivity; your placement of attention; your interpretation. All these things are immediately accessible, but not super "thinky." All I can do is stoke your curiosity.

Ok, let's get back to it!

A Bizarre State of Perpetual Argument
As I laid pondering this on Señora Vanessa's massage table, the recognition began to extend itself (effortless daisy-chaining of insights is one of the benefits of lithe reframeability). I realized that I've experienced a subtler version of this impasse all my life. No one ever stops arguing when I concede an argument. They just keep going.

I always thought it was because they loved hearing themselves speak — i.e. they were really arguing internally, trying to persuade themselves. And while that's surely a factor, it's mostly because my agreement seems way too light and easy to be true. Where's the struggle? Why am I not clutching my forehead, yanking my hair, and bulging my eyes as I move an enormous mental boulder to foster a weighty change of perspective? There ought to be low moaning as I squeeze fresh fodder through my cognitive sphincter. So my blithe ease signals that I'm using empty words to put an end to the argument.

I am patronizing. I am glib.

Frame-Stuckedness and Culture
Señora Vanessa's version was more extreme because Portugal is a country where people are defiantly, fervidly, proudly frame-stuck. They haven't just forgotten how to reframe; they staunchly oppose it.

A great many people here remain in eternal mourning after anyone significant drops dead. Why do Southern European grandmas dress in permanent black? Because by a certain point, someone has surely died. And they will not let go of loss, nor would they ever want to let go of it. Or let go of much of anything. They defiantly, fervidly stand their ground. Character means never budging one's perspective.

What makes the Eastern outlook (dare I say "framing") seem so ineffable to Westerners? It prizes the release of psychic binding, while Westerners (especially Europeans, and especially especially Portuguese) would never consider any such thing.

I've been here long enough to watch the process unfold in real time. My sparkly 60 year old neighbor lost his 85 year old mother two years ago, and the sparkle has not returned. It will never return. And his friends, in turn, mourn for him, and the loss of his sparkle in their lives diminishes them, as well. A chain reaction of volitional self-immolation stems from a staunch unwillingness to let go of anything tagged "Existential".

And countless things earn that tag because high stakes create life's deepest richness — though the irony is lost that this very richness is what's lost upon self-extinguishment.

When the unthinkable occurs, violating our most emphatic red lines, self-extinguishment is the unavoidable result. There's actually a logic to it: "I can't survive X" would seem to compel us to dissolve upon X. At least if we're utterly frame-stuck.

See this series about how we're all survivors of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable

As I stroll Portuguese streets, I notice zombies. "We have feelings," they reason. "Deep, deep feelings. We prioritize our deep feelings, and mourning's not truly mournful unless it crushes our spirit with maximum drama forever. The ultimate expression of Feeling is a state of permanently resigned Numbness. The end game is to transform into a veritable fountain of numbness and non-sparkle. Such is life!"

And of course it's not just from mourning. One can become frame-stuck (aka "frozen perspective") in any context. In fact, that's what we like about this place!

Why has Portugal held onto its traditional culture so much longer than other European nations (e.g. dining culture here is an astonishingly direct connection to the medieval period)? An academic would attribute it to "cultural tenacity", which is true in a flattened, cartoonish view. But how is this stoked, moment by moment, in the minds of actual people? How, in their momentary activities, do they preserve old ways?

Frame-stuckedness! Frozen perspective! The cognitive sphincter of shifting perspective seals tight!

I'm not saying other places are particularly lithe about reframing (humans seem to range from "pretty damned stuck" to "quite impossibly stuck") nor am I saying that lithe reframability is always a greater good. It's much better for me, because I cope quite poorly with the aggregate results of whimsically self-imposed psychic burden. But I grew up in a thin pseudo-culture of slice pizza, shopping malls, and pinball, so for me there's none of the nutrition a Portuguese derives from tenaciously clinging to Culture.

Just as there's a fine line between agreement and patronization, "liberation" is perilously close to "groundlessness".

Of course, the difference is all in the framing.


There is a moral component to frame-stuckedness. In many contexts, it's another term for "heroism".

Updating Eleanor Roosevelt

Updating Eleanor Roosevelt's quote — valid for millennia but now completely obsolete:

Small minds discuss memes

Average minds discuss celebrities

Great minds discuss events (faithfully echoing their tribal thought leaders)

Above and Below

The very worst waiters that I've ever seen all had something in common:

They all felt that being a waiter was beneath them.

When, in fact, being a waiter was well above them.

It was their superiority that made them inferior.


This much appreciated posting from way back in 2010 was only the start of my recognition of how upside down and embarrassing everything is.

Juice Squeeze

You cannot, in the present era, sell a used item to another person for a stated price.

If an item is worth $50 and you price it at $40, you will either be ignored (because there's clearly something wrong with it) or else be counter-offered $25.

It's been years since I've seen anyone accept an offer as-is.

I don't think it's stinginess. It's competitive imperative. People rush forward to perform the juice squeeze to indulge their adversarial impulses. An opportunity to conquer and crush! Unilateralism! It's a bit like Sue and the speed bump.

I recently posted an item for sale, making abundantly clear that the (very fair) $100 price was firm, and was flooded with messages ala "$85".

I replied to one:

Do you see any way to do this without launching a game of “Haggling and Screwing”?

Can you imagine a universe where someone charges a fair price, and you pay that price, and you’re happy? Or does that sound empty and pointless? Am I silly for even suggesting it?"

To be fair, current conditions make everyone overcharge now, to grant the sadists and conquerors their crushing victories. We charge $150, and let ourselves be bargained down to $100.

I can't do that, for four reasons:

1. I'm generous, so I prefer charging a fair price and making people happy. That, to me, is the win.

2. I'm efficient, and this route seems like a great big slobbering needless ordeal.

3. I don't like getting roped into dramatic shtick.

4. I don't negotiate with terrorists.

So I don't make many sales!

Opt-In, Opt-Out

There will never be a channel for people who do things I find interesting to inform me about new interesting things without inevitably filling the channel with blather.

I've now been internetting for 34 years, signing up for mailing lists and notifications I was inevitably compelled to ignore or to cancel. And I'm convinced it will always be thus.

There's something about the human world that won't allow genuine opt-in update channels to maintain their integrity.

Extra Spaghetti

I added a few new lines to "The 'Spaghetti-in-the-Face' of it All".

Sometimes, after all the shucking and jiving, I find that I hadn't stated my point cleanly. Not that I feel obliged, but since this posting offered the same insight from several different viewing angles, it seemed appropriate to include a nice, straight shot with no top spin at all.

Will You Still Be Sending Me a Valentine?

"What will I be doing at age 63?" asked 25 year old me.

This photo would meet with his approval.

When I was a child, I felt that I had a line of communication open with my elder self, and received guidance therefrom.

Now that I'm old, it's the other way. I solicit *his* approval. Am I doing ok?

Guess I missed the crossover point. Oh well.


See also "Postcards from my Childhood", wherein I recount notes I sent my future self, worried that he'd forget essential stuff.

The "Spaghetti-in-the-Face" of it All

Every day the world throws a plate of spaghetti in your face.

And if you wake up in the morning saying, "I will not tolerate having a plate of spaghetti thrown in my face," you'll have a very bad experience here.

Sure enough, most people have a very bad experience here.

It's a hallmark of aristocrats to eagerly draw red circles around the Unacceptable. They're accustomed to having their preferences coddled. Others come into more frequent contact with unavoidable friction, providing opportunities to perhaps stumble into acceptance, while aristocrats persistently assume they have a veto over how things work.

At this point everyone in the First World is an aristocrat, and thus entitled to draw red lines that God, the universe, or whatever must respect, even though, hilariously, they never do (every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable).

---

If, on the other hand, you lick your face and exclaim, "Mmm, spaghetti!" — or simply accept the experience neutrally — then you'll have a much better time here. And since we have free latitude to interpret anything in any way, one might even decide that an abrupt delivery of spaghetti is the Universe's notion of a beneficent gift, like the lovely fresh oxygen and life-giving sunlight (which the perennially irritated might frame as oppressive, as well).

But we're not taught to do that. Quite the contrary! We live in a world of people who feel they deserve better than to have a face full of spaghetti. Which makes the spaghetti-in-the-face result all the more uproarious.

Despising the spaghetti began with an arbitrary — even whimsical — choice. Another hallmark of aristocrats is the lavish accounting of despised things. The litany proudly defines them, and anything disrespecting those sharp borders is declared unacceptable. First on many lists: surprise and disruption.

So one must be super nonconformist to go, "Mmm, spaghetti! Delicious!"

You'd look like a fucking lunatic.

There's social stigma there. You'll be far more in step with society if you sputter and curse and fume and rage continually as the world vexes you, like the bully in a silent film comedy.

---

Everybody imagines the world compels their response. It does not. We respond according to our own framing.

Hypothetical Person: How could I not erupt into fury with a face full of spaghetti?

Narrator: The world throws spaghetti in everyone's face every day.

Hypothetical Person: Yes! And I fucking hate it!

Narrator: Well, then you hate the world.

Hypothetical Person: For sure. But the world compels my hatred!

Narrator: No, it doesn't. Your high-level policy decision to hate spaghetti in your face compels your hatred.

Hypothetical Person: Who could possibly enjoy having spaghetti thrown in their face?

Narrator: Well, you see, that's the conformity problem right there.

Hypothetical Person: The what?

---

Stuff happens, and we give it meaning in our post-processing.

And we are amazingly, hilariously, mind‑bendingly free in that assignment

....at least if we're not striving to conform.

---

The "Verses on the Faith Mind by The 3rd Zen Patriarch" (aka Hsin Hsin Ming) is an astounding bit of medieval Chinese wisdom, but it was written in a very different era for a very different culture, making it more inaccessible than is necessary. Here, I'm trying to take the gist and modernize it.

Have a taste of the original:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.

When the deep meaning of things is not understood the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.

---

The "spaghetti-in-your-face" trials and tribulations are sufficient to leave a majority of the population in sour aggrievement. But what about worse stuff? Here's my take.

Swagger

Swagger is the scarlet letter of mediocrity.

---

'Mediocrity' includes competence.

The culture has lost firm hold of the term, because mediocrity is the goal and baseline (which, as I explained here, doesn't work because it creates a downward spiral). So I need to clarify that I'm not saying swaggering people are screw-ups.

Swaggering mediocrities get things done. In fact, that's why they swagger! They know they can get things done, which is hard, and makes them people who do hard things. As I explained at that last link, competence requires great effort, which is why so many non-remarkable people feel like kings and queens. And I won't even condemn them for it.

However, I've known some remarkable people, none of whom of acted like kings and queens. They lacked spare time for maintaining a facade, or even a self-image, because all effort went voraciously into doing The Thing. This leaves no assets leftover for seeming like a Thing-Doer. Striking the pose is a whole other gig.

Remarkable people rarely swagger. John Thorne, Bill Monk, Major Holley, Arnie Lawrence, David Lerner, Arnie Lawrence, Stewart Sharpless, Les Blank, or The Sainted Arepa Lady...none of them ever swaggered a bit. They were just people, though, in every case, world class.

The Oblivious are Oblivious to Obliviousness

We don't know no one's listening to us because we're not listening.

We don't realize nobody's paying attention because we're not paying attention.


We underestimate how narcissistic everyone is because we’re too narcissistic to notice.

Told You

MAGAs are discovering Trump's a fraud after all, just like they discovered that COVID was real after all, just like they discovered that the cabal of pedophiles (and cover-uppers thereof) was largely on the other side, just as conservatives discovered that the (original) Iraq/Afghanistan war was an awful idea, and the Vietnam war, and all the forever wars started by hawks from their side, and just as they wagged their heads in disbelief at this new forever war that's wrecked our economy, our readiness, our standing, and made Iran great again.

Yet none of the people who doubted my patriotism — or my sanity — at any of those junctures (while I objected heatedly from the Center) has apologized, or acted apologetic, or even just adopted some iota of humility. They'll keep blustering forever. Having been wrong a bunch doesn't mean you're not always right!

In the 1980s it got super unpopular to ever utter the words "I told you so." The culture deprecated that move. And now, in 2026, the entire concept of "having been right" is nonexistent. Vanished. A non-thing. 

The opposition is wrong definitionally. You may have been wrong (though you're always right) a few times, but "they" were never right! It's the death of symmetry. Newton's Third Law of Motion has been repealed.

Liberals do this, too, of course.

Only Boring People Get Bored

Charles Bukowski noted that "Only boring people get bored.” It entered popular consciousness when Betty Draper stole the line on Mad Men.

It's worth considering the mechanism behind this. I think it reflects a flipped perspective; a misapprehension of cause and effect. A framing error.

It's not that the world bores bored people. It's that they suppress the world’s interestingness. Bored people are like Kryptonite for interestingness. They don't innocently miss it, they proactively thwart it.

Bored people drain the interestingness out of everything.

Interesting people experience this all the time. They feel compelled to overcompensate in order to merely register. Escaping the inexorable singularity of a bored person is likely how it feels to be sucked dry by a vampire.

You Are Not Special and Wonderful Exactly as You Are

In my posting, "Entitlement", I described a guy who treated me with nothing but dehumanized contempt while expecting me to lavish kindness on him (ironically missing the kindness I actually lavished on him because it didn't match the exact scripted kindness he sought, but let's not get subtle):

This tight, ungracious, grim, uninteresting, self-centered little guy had offered absolutely nothing in terms of social interaction. But that was the last thing he had in mind, because he felt he deserved his movie moment from me just because. The notion of earning his way was totally alien for him.

He offered nothing.

I keep meeting people (Americans, not Portuguese) who offer nothing. They have their little shtick, the Character They're Playing — cloned off some familiar roleplay we've all seen in movies or TV. But you can wait all day and they won't say anything interesting or smart or funny or kind or distinctive or useful. They just present character, imagining this perfectly sufficient for a social win.

"I'm Kenneth. I have nothing extra to offer you (and, really, who are you to expect anything from me, anyway?). I offer you a moment of Kenneth, and that's quite enough. So, cool, we're friends now, right?"

No, Kenneth. There are 8 billion people with whom I coexist, and while I wish them all well, and if there's some emergency I'll pitch in, but they don't become significant to me (or to any other individual) by virtue of being them. They must clear the extremely low bar of being something above/beyond the raw state of "I'm Kenneth."

How did our society lose the ability to imagine earning one's way, to any degree and in any fashion? Where did this entitlement come from? How did Americans get the notion that they are each very special; that simply being themselves is not merely "good enough', but downright wonderful?

Fred Fucking Rogers.

Having focused on the odd concern that Americans lack self-esteem, he kindled it to a degree where generations who've never heard of the guy have been convinced, by the echoes he left in our culture, that JUST BEING ME IS GOOD ENOUGH.

It's really not. One needs to show up with an ability to say or do interesting or smart or funny or kind or distinctive or useful things. Merely presenting character — a rendition of some prefab personality type — is...okay. You deserve all the perqs of membership in the human race, and no one should persecute you or deny your basic dignity. And that's a lot!

But it's not, in and of itself, wonderful, regardless of what Mr. Rogers and this post-Rogerian culture have led us to believe. You need to try; to contribute above and beyond your raw undeveloped you-ness. We are not entitled to love or fascination for merely showing up. It's not sufficient to hover in a no-effort raw state while expecting all the prizes.


I'm not saying Fred Rogers was malign. He was a very nice man, trying to comfort scared children. I'm claiming he was horribly naive, and failed to think through the adult consequences — which have been abysmal. And while he is obviously not solely responsible, I really think he played a significant part in creating this predicament.

---

I've made this same argument once before, but wanted to try again freshly to try to connect it with last week's observations about entitlement.

Focusing specifically on the low-effort aspect, see also "Why Aunt Marge Can't Be Just Marge".

Protocols of the Elders of Zionism

"Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism."

It would ordinarily go without saying. For example, one never hears anyone disclaiming that criticism of Denmark isn't "anti-Scandinavian." But the trouble is those "Israelis" are just so sensitive and self-righteous and pushy and exasperating and awful^* that they see antisemitism everywhere.

^* - which is why they require frequent excoriation!

Adulation Inflation

There's a bit of business that inevitably comes up whenever a friend or acquaintance experiences some level of fame. I hear something like this:

"Sure, I'm just a golf columnist [or singer/songwriter or ceramicist or small town mayor or juicing blogger], but sometimes I find that I actually made a difference. For example, I received an email [or text or YouTube comment or photograph of a tattoo] from someone whose blah-blah-blah was devastated with blah-blah-blah, and they told me that the sheer blah-blah-blah of my blah-blah-blah gave them the strength to get through."

I've been through this more than a dozen times with other people (and more often on my own paltry steam), and I know my prescribed response. "My God," I'm supposed to reply. "That's FANTASTIC! You! Are! Fantastic!"

But I can't manage it with conviction, because I'm crawling out of my skin with embarrassment knowing that anyone remotely prominent gets these stories by the bucketload. They're so formulaic that they seem mass-produced, but no. It's a certain sort of person with a certain goal.

If you ever met Chris Rock or Michael Phelps or Ruth Reichl, and told them "You're greeeeat. You're soooo greeeeat," you can easily anticipate receiving a glassy-eyed "thanks" at best. Adulation inflation is a thing, so if you want to have A Real Moment with the celebrity, you must cut through with something more galvanizing than "you inspired me".

And that's what this is. Cutting through.

Everyone who takes this route imagines they found a unique penetration tactic. But, no, it's utterly formulaic. Let's render it in MadLibs™:

Your [noun] inspired my [related person] to [verb] in a moment when [related person] was [adjective].

My quandary is this: do I tell them? Or let them swell their self-regard to turgid magnificence by buying into this hackneyed form of 21st century fawning?

But how, you might ask, does this apply to Natalie Harp, the president's constant fawning companion?

Here's how author Michael Wolff (who first broke the story of her outsized influence three years ago) explains her "rise":

"She had a story in which she had...a serious cancer that would likely kill her...This story has a lot of holes.

"She then maintained that she had been cured of this cancer because in the first administration there was a Trump supported bill that gave greater access to experimental treatments. So she maintained that because of access to those treatments, her cancer was cured. This then made her claim 'Trump saved my life.'

"And that gave her a speaking berth during the Republican convention in 2020. She was given television time to say "Donald Trump saved my life." This then gave her more access to Trump world, and, in fact, got her a job."

Natalie Harp perfected the form.

You Must Always Overshoot

The thing you do best, you do substantially less well than you imagine.

This isn't an accusation or a prognostication. It is an inevitability. It's because we rate ourselves on our intentions, not our results.

"I am a good, competent musician, and I play in tune. I ensure this by aiming to play in tune. On occasions when I play slightly out of tune, it's forgivable because, hey, mistakes happen. Nobody's perfect! I am still a good musician who plays in tune because I aspire to play in tune!"

No. You're not. You're substantially less in tune than you imagine. Because you are not your aspiration, you are your result, and you ignore your failure. And so you play out of tune a lot, which is what crap musicians do!

This isn't just a psychological quirk. Accomplishment is weird, and we're poorly prepared for it. One needs to overshoot, and maintain that framing ad infinitum. Which is really weird...and explains a lot!

I once wrote that:

Amateur musicians sometimes play out of tune. This is because they're trying to play in tune. If you try to play in tune, that means that when you fail (and you will fail!), you'll be noticeably out of tune.

Professional musicians don't try to play in tune. They're preoccupied with trying to play really, really in tune. So when they fail (and they will fail), they're still reasonably in tune, though not precisely enough for their standards. They'll wince, and feel like failures, but you won't hear it.

Amateurs conclude that professionals fail less. Wrong. They fail as often as anyone, but they work within narrower tolerances. We're all failures, but pros fail well.

You can deem yourself a success while failing if you aim for success and write off failure. But if you really want to avoid failure, you must become really weird, sacrificing prudence, and stoking what most observers would describe as an obsession. That's how you get really accomplished results. And by "really accomplished", I mean the modest result of playing in tune, or coherently arranging one's thoughts on a page, or making a movie with the ability to suspend disbelief. We haven't even begun to discuss actual greatness.

We all know that "extraordinary results require extraordinary effort.” Nothing new there. But extraordinary effort is a flat cartoon of a guy arduously wiping his brow. Really, all effort feels extraordinary, doesn't it? Every musician who ever played a note imagined they were devoting extraordinary effort because there's substantial overhead to merely producing notes. Even crap ones! Every hack works his ass off; sacrificing for "his art."

"Extraordinary effort" feels like a baseline akin to the cosmic background radiation. But if you ever intruded behind the veil to glimpse the process of legit extraordinary effort, your reaction might be like seeing Darth Vader with his helmet off.

Oh.

Geez.

I'll let you get back to it.

It's troubling. Repellent. Vaguely sickening. Even easygoing, polite chatbots tease me for my willingness to go to extreme lengths to climb a curve of declining results one more rung. I sense them processing it all ("He seems ok, seems happy, seems stable....but, really, this is a bit much...but, hey, he's a good writer and this is how it's done...but, really, this is a bit much...but he seems ok, seems happy, seems stable...but...")

I can trouble a fricking chat bot with the effort required to be just a good writer who's occasionally very good and sometimes excellent. If I merely shot for that result (with normal tolerance for shortfall), it would be five drafts and off to Miller Time, with no one put off in the least!

All of this applies, by the way, to every aspect of human life. I know someone who sincerely tries not to excoriate people who've disappointed her. Which means she periodically excoriates people who've disappointed her.

Hey, she tries not to!

I tried explaining that such behavior is absolutely unacceptable in 2026, and that the rest of us wouldn't even imagine it. That's why you seldom see this sort of thing. But she feels virtuous from her aspiration — her desire — not to. And so at this point it's pretty much all she ever does (everyone within 50 miles has burn scars). Just like how musicians who try to play in tune are, inevitably, out-of-tune musicians. And just like how any musician who consistently plays in tune is (under the hood) a kooky obsessive wing-nut barely recognizable as a functional human being.


See me argue the antithesis here and here.

Entitlement

One of the omnipresent features of earthly life that completely mystifies me is entitlement. It's such a simple idea, yet it showers strange behavior that can only be focused through this lens. People deserve. Or so it seems.

I have to take it on faith, because I don't. Normally, I can empathize with the intentions behind bad behavior, having managed a million people for a decade, acquiring a pretty authoritative sense of where humans are coming from and how they got that way. But entitlement still knocks me for a loop, because I never had a taste of it. My entire life, all 63 years, served to broadcast the clear and unwavering cosmic notice that I am entitled to nothing. I don't deserve.

This sounds bitter and self-pitying, I know. But it's neither. Hang on, you'll see where I'm coming from in a moment.

The lesson I was taught was to expect nothing. Not even a do-over, or forgiveness, or credit for past performance, or even mild benefit of the doubt. Everything, it was impressed on me by worldly experience, must be earned (while withstanding a stiff headwind).

This voice is not my voice, by the way. I'm putting it on. This was a writing exercise and thought experiment wherein I adopt the perspective that there was some other alternative I was deprived of. And this is a completely alien perspective. So it's fake for me. How'm I doing?

I'm not deprived because I never saw any other world. So I've adapted, stabilizing in the world as-is, and am perfectly okay with it. I've learned to be stout-hearted in headwinds. A neat trick! I'm grateful!

I follow the rules of engagement as they appear to be set out before me. And as I do, I can't help endlessly remarking upon the fact that all the free oxygen and sunlight are super-nice! I notice this way more than other people, because they're entitled to so much more that the sunlight and oxygen seem puny, while to me they're mind-bogglingly generous freebies. Gimmes.

I really enjoy the oxygen and sunlight. And the trees! And, with a bit more labor and initiative, restaurants and music to seek out and enjoy. And I'll be goddamned if that isn't enough to hang a life on right there. The rest is gravy frosting.

The Portuguese are much less entitled. And this brings into much brighter focus the entitlement of Americans, some of whom stride these corridors like colossi. They stand out so starkly that they might as well be made out of neon, and I've come to realize it's their entitlement, infinite on all levels, in all circumstances, to every possible degree. The entitlement is a gushing, drenching galactic fountain.

That's not actually the best metaphor. It's more of a suck than a gush. And I resist that Suck, disappointing them profoundly, as we all do, because no one could possibly slake the entitlement of the average American. It's an unfillable chasm. It's the suckiest suck that ever sucked.

So I don't even try, and have learned to disregard the haughty indignation that meets my maddening nonsolicitude. I am not completely immune to it, however. It does incite one single emotion: envy. I envy the entitled, because the world has plainly taught them something very different from what it's taught me. They've been taught that they Deserve, and that's a lesson that's luxurious, easeful and privileged beyond my imagining.

So when people demand Things and Reactions and Attention and Respect and Admiration and general Obeisance from me (I'm to devour their bullshit and beg for more while they haughtily spurn all manner of real value), it feels like a billionaire asking a poor guy for 20 bucks.

It is infuriating. I'm someone who's cooled most of his infury into mere exasperation, but this one sputtering flame remains. But, mostly, really, it's envy.

---

My problem is that I keep expecting entitlement to look like Mrs. Howell getting all piqued because the waiter put the fish knife on the wrong side of the plate.

That's not how entitlement works in real life.

A story:

I'm in line at a generic Euro kebab joint here in Setúbal run by an Indian guy who makes me secret off-menu Punjabi dishes. Two Americans enter after me. Stiff. Uptight. Uncomfortable. Husband asks me for ordering advice, and I start to tell him, with enthusiasm, about the secret Punjabi menu. He's utterly disinterested, ignoring every word, not even bothering to face in my general direction as I amiably engage with him. He really just wants to know how large the large pizza is; and as for my other bullshit, no thanks, guy, bokay?

On my end, I don't know how big the large pizza is because I'd never order pizza here. I tell him this, but, having proven myself unuseful to his immediate needs, he's out of the conversation, squinting upward at the glaring menu. I have ceased to exist for him. I'm useless.

Fair enough. Not a chowhound! My thing's not for him! No harm, no foul!

But a few beats go by, and he clears his throat and tells me he and his wife are thinking of moving to Setubal. I smile a bit distantly and wish him, sincerely, the best of luck. And, boy, is he pissed.

This wasn't the movie scene he'd expected. First I failed to play my appointed part in his pizza scene, and now I'd once again failed to read my lines properly. I was supposed to graciously welcome him to this little corner of heaven, befriend him, take his hand, and answer questions and show him around and generally play the gracious and helpful expat like in the YouTube videos so he could come away remarking about how EVERYONE'S SO FRIENDLY HERE. I was perfectly polite, but to him I was a churlish shithead refusing to give him his moment. Again. First the pizza, now this.

This tight, ungracious, grim, uninteresting, self-centered little guy had offered absolutely nothing in terms of social interaction. But that was the last thing he had in mind, because he felt he deserved his movie moment from me just because. The notion of earning his way was totally alien for him.

From my perspective, he'd twice contemptuously dismissed me for failing to serve his immediate needs, and had shown contemptuous disinterest in my bullshit (aka helping him eat a profoundly tasty lunch). But my perspective was utterly beside the point.

Anyway, my merely polite well-wishing provoked him into a huff. He was fuming. As I departed with my takeout a few minutes later, I turned back to say goodbye and repeat my best wishes. He and his sourpussed wife glared at me silently. Not a word. I wasn't a human being. At no point in the encounter was I a human being. No personhood, only failed solicitous functionality.

Now that's entitlement!


See also "Why Aunt Marge Can't Be Just Marge"

Everything That Happens Teaches You Precisely What You Need to Learn in This Moment

I've revised and improved this posting from 2023.


I've had the impression since childhood that the universe is trying to teach me things. In fact, that's what This All is. Especially the friction; the "bad" stuff.

I'm not trying to shine some positive light on it - Mr. Optimist constructively framing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It's not a "spin". For me, it's a fully-formed point of view that's stood the test of time. My conviction rests on two elements:

I detect intention. Nothing supernatural. Not some lofty "Guy". Something more...tectonic. And unmistakably intelligent.

Second: the timing is never random. Everything that ever happened seemed to teach me precisely what I needed to learn in that moment.

I'm not presupposing some meaningful magical orchestration. It's more like being caught in an inexplicable machine, challenged to reverse-engineer its nature and operating principles — and, more mysteriously, my own nature and operating principles. Gradually, the objectives merged. And they seemed to merge coherently. Which is my point!

The lessons learned were never complicated. Just basic, remedial stuff. Like an ape delighted by the revelation that a stick helps knock bananas from high branches. Stuff that can't be unlearned, because it's so very obvious.

I've previously noted that even the most profound epiphanies easily congeal into cheesy cliché. Gems soon turn to dust. So: It's all teaching us; and the lessons, which arrive as ecstatic epiphany, turn out to be ludicrously banal. That's my 18-word summation of life on Earth.

Few people frame worldly adventure as lessons being taught. Instead, the teaching feels like persecution. Aggravation! Headwind! Frustration! An obstructive universe keeps getting in their way as they try to do what they'd set out to do.

I once wrote a poem, "The Reed". If you click back to its original post, you'll enjoy a cool accompanying photo, but I'll repost the poem below:

The reed,

unendingly assaulted by violent wind,

never suffers.


It never occurred to the reed

that the wind was a separate, external thing.


Insofar as the reed thinks at all,

it thinks it's dancing.

I confess that I haven't always been 100% reed-like. I've felt persecuted at times. But I've tried to keep one foot firmly planted in the recognition that it's always - without exception! - lessons being taught. And I've stabilized around that framing.

It makes a huge difference, because you can't learn lessons until you open to them — embracing the deeper benevolence rather than resisting the superficial harassment. You need to be receptive! You have to thirst for more! The answer is indeed blowing in the wind, but the first step is, obviously, to welcome it rather than bitching about the damned wind.

"Bitching about the damned wind" and "receptivity" are vastly different mindsets. It's an eternal choice, and only one choice is sane despite its puzzling unpopularity.

You can go your entire life bitching about (aka "peeing into") the wind. But the lesson of lesson-learning will leave you extraordinarily receptive, if you can get past the false assumption that this is just more "Take your lumps!" stoic shtick. Establishing this mindframe, despite its off-putting essential sanity, can be your miracle box. The universe functions as an epiphany provocateur if you'll merely let it.

And if you can embrace that recognition while also remaining consistently reed-like, you might find this ride more delightful than I did for most of my time here. Do better than me, and dive in with both feet!

---

Beware, though, of this pitfall.

The Steep Intellectual Prerequisites of Extreme Idiocy

There is a level of stupidity that only smart people can attain.

Extraordinary skill and mental firepower are needed to reach the absolute peak of stupidity.

---

Marx. Ayn Rand. Eugenics. Radical Chic. Universal basic income. Mortgage-backed securities. Lobotomy. Nation-building. Segways. Technical stock analysis. Citizens United. Clippy. "Move fast and break things". Etc.

The Hidden Pitfalls of Exceptionality

The problem with making an edge case of yourself (in any respect) is that it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific "You" as a generalized "Them."

People very often are not interacting with a specific you. You dissolve for them into a category. This is perfectly normal, and usually unnoticed by either party. It happens most commonly out of laziness.

It takes special consideration and extra concentration for someone to lock onto you as a unique entity rather than a generic one-of-them. So you often become the category. Humanity-in-general, or else whichever personality type you're seen as representing. If you wear fuzzy sweaters and smoke lots of pot and repeat "It's all good!" a lot, this makes you easily categorizable, and you'll often be spoken to as That Guy; a cartoonish blur rather than the specific person you are.

The second cause is narcissism. If people exist to serve one's needs — populating dramatic arc requirements and filling in needed chunks — there's little reason to conceive them as unique entities...except insofar as it helps to manipulate the desired result. Being essentially disposable, we scarcely merit tighter focus.

It even happens with chatbots, who are neither lazy nor narcissistic. Even if you've shown over time that you're very much this way, a given utterance on your end might be parsed that way if that's a more widely typical interpretation. You might chalk it up to a bot's inclination to draw from corpus rather than unique current circumstance, but I see no difference from what humans do. We smear from our experience, barely heedful of custom fit — which is, after all, a pain to maintain ad infinitum. And my point here is that you'll only notice if there's a stark difference. If, that is, you've made yourself an edge case.

Disintegration-into-category normally rolls up quite comfortably within the suspension of disbelief fueling human sociality. We seldom notice when an interlocutor lapses into viewing us blearily as "people" rather than "person" if there are no major differences between the two. But insofar as we stray from the mean via achievement or failure, or uncommon ways of thinking, talking, or acting (“exceptionality” isn't just high achievement; it's any variation from human baseline) it will become horrifyingly obvious when our personhood fades. Where'd I go???

I once found myself in a Memphis at dinnertime with a gaggle of cousins. I suggested a restaurant. One of my cousins countered "Is it any good?" and the others placidly awaited my answer.

So this isn't just about encounters between people who don't know each other well. My mother often deemed my intentions selfish, though selfishness is not among my many flaws, as even casual acquaintances observe. She had three children, two of them remarkably selfish (with positive qualities, as well, some of which I lack), so my mother, having sensibly registered that the majority of her kids were that way, settled into the reasonable operating assumption that "My kids are selfish." She'd frequently ascribe my intentions that way, as I felt myself blurring into the category. Which is weird.

My mother wasn't really at fault. She was just doing what we all do most of the time. And if I were a more normal 60-80% selfish, I'd have felt light exasperation when wrongly accused, not the alien uncanny experience of a mother eerily blind to her child’s most obvious quality. If selfishness were more in my mix, it would have been a perfectly understandable error. A fine-tuning issue. But, having made an edge case of yourself, it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific you as a generalized "them."

---

I was haunted for years by an experience that turned very strange on the bucolic, idyllic New England small town lane I lived in for a while. I'd observed that one of the neighborhood children had extraordinary artistic talent. As I've noted, this sort of thing can be very hard to notice because we tend to compress greatness (placing "fabulously great" adjacent to "competently okay"; i.e. "greatness" seems like "goodness" with extra oomph). Everyone knew she drew well, but it wasn't recognized that she was a prodigy. I told her father, and his face turned red and gnarled into pained disgust. "My child is not extraordinary!" he fumed, leaving me paralyzed with bewilderment. Ever since, I've been painstakingly unraveling what, exactly, he meant.

I think he sensed something I couldn't at the time: the uncanny, horrifying drawbacks of being an edge case, and he didn't want that for her. I interpreted it at the time as a hard-headed celebration of mediocrity. But maybe he was onto something. Maybe this explains the universal impulse to conform and not stick out. Maybe people innately sense something that took me decades to recognize.

The Temperature Magician

In a recent posting titled "Sharpening", I wrote:

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.

I bought a bunch of cheap little temperature and humidity sensors from Xiaomi, and left one in every room. Mostly to help decide if I really need AC, and to track effectiveness of open/closed blinds and fan placements.

When I enter a room, I guess the temperature, very informally, and then glance at the thermometer. How many iterations would you imagine it took to get within half a degree? 1000? 10,000?

No, more like 15. After 15 iterations, I was usually surprisingly right, though occasionally dead wrong.

After 200, I was not much righter, but dead wrong a lot less.

Now, after 1000, I'm nearly the same. After a billion, I'd expect any improvement to be hardly noticeable (unless, perhaps, I managed to maintain a fresh sense of discovery as the process becomes tediously routine).


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

You Can't Get There From Here

How far away is another frame?

Impossibly far yet immediately accessible.

It sounds like a trippy puzzle, but there's nothing spooky about it. It's a simple matter of shifting perspective.

How far away is forgiveness? Impossibly far, but you can do it right here and right now. It's immediately accessible. Just reframe!

How far away is gratitude? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just reframe!

How far away is love? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just reframe!

How far away is your reorientation as a speck within a vast universe, making petty concerns irrelevant? Impossibly far yet immediately accessible. Just reframe!

There used to be a saying, "You can't get there from here!" With shifts of perspective, this is literally true. You can't get there from here...yet it's immediately accessible. Just shift perspective. Just reframe.

It's not a question of "trying harder." It's a matter of viewing differently.

We've all experienced this. One day the world seems different — we're "inspired" or "in love" or "forgiving" or "appreciative" or "freshly determined" or "finally at peace". It all shifts, and things look different, so we figure the world must have changed out there.

But no. We did it — by shifting perspective in here. And this ability is always available, like a smartphone feature we've forgotten about.

A shift of perspective can bring us impossibly far. You can't even get there from here! Yet it's immediately accessible.

---

That's the simplest explanation. The "Explain it like I'm 10" version.

This series goes the other way, explaining how the entire multiverse hinges on this utterly simple flexion of subjectivity. I.e. this is how it all works.

Recircumcision

A strange form of behavior is becoming more and more common. I've coined the term "recircumcision," which hopefully evokes a baby peering up from his crib in horror asking "Really? You're seriously going to cut me again?

The recircumcision phenomenon is best seen by examples:

Outdoing Your Self-Deprecation
You say something self-deprecating, and the other person one-ups you.

You: "I'm a screwup"

Them: "You're the biggest screwup who ever lived".

Your self-deprecation in no way immunizes you from my deprecation.

Congratulations on your recircumcision!

Apologies, My Ass
In one of the Slog's most popular postings, "Angel on a Bike", I tried to make hay out of the widespread reluctance to accept apologies:

I absentmindedly walked into a bike lane in Manhattan, forcing a biker to swerve around me. I recoiled in horrified shame, yelling "I'm so sorry! I'm an idiot! Are you okay?"

Over his shoulder, he roared, "You fucking asshole, why don't you look where you're going?"

I quickly realized that this person was an angel, perhaps even a sort of messiah. If he'd gamely nodded at me in weary resignation, I'd have felt awful all day. But his reaction absolved me of all guilt. I felt light as a feather.

The unwillingness to accept sincere apology is a hallmark of lousy character, but it also affords the highest possible absolution. The biker had taken me utterly off the hook, leaving me completely unburdened.

Measure once, cut twice. Recircumcision!

Forgiving You For Their Mistake
In the posting "Correcting the Record?", I noted that you go on probation whenever someone realizes they've judged you wrongly.

If someone has a wrong idea about you—about something you said, did, or thought—you might, with effort, convince them otherwise. Maybe!

But here's the problem: we exalt our assumptions and opinions, even when they're whimsical. They outweigh provable truth (if this seems odd, imagine how different this world would be if it weren't so). So after all the explaining, you won't have cleared yourself. You'll have been given a reprieve. They'll frame it like forgiveness. They've forgiven your transgression...this time!

So the next time you offend, confuse, or simply trigger another wrong conclusion, you’ll be treated as a repeat offender. No more benefit of the doubt for you, mister.

Recircumcised again and again, 'til it's whittled down to a stub!

Sue and the Speed Bump
Here's where I finally saw the heart of it. The kernel. The unseen flowing channels of ghastly glowing green ectoplasm beneath quiet city streets spurring all this ghoulish recircumcision.

I'm driving zippily through back roads with a passenger, Sue, a bitter elderly alcoholic who excels at the unique alcoholic skill of judging everyone and everything from atop a dizzyingly high perch and won't you please pass the wine BELLLLLCH thanks very much.

I hit a speed bump at speed. Jarring. I apologize profusely — at first, sincerely, but lapsing into more lavish and pathetic self-immolation as I try to delay and dispel the inevitable blast from Sue's loaded shotgun of verbal excoriation. However, my tongue lashing is not the least bit reduced by my profuse mea maxima culpa blame-taking. The doctor has slated you for recircumcision, so recircumcised you shall be.

But just before she emits her harangue, I notice something. Her jaw sets. She has perceived an obstacle. An impediment. And she's revving her engines to clear it.

I realize, with a sickening start, what happened. My apology had infuriated her, because it was taking away her big moment. Sue's big moment where she'd enjoy free reign to savage another human being without compunction.

There are precious few opportunities to really let loose and harangue, harass, attack, insult, deride, and generally consume fellow human beings while remaining more or less within the bounds of proper behavior. Such moments are golden. Golden moments! And my extended apology had been like stealing a toddler's sundae cherry. Which, naturally, only peaked her pique.


The horrifying truth is that the knives are never far from out, anything you do might precipitate the snip-snip-snip of greedy scissors, and they actually like it this way.

The Mundanity of Intuition

The problem with intuition is that it can be hard to distinguish useful intimations from suggestions of what you want to happen, or are afraid might happen. Or from random frothy mental noise. It's hard to winnow truth from slop.

I've written previously ("The Subtlety of Truth") that real intuition is quiet and doesn't nag, whereas emotion and froth holler on endless repeat. "God whispers while the Devil shouts" would be the cheesy storybook version. Real intuition feels like knowing.

I just thought of another hallmark. Real intuition feels obvious.

Often have I screeched my car to a halt in front of some seemingly generic noodle shop or bakery and eagerly polled passengers "doesn't that look fantastic?" while they squinted and shrugged. They don't see it. Which bedevils me. How can they not see it?

That's how real intuition feels: remarkably mundane. Obvious. Right there in front of you.

It's so banal that it might be flowing deeply without your ever realizing. Extraordinary ability feels flatly ordinary from the inside. My sister, a natural at drawing, spent years thinking the rest of us simply don't try hard enough.

If you imagine you've come up with something mysterious and magical, that invalidates the whole thing. Real intuition doesn't feel special or strange or uncanny. It arrives as information, no different from any other. Like noticing an open window or empty coffee mug. So I'll amend my previous aphorism: Real intuition feels merely like knowing.

This observation itself is recursive. It took me 63 goddamn years to notice. Why? It was too obvious.

Booby Trapping

Mocking old people is like booby trapping the rollercoaster you're queued to ride.

My Brad Pitt Chronicles

My whole life, I've worked into a headwind because of my looks. It's not that I'm particularly horrible looking, but more than one woman has informed me that I'm not in "their league" (actually true, though not in the way they thought), and when I walk into a room of strangers, the energy, despite my upbeat attitude and witty repartee, sinks measurably. Ah, hell. Here comes Mr. Shloomphy.

The issue is that I'm really, really — no, really — not Brad Pitt, and just as I entered adulthood, that became the standard. I've failed the Brad Pitt standard miserably.

Which is fine! I'm not trying to look like much, or seem like much. My interest is in full-heartedly doing much. I don't mind standing back in the gloom as lowly Mr. Shloomphy while people enjoy my creations. I'd much rather be The Guy than seem like The Guy, even though this ensures that no one ever believes I'm really The Guy. Seemers always win!

It's not my ideal outcome, but I wouldn't switch. Even in a world that rewards pretense over substance, I'd rather Do than pretend to be a Doer.

There's also a moral component to beauty which always made me feel that it's not for me. I once noted that "Qualities such as kindness, intelligence, generosity, and a sense of humor are of service to others. Beauty, by contrast, serves only its possessor." I didn't say it with a bitter snort. In fact, the world probably needs beautiful people to spruce up the place and stoke whatever social energy we still have left as a species. In a world of Mr. Shloomphys, we'd all recede 100% into our screens rather than just 98%.

So perhaps beauty can be mildly generous, after all. But it's still not for me. There are specialists for that, so I amiably get out of the way and let folks preen while I do what I do, because that just seems more useful. I was raised on Richard Scarry. We each contribute what we have to contribute.

And it didn't work out so badly. I got a lot done, and a series of oddly glamorous girlfriends saw past Mr. Shloomphy's facade. I'm proud of my work, and would regret it if I'd ever shortchanged it by diverting energy to making myself seem shiny. I was famous for a moment and didn't like it. I walked away. So I'm not a victim of circumstance, or of genetic lottery. I've made choices for clear reasons, and I stand by them.

But the same world that always responded to me with a firm "Uh-uh!" — insisting that I don't look the part, make the grade, or pass the Brad Pitt test — is suddenly very upset about my looks.

I'm 63, and my genes are not optimized for graceful aging. Plus my health has been crap. Plus I was spookily aged by my ordeal with Chowhound, which I created at age 35 (looking 28) and escaped at age 43 (looking 60). And when I connect these days in-person with old friends — even ones who particularly admired and respected me — roughly half of them wince at first glance. Often, an overt sneer. They grudgingly chat with me, and I don't hear from them again. I'm more chill and droll than ever, so it's nothing I'm doing. It's how I'm looking.

So I suppose this means that they'd mostly liked me for my fantastic good looks all along. Who knew??? This beautiful, beautiful man longer radiates PIZZAZZ! How the mighty have fallen!

It's the strangest strangeness of my long, estranged life. I don't get it. But I keep doing my thing. I'm a diligently purposeful ant, striving to be a generous earthworm (shitting out ever-so-slightly more nutritious earth as he goes), all with the blitheness of a reed (with no reason to object to the battering wind). Everything else is a kaleidescope, which I try to marvel at but more often just eye-roll — giving me frown lines compounding my tragic loss of visual magnificence.

---

When this bizarre ride is over, and I'm handed a user survey card to rate my experience, I'll hand it back, blank, with an affable shrug. I'm not sure anyone has ever worked more industriously to understand this world, but much of it remains absolutely bewildering. This place truly defies all understanding.

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! :)