When I was nineteen or so I loved dance parties. Then I had this nightmarish thought that all of life might just end up amounting to just that, a procession of flashing lights. They never did much for me ever again. So goes life of the senses. What was Kingson’s yearbook quote? The effort to understand the universe is the one thing that raises life above the level farce and gives it the grace of tragedy. Yes, it’s important to understand. It even feels like the most important. There are other things. Exploring. Creating. There isn’t much else.

This book I finally got around to usurping from the sibling unit and reading might be one of the few that will really change my life. It’s about Platonism versus empiricism. I’ve always thought that empiricism is just a lot of boredom, left to people with more patience, a better work ethic, and that Platonism is about possibilities and therefore far more interesting. Taleb prefers empiricism, for fantastic reasons. We’re both right.

The thing of interest here is what is easily mistakable for nothing at all (for the peasants, for the ants on the anthill, as is the nature of insects to look down and not out). The black space off the edge of the map. The vast intractable unknown. How to get acquainted with it? Maybe even bootstrap oneself into it? Back in the day the popular consciousness put seamonsters and all sorts of other things in that black space. Bolder types go out and survey the place, generate maps. Empirical, like. Close to reality. Some time later others come back and reshape the place, (Platonically) carve out the island of Manhattan for example. And look how that thing has surpassed its progenitors.

Relatedly, of course what I’m in my heart of hearts most interested in isn’t love or kindness, but a leaving a self-perpetuating something that issues forth from myself, a copy that copies itself, viral-like. Those feelings are lubrication for that disease, what it ferments in. The luckiest person in the world is the one who loves his work and loves his family too. But love doesn’t seem like an end upon itself as much leaving a mark does—and it’s always important to hedge one’s bets—here, between work and progeny, hope that either one or the other doesn’t fail. I don’t have any intention of telling my kids that, though.

what your old stuy classmates are up to:
St. John's suspect troubled but meek, pals say

holy shit..

Yo, went to a Mets game the other day, a first for me. Games are appealing: rules are clear, success is easily defined, and so it’s easy to throw all your rational and irrational force behind personally or vicariously pursuing that success. Then there are the regular rational aesthetics. And, elements of the game are accidental, but not too much of it. All these things are pleasurable for most people--like for the rowdy moron drunk gumbas, paying $6.50 per beer, 5 beers each, in the row behind us. Me too—Jose Reyes missed a line drive that eventually cost the game, knocked my elbow into my armrest accidentally out of disappointment and it still hurts. There are (at least some) reasons for all this.

It's like most pop music, which is almost defined by regular rhythms, changed up here and there for kicks. Also, there is still nothing I find hotter then guys in uniform. Or even better: It was a wonderful day for me when the more attractive hipsters started to wear army jackets. Regularity but with elements of irony. The utmost in simple pleasures.

Why is that? Wikipedia says thinking is: “a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires”. Whooa. Is this why all this simplicity—ready-made models with variations here and there—is so appealing?—provides a (maybe rare) feeling of mastery over the world. Feelings of mastery are pleasurable for evolutionary reasons (mastery = survival) ? Maybe.

How much of life really is like that? Easily defined, and easily mastered with practice? Much of the 9-5 work world, world for sure. But that is an explainable subset of something far less explainable. What accounts for the job you have, the spouse you get, and all sorts of other things. So much randomness, not so model-able.

Real jazz, more than any other form of music, is close to life. Musicians have repertoires of riffs already learned, and then it’s how all this knowledge and skill interact with each other in time and improvisationally that constitute musical reality, an unexpected synthesis. A true metaphor for life. Most folks don’t like it at all. Hard to blame them for it.

Quiet times like these are for sitting back and sifting through, sloughing off the wrong, embracing the right. If. Possible. I read somewhere that memory is more about mood than pictures. How can the moods occupying all that swath of time be described with any accuracy—even the narrative I might impose on it right now must be effected by the mood I’m in this hour. And that will effect future narratives. Corruption without end.

Today is another nine-eleven. Which for me then comes out to sixteen pre- and six post-. Finally far enough, right, to be callous enough not to need to tread as lightly as possible and even appropriate the thing for exegesis about one’s personal life. Though I still feel that even mentioning it is an act of defiance—that last sentence too, another act of defiance. Defiance against what? There is nothing pushing back. What’s with all this fury (if w/o sound) that seems to signify nothing?

I run two miles every day now—up from one and working up to three. I know that isn’t much for most, but I’ve never been talented at endurance, so it’s more reason why this improvement gives me a sense of well-being. Like the carrot-and-sticks of old, like grades were before the all the insidious complacency. Intimations of greater ambitions to come; it’s fully possible to create one’s own superstructure of carrot-and-sticks, which people do, and it takes them all sorts of places.

And yet as always it seems like an impossible farce to grasp backward at the unbounded optimism, the infinite ambition, of a Stuyvesant sophomore when the entire direction of one’s life hence has been towards tepidity and timidity. Not just because you’ve grown older and wiser and now think that the most even gaze produces the most correct information, but really the other reason you keep your head down is because you happen to know that this world is full of horrors and that nobody escapes. (Guess which Tony Kushner play I plagiarized that last bit from.)

Relatedly, a good half of my real experiences with pot have been about pure terror, the same waking nightmare about *cosmic* solitude. When it’s not so terrible, it’s a background mood, a corpse in the room, which you refuse to look at because you’ve seen it before, and it was horrible enough to neutralize any curiosity about it.

This is not trivial. X, the only person I’ve met that seemed to really identify, said that it can be something to grow from. He said it so equivocally (maybe he has never been successful it?) that I almost didn’t catch it. It’s a thought that has really gotten under my skin, though. The idea that it is fully possible to ride roughshod over the abyss under your feet, the one that you know to exist, while drawing from energy that is its own justification. The same autotelic energy (“what is right? Whatever increases the feeling of power”) that can again, in turn, transitively be used to justify all those ridiculous sticks and carrots...

X had a big mirror in his living room which cut off where the top of the couch started and below that on the floor a bed spread was laid out where I’d eat watermelons among other things. A set up that let me watch myself dive in—to what? It’s true that as much as I know about dead ends in theory I actively seek them out. Because all fun must be escapist in some way, right? And what is this whole genre of activity supposed to be besides fun. August on the other hand was the most solitary month I’ve had in years. Good for me—keeps the red blood at that low level I like it to be at. Of course that thing is unshakable. I try to sublimate it, drown it out, wash it away and it attacks from all sides, especially on the most gorgeous avenues which is the stretch of space from the village to where midtown starts. My big eyes and short stature have given who knows how many the impression that they are on at least close to uncharted territory. An illusion I let them have because I am vindictive and hate to be tread on and happen to know that in a post-prophylactic world, ethics about that thing truely are irrelevant (or, the distaste that replaces ethics for those who think they dont believe in ethics) and I believe in getting over one’s first if they’re wrong--or worse, limiting. But then I know it’s a 20^th Century form of hubris to tell the world how it should work and then pretend to live in that sort of world. Which was our parent's generation and look how they turned out. No sane modern person thinks he could really fight every single battle and swim against that tide of how things are. Relatedly, my mother at her most quotable and, actually, least anti-Semitic: “everyone else has a savior, what are they waiting for”. Weeell, maybe it’s on account of their higher standards that the soft spoken carpenter didn’t quite do it for them. Or maybe waiting-as-a-way of life is the best one, the most productive, least destabilizing one. I’m waiting too, for someone smart to make me feel things again. Preferably rich and with a nice body, but I wouldn’t want to ask for too much. Was never good at seeking these things out, in any case.

Furthermore, I’m on hiatus from zen. Made me so divinely-bovinely content. Which is fine when life is on the upswing but then a vacuum opens up and you’re like a lamb to the slaughter. Which is more a-posteriori theorizing, but I wouldn’t do it If I didn’t think I was getting closer and closer to a better idea (of what-the-fuck just happened in my life). In moments of most clarity is when I’m most disgusted at what I’ve become; when did I become so frivolous. There was a time when I felt like I took life as seriously as anyone I knew. By far the most dangerous (non-psychotic) belief that I can think of is that it's ever possible to just give up and go to sleep in the snow without some sort of consequences. And, that's all for now.

Psych Prof Farbstein once said that most inventions have correlates in nature, especially in the human body (pens are penises, hinges are joints, etc). Enrapturing idea. And then there are things that don’t fit. More basic things: there’s no such thing as a parallelogram in nature, as far as I can tell. Not immediately accessible to the senses anyway. It’s something that came forth spontaneously from humans, an invention of human abstraction.

Also: the first time I was old enough to notice these things and up in an airplane, the thing I found most shocking was all the squares everywhere: all that land squared, appropriated, made to serve a purpose, a purpose for whoever appropriated it. Just like the wonderful views outside Manhattan high-rises: other buildings, layers of square upon squares. It’s the human disease.

So--the older I get the more I think Nietzsche was right: I see power everywhere. Bureaucratic power over other humans is just an obvious form for obvious people. More profoundly, there is the power derived from power over nature, imposing oneself on it. Imposing one’s own order, one’s own laws on it (autonomy = self + law).

Then there is the flip side: destruction is *the* nightmare, penultimate only to nothing at all, which is luckily hard to think about. It comes in subtle forms, too: like how after a big rain, little rivers tend to carve themselves through the asphalt. Always the tendency towards entropy: the return to disorder from all that hard-wrought order. Terrifying. Order requires power and thus order is power, which doesn’t work out logically—but what’s that question? What do you believe even though you can not prove it? That'd be one answer, with the addendum that power, in turn, more than anything, is everything...

Theory comes from the greek theorei, which is the same root for theater--which comes from the same idea: to detach and watch. watching is prerequisite to understanding, says one theory. as assumes most of classical western philosophy (which forms so many core assumptions learned implicitly through years of schooling, and by just living in the modern world). Sanctioned by the assumed noble-ness of all this detachment, it’s possible to detach away giant sections of one’s life this way. For example, in theory X seems like the best thing to do with my life, this or that the best kind of person to marry, etc. Reject everything else. Things left to chance are reduced to a minimum. There are even theories for that element of chance. The central limit theorem for example. A more sophisticated theoretical person might make provisions for the 99% range of possible occurrences, which lie in the middle of the bell curve.

It happens to everyone, though: sexual preferences congeal into “types”, strangers into stereotypes, interests into, so very unglamorously, into what I should-be-interested-in because it’s the path I’ve chosen. In such a state of affairs, I think, living in the theoretical cloud that accounts for everything, the only things that are directly and truly experienced are curveballs. And only things that are really and truly experienced can produce (psychological) growth (or degeneracy) in the thing doing the experiencing. It's the difference between a theoretical punch in the face and an actual (practical) one. It’s why major events are so important. Everything up until point X is already accounted for intellectually and thus inert. Like how the stock market follows a random walk because all information up until point X, facts as well as theory about the future, is already summed up into stock prices. Completely unforeseen events are what really changes things.

[Still, there's a vulnerable core in there, vulnerable to certain things, some things more than other things. Maybe that's what should be understood. One's vulnerabilities more than anything. Because the world is unpredictable. Jung's archetype theory is appealing. Events derive their power from the ability to activate certain proclivities. such proclivities in the collective unconscious, humanity at the most basic, and then one’s more unique proclivities. Matching modern empirical psychology with one’s own background and experience can illuminate that. The things it predicts, they might not ring true yet or even ever, but watch out! You might even become a homo, if the circumstances are right.]

Daoists sit and forget for the sake of richer experience. Forgetting all details, especially the mundane ones in order to experience them again, like for the first time. A return from detachment back into one’s animal core, the one that is always fully immersed in one’s surroundings. This, too is powerful. Everyone speaks better chinese when they are drunk. A (deliberate/non-deliberate) obliteration of the self-reflecting rational intellect. It’s what western psychology appropriated recently and called “flow”. Maybe it’s possible to live one’s entire life in that flow state. Daoist sages do it, maybe. But they were never known to be very productive--the tendency is to live intensely but with no value added (you can't learn Chinese while drunk). So, using the rational intellect to harness that subterranean spring, directing and channeling that explosive mess--at its best and most mature, a deft corrective…