indirection

Not that I’m surprised, having put up with others’ online inanities for a couple decades. But what a drag having rushed to read a comment someone made on this blog, and it turned out to be an invitation to join an “adult” site.

I suppose I’ll never be completely free of the itch to write online. But I go through strong phases where it feels pointless. Where it feels leaving anonymous 3×5 cards in library books is the way to go. Or maybe even merely a diary no one else will ever read. Of if just one person finally does, the words and the feelings they channel will be that much more valuable and special, for not being merely just so much electronic toilet paper.

If less is more, is nothing everything?

The holidays provided more evidence for why I don’t like holidays.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved being with the others present.

But, see, in my mind, it doesn’t take a holiday to do that. If anything, all the other crap that comes with holidays (shopping, gifts, excessive food preparation and consumption, extra traffic, the pretense that there’s something mystically “real” about the holiday, etc., etc.) gets in the way of interacting with the others in free and interesting ways.

Never mind the various obligation issues pertaining to having to spend equal time with people who can’t possibly all be together in the same place at the same time, e.g. because they’re different families who’ve been monkey-wrenched together by law (i.e. marriage), and the hard-feelings that can arise when there’s perception of favoritism, of spending more time with one group than another.

I’m even more scrooge about it all than I may seem to be letting on, here. I rather detest all the additional hoopla, pony show, or however else it might best be described. But I’m trying to be nice with my description, otherwise I’ve heard I shouldn’t say anything at all. Yet, is there really any point to blogging if you’re not going to say what you really feel, believe, think?

Perhaps my biggest problem with holidays is I’ve never been honest about it. So I wind up going along with everyone else’s seeming life-or-death need to real-ize such events, but then spend most of the time in “told you so” mode internally, while the usual disasters occur along the way, along with a big scoop of resentment for having been “made” to attend - although what I’m really mad about is my having not been honest to begin with (but that’s usually too hard to admit - but, hey, at least I’m finally doing it now, right?).

So, I hope to do better along those lines in the future, starting with the honesty.

But as you might imagine, it’s hard given the realities of peer pressure, political correctness, etc., etc. 47 years among humans gives me plenty of reason to believe being honest about such things is paramount to being relegated to the region of the herd often referred to as “the outside looking in”. And I don’t just mean for the duration of the event. But forever more.

Maybe that’s what bothers me most about holidays. That there really can’t be much honesty about them without serious social risk. But then maybe not taking that risk is risking more, what with the intensity of resentment that can result for not being true to one’s glorious “self” in such things.

Beautiful day and night.

Sure, I had to dig my car out of post ice-storm conditions, including an extra layer of frozen slush thereupon for parking in the street. And I discovered a parking ticket for having forgotten we live on a “snow route” through town. The ticket - crammed in the outside rear-view mirror - wasn’t visible until I’d chipped a fair amount of ice off the mirror. That’ll be $25 bucks unless I can successfully plead just-moved-here ignorance.

Also, the night before was one of my worst nights ever on a craps table. And while we got decent sleep last night, such has not been the case for days.

But I completed everything I needed to at work to be relatively work-care-free for a couple weeks off. That’s been somewhat rare in my 23 year career. Seems like the biggest disasters have gravitated to occurring just before vacation time.

We also enjoyed watching Woody Allen’s “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy”, which I’d seen before, but probably at least 18 years ago.

But, alas, I’m feeling a virus of some sort crawling in me, throat and nose and ears and chest. It’s far from full term. And with any luck at all, the vitamin C I’ve pumped this body full of will kick its immune system in sufficiently high gear to do reasonable battle.

But such is life. Winning. Losing. Drawing. And everything in and about.

To say life is a game a craps is to say nothing, because it’s so utterly true.

Which isn’t to say you can’t win. You can. But you need to pay your dues, keeping you active at the table, ready to bet and increase bets as the dice become hot and go hotter.

The key is remembering there’s no formula. As soon as you play from a formula, the house is en route to winning.

Because there is no formula: in attempting to impose a formula upon occurrences having no formula, you mock reality, which cannot lose in the long haul.

You must become symbiotic with as many table/life trends as possible.

Luck - or whoever you believe really rolls all dice - carries you.

The fear of the Roller is the beginning of craps knowledge.

It’s not the kind of day for performing outdoors. Sure, it’s sunny. But it’s also 45 degrees, the ever-present threat of wind. Them’s not guitar-playing conditions. It’s bladder-seems-full-again-too-soon conditions.

On top of that - or maybe ’tis the underlying motive (there’s a certain amount of guilt, hence the weather excuses first) - I just don’t feel like it. We’ve done it several times, and all indications are it will be same old. Commerce is 99.99% of what matters down there, if not everywhere. It’s a fair amount of work wheeling the equipment down there, setting it up, taking it down, and wheeling it back. It seems like that work should lead to more benefit than merely imagining a few others thought we were good, or it made them happy. Again, tomatoes and eggs and croissants are far more important.

Today’s chill feels very curl-up-with-a-book. But I just finished curling up with a book, and mostly came away with the re-realization that fiction lost its innocence years ago, for me. I’m so much more distracted by the mechanics of reading and nearby goings on (e.g. branches swaying through the open blinds) than I am drawn to some world I have to maintain with repeated imagination. Keeping track of the so-called real world is enough work.

Once you’ve thought about it a bit, the righteous emotion some display when talking about how important it is to vote is sadly humorous.

It’s humorous because it’s such a classic display of shallow thought thundering all rough and tumble and knowing.

It’s sad, because when you do the math, you find that while voting is valuable when you don’t have the option/right to vote, it pales - might even be considered all but useless - compared to sustained interpersonal politics.

Consider an elected position with a term of 2 years.

Each person gets one vote, which they’re allowed to exercise once every 2 years. It takes about 10 minutes. So the voter exercises an entire 10 minutes of influence upon the political system every 2 years. That’s 10 minutes out of the 1,051,200 minutes there are in 2 years.

While that walloping 10 minutes out of 1,051,200 might be a lot if elected representatives were quarantined in solitary confinement, with no opportunity to interact with so-called “special interests”, then maybe that astounding 10 minutes of civic effort might be something to hoot and holler about.

But guess what? Elected representatives are not quarantined in solitary confinement. They’re accessible to others. Any and all others.

Let’s say someone wines and dines a representative. How long does that take? A couple hours? Let’s call it 120 minutes.

And that’s just once! 120 is 12 times bigger than 10. And it’s quality time to boot. It’s time where the person making the effort to get through to the representative has direct access - they can state their causes and reasoning in as much detail as they wish.

The voter? Um… well… what message did they send? Oh, right… that they generally maybe sorta kinda believe in most of what the candidate is said to believe.

At a bare minimum, the winer/diner has 12 times more influence than a voter. And since it’s direct communication, it’s really a lot more than that. Theirs is no mere vote of confidence. They have the opportunity to persuade.

And if they perform said wining/dining several times a year? Well, just keep multiplying out the effective influence.

Do we get it now, voter rights mongers? Do we see why putting a lot of effort into getting people to vote really doesn’t mean shit compared with, say, getting them to actively participate with their elected officials?

Yeah, sure… a vote means a ton if/when you don’t have a vote. But once you do, it means almost nothing compared with personally interacting with elected representatives.

The reason silence is golden is because the confusion ensuing from word-mediated communication between human beings is shit.

And, yes, of course, that includes this communication.

Given that, it would be within millimeters of the height of folly to attempt to explain it to you if you don’t already get it.

I for one (and, unfortunately, the number one is apparently not too far from being accurate) am ecstatic to be spending far less time online than a year ago. And even when I do, it’s with orders of magnitude less hope or faith in finding anything of value there.

But the acoustic guitar? A jog? Good eating? A good game of craps?

Golden.

<ahem>

I remember in college saying in a letter to a friend that my epitaph should read, “He waited”.

Well, I mean, others have their lives, so they’re busy tending to them. And then there’s all this inefficiency of communication. Even in this alleged glorious age of electronic communication, I’m waiting half of forever to be receiving answers to inquiries. More often than not, the answers are non-answers requiring additional, more detailed inquiries. And it all fans out in wait-producing ways reminiscent of “x to the x factorial”, ikywim. Never mind the fact that I’m the only person on the planet who rides into town on a horse named Punctuality, with any regularity.

So I’ve waited, and continue to wait.

It’s a beautiful September day, this day after my mom’s birthday. Sunny. Perfect temperature. Just enough breeze. Probably should be outside, but I already spent serious quality time there, today. So for now it’s a bit of internet vegetating.

Dang it, words have failed me. I’m not talking about clarity or precision. I mean they no longer enchant. Fiction no longer makes me forget it’s fiction. And writing no longer makes me forget that nobody will get it anyway. That nobody will feel the actual states. A vow of silence suddenly sounds like a recipe for sanity.

It was an interesting trip on the craps table, last night. My latest methodology had me slowly but surely sinking. Probably down to minus $220 at one point. But I hung in there. Three or so good shoots had me back to minus $55 when I finally pulled the plug. And - my God, craps is such a woulda/coulda/shoulda affair! - had I not made proposition bets, and had I removed my bets before the final seven, I’d have probably been slightly up. But it was a lot of fun. Well, not the initial downward spiral. Couldn’t focus. But some fun characters showed up, and those few good rolls (one of them, mine - it feels good to be the shooting hero), and the high-fives were happening, and the hooting and hollering.

I’ll be back.

Three cheers for the so-called cathartic aspect of writing. Because when you’re pouring your heart into a thimble near the edge of the online universe, attention levels are basically just a smidgen above absolute zero. You’re either feeling relieved for purging, and satisfied with your writing, or you’ve basically wasted your time. But maybe someday there’ll be tons of traffic this direction, people will be hanging on my every word, and thus will it seem like something more than nothing is happening here. Well that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be.

Not a whole lot out of the ordinary happening today. I’m vacationing with my kids. But between doing the heavy lifting, that they might enjoy their time, I’m just fiddling a little with the guitar, reading others’ whining and questionable claims (aka blogging), and keeping my bladder empty.

Now I’m recovering from a mild sneezing fit, and flossing between words. My eldest passes by to where it’s both politically and sanitarily correct to address the fullness of his bladder.

I suffer (and benefit) from having wondered how this (i.e. life) works at an early age. I really, honestly looked into it. And not merely by reading acceptable literature on the subject, although I did plenty of that. But I also read a lot of off-beat stuff. And experimented. Lots of experimentation. I somehow understood that knowing and doing were incomplete without each other. They complement each other. Head knowledge alone is sterile, and doing alone paves a slippery slope to the nearest ditch.

But as with the pursuit of anything beyond the surface, it becomes impossible to communicate with others about it unless they’ve walked a similar enough path, and exercised similar muscles along the way.

They may use the same words as you. But they don’t get it. And you know they don’t get it. And you also know they don’t know they don’t get it. And attempting to inform them of such at best results in their taking offense with what they perceive to be your looking down upon them.

Sigh.

So, I don’t know. I sometimes worry about it, and feel I should be making some kind of effort to get through, to share. But then I remember that’s not how it really works. I had to scratch and claw for what I know and what I’ve become. It can’t be given away. It’s not free. It’s actually very expensive.

It costs your “self”.

God is said to not be a respecter of persons, not because God has no respect for persons (in the good ‘ole Rodney Dangerfield sense). Rather, because God knows there are no persons to either respect or not respect to begin with. “Persons” are unicorns, as far as God is concerned.

Sin is believing (aka real-izing) otherwise, i.e. believing in free-willed, separate individual person-hood (aka self-hood).

It’s that simple.