Boring

How bored can I be and for how long?

I consider all the things I could do: feed the dog, go work on my bike, read a book, research suicide methods on the internet.  None of those, however, are interesting enough to move me from my seated position here on the couch.  I’m not even motivated to rise and turn up the heat; it’s not boring enough to be warm; I’d rather sit here being bored with being chilly.

What is boredom, anyway?  It’s a feeling that there’s something more interesting to do, that the world holds greater charms than one is experiencing, and that you deserve better than you’re getting at the moment.  It would seem, therefore, that one ought to be bored at every moment.  And perhaps we are.

There’s also an aspect of fear that goes alone with boredom; it’s a fear that this is all there is—that this is what you’ve got to look forward to for the rest of your life.  I’m afraid that if I’m bored now, imagine how bored I’ll be as an even older man with really nothing to do.

Mom used to say, as all moms do, that there isn’t really anything that’s boring; there are only boring people.  So, if you’re bored, it’s all your fault.  I’m not so sure.  Surely, I wouldn’t be so bored if I had something interesting to do like lying on a beach drinking a pina colada between bouts of body surfing and beer-drinking.

I also wouldn’t be bored if the Steelers game was on right now.  So, clearly, I’m only bored because the future holds better prospects.

If I were dead I wouldn’t be bored, unless I go to heaven and have to hang out at the right hand of God for all eternity.  Even if it’s pure bliss all the time, it’s going to be boring, simply for lack of variety.

Kind of like this, only without the chill.

Warrant

“Seeing is believing,” they say, but just as often, you hear, “You won’t believe your eyes,” so which is it?

I’m sort of skeptical of eyewitness accounts, especially in the kingdom of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king and since ours is a world in which people continually turn a blind eye towards suffering, it’s easy enough to see (even if you’re sightless) that just because someone believes they saw something is little reason to believe they saw it.

I could show you what I mean, but that wouldn’t prove anything other than that you have eyes, a fact you’d never have known unless you looked in a mirror.

Being nearsighted, I may have a myopic perspective on all this and I’ll be the first to admit (especially after the water-boarding) that I probably don’t see things as clearly as I should.  Nevertheless, even if I can’t see the nose on my own face, I am able to discern between the forest and the trees; the latter being mainly conifers, the former including winding paths and lots of mycelium.

Moreover, I’d rather take the long view, which affords me a God’s eye perspective; the problem with that is since God is not Cyclops, I fail to perceive depth accurately and run right into a telephone pole I had visualized as somewhere much farther down the street.

I used to think there would come a time, where, as my presbyopia worsened, my nearsightedness would be perfectly counteracted so that, for a brief period, I wouldn’t need glasses at all.  It hasn’t quite worked that way, although, as luck would have it, I am finally at the point where not only are things blurry up close, but they’re also fuzzy far away, in addition to being cloudy in the middle.  Consequently, I never have to worry that I might be missing something—the way things stand now, I can be utterly confident that I am, sight unseen.

Regrets

I sorely regret the fact that I have no regrets. 

I’m sorry that I’m not sorry. 

Please forgive me for my unforgivable behavior. 

Never let it be said that I have nothing to say.

I can’t imagine why I’ve done the unimaginable.  If only I were the only one.

I’ll try to consider being more considerate; instead of doing what I ought not, I’ll just make sure not to do what I shouldn’t.

We have ways of having ways; there are passages through the impassible; if you look for what can’t be seen, you’ll find the invisible.

I can’t help that I was born this way at birth; no doubt I’ll live like this until I die.  No one should expect me to do the unexpected; it’s not a surprise that my behavior isn’t surprising.

When it’s all over, I’ll be done; at the endpoint we’ll be finished.  If we start at the beginning, we can count on reaching the end when it’s over.

Of course, if I’ve done something illegal, I will have broken the law.  And if no one will excuse me, then I agree my actions are inexcusable. 

But a person has to admit only those things that are admissible; what we cannot speak of will remain unspoken.  That said, if I’ve failed to express the inexpressible, I’ve also been unable to describe the utterly ineffable.

No one wants to be that guy who is “that guy.”  But I can’t help myself if I’m helpless.

Meanwhile, I’m spending my time spending time and only saying things that can be put into words.

The future will arrive after the present is finished; injuries will happen to those who get hurt.  We know we have feelings because we can feel them; there’s no point in denying the undeniable.

Had I chosen an alternative, I have done something different; but when all is said and done, if I were really someone else, then I wouldn’t be me.

Senescence

I can’t imagine that the fall colors have any evolutionary adaptive advantage for the trees that display them.  They can’t be there to attract any pollinators or dispel predators; my hypothesis is that all those vibrant reds and yellows are simply the background consciousness of Universe bleeding through.  It’s as if the aesthetic impulse of Nature is unable to be suppressed; it just can’t help itself when it comes to making beauty.

In other words, there is no reason why the fall foliage is so fabulous; it just is.

This makes me wonder, though, about all those millennia before human beings were around to appreciate the way the maples blaze and the poplars shimmer; if there weren’t any creatures whose minds perceived the light from the sun off those leaves in the way we do would those colors even exist?  Suppose the only animal organisms in the world were ones whose visual processing machinery couldn’t distinguish between different electromagnetic wavelengths in what we refer to as the visible spectrum.  Wouldn’t we have to conclude that, in such a world, fiery red maples were not?

This, of course, is not meant to detract in any way from the lovely canopy that has dominated backyards and bike trails these last few weeks; nor does it make the ongoing disappearance of that loveliness any less poignant.  On the contrary: the contingent, yet inevitable nature of Nature’s ways inspires me to be even more awestruck by the beauty than I would if it could be shown to have some practical purpose.  That all this might just be a superfluous expression of an exuberant Universe heightens my appreciation for it immeasurably.

Fall is the most fleeting of the seasons around here; all it takes is one big wind and rainstorm and the warm-hued palette goes from over our heads to under our feet.  While it lasts, though, it may be the loveliest of all, especially if all that beauty is really useless.

Didn't

Consider all I failed to do this summer:

•    I didn’t practice the Ashtanga Yoga Second Series with any regularity.

•    I never got around to writing my novel; I didn’t even write a piece for my weblog every day.

•    I didn’t clean out the scary storage area in my basement.

•    I hardly gardened; the potatoes were planted and harvested, but the tomatoes pretty much languished for lack of water.

•    I didn’t overhaul any of my bikes.

•    I only took one load of stuff to Goodwill; I still have many untouched piles of books, clothing, and odds and ends I could take.

•    I didn’t ride my bike to Portland.

•    I only did a cursory read of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Neo-Darwinian Materialist Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, in spite of my desire to set up a philosophy reading group with several of my colleagues to explore it in-depth.

•    I left the roof of my bike shed untouched, even though it’s obvious that the moss is taking over.

•    I didn’t hire anyone to put solar panels on our outside studio roof.

•    I failed to really address the inevitable problem of water collecting in my home’s basement during the rainy season.

•    I didn’t go to the horse-racing track with my family.

•    I didn’t study the Yoga Sutras; hardly anyways.

•    I never made pesto.

•    I didn’t once go out to see a band play at a bar by myself.

•    I never found time to take mushrooms.

•    I failed to bring about peace in the Middle East, justice in Ferguson, Missouri, or aesthetic taste in Las Vegas, Nevada.

•    I didn’t bake dill scones.

•    I never volunteered at the local soup kitchen.

•    I didn’t swim in Lake Washington more than half a dozen times.

•    I didn’t lose those five pounds.

•    I didn’t win a Stranger Genius Award, a MacArthur, or the Nobel Peace Prize; the few times I bought lottery tickets, I had no luck either.

However, I did write this!

Nothing

Fifty or sixty years from now, I’ll be dead and, almost certainly, a century from today, everybody who knows me will be gone, too.

It’s not out of the question that human beings—or at least the particular version we’re familiar with—will be extinct in a couple of millennia, and, as everybody knows, it’s only a matter of time before a giant asteroid hits the planet or climate change does us in and all traces of homo sapiens are eradicated from the earth.

So, it seems sort of silly to be worried about accomplishing anything.

Whatever I do is not going to make any difference in the long run; it’s only a matter of time until no one will be around to appreciate my efforts.  Why not save myself the effort and just stop trying to be creative or productive since who cares anyway after all?

Now, presumably, one could argue that what I do—or anyone does—matters to people who are around right now, including, I suppose, me, too. 

But I don’t know.

When I reflect upon my accomplishments, such as they are, I’m singularly unimpressed.  It’s hard for me to care about anything I’ve done unless somebody else does. 

And since it’s not obvious that any of my efforts mean anything to anyone, how can I possibly maintain the illusion that any of it is worthwhile? 

Consequently, the sensible thing to do, for me, and, I would argue, pretty much everyone else, is to do nothing.

Well, nap, maybe.

After all, when all is said and done, we may as well just be done with it.  No more senseless striving after unachievable goals.  No more rat-racing among one’s fellow rats.  No more worrying about what we have to do and what will happen if we don’t.

Finally, we can all stop pretending that anything anyone does means anything at all. 

And, we can all stretch out on the couch and take a nap.

Reviews

I just finished reading former National Book Award winner Michael Cunningham’s newest novel, The Snow Queen.  Lovely, lyrical writing; beautifully-drawn characters; and at the center, a metaphysical mystery that makes you wonder about the supernatural and whether miracles are possible; still, it wasn’t my favorite of his books; I’d take The Hours or A Home At the End of the World over it in a heartbeat.

But so what?  Why listen to me?  Read it yourself and make your own decision.

The accelerating phenomenon of first-person reviews of pretty much everything, from books to movies to restaurants to lawnmowers, gas grills, or food processors has not improved the world, nor even provided much truly useful information for prospective consumers of said items.  It’s just an opportunity (not unlike this one here) for some opinionated loudmouth to hold forth on his or her own preferences as if those subjective perspectives carried any weight or meaning.

I’m sure the people who write reviews on Amazon, Yelp, Urban Spoon, or wherever believe they are making a positive contribution to world: they’re convinced that they are spreading knowledge and saving people from the terrible prospect of reading a book or having a meal or purchasing an item that fails to meet their own high standards of excellence.

Big deal.

No doubt they’re also preventing any number of gullible souls an opportunity to experience the unknown, the unexpected, the serendipitous, or even the awful, (which isn’t such a terrible thing after all.)

Are we so frightened by our own judgments that we need to validate them beforehand with the opinions of strangers? 

Or is it simply that we’re too lazy to form our own opinions without some context or corroboration from the unseen masses?

The conceit is that by researching reviews, we save time and money by avoiding the less-than-ideal; in fact, what usually happens is we spend so much energy reading reviews, we never even get to experience what’s being reviewed.

Grail

Among the central tenets—if not THE central tenet—in the Advaita Vedanta, (which is one of the philosophical schools underlying Hinduism)—is that, as human beings, we routinely misidentify ourselves as an individual self as opposed to what we really are: the Universal Self, the fundamental ground of all Being, Pure Consciousness, the Atman, identical to all of Reality, the Brahman. 

Or, something like that.

Contemplative practices like yoga or meditation are designed, as the sage Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras, to “still the fluctuations of the mind” so that our true nature is revealed and we can see ourselves—to use a common analogy—as the whole ocean rather than as individual whitecaps upon the sea.

As it turns out, however, instead of say, retiring to an ashram to chant the 108 names of God from dawn until dusk, you can achieve the same result by gathering up about fifty people on bicycles, have them ride to a wooded park on the edge of a warm, glassy lake, where—inspired by so-called “distributed scalable cocktails”—they will mingle and dance to a bicycle-mounted sound system whose highly-efficient power diodes make possible an audioscape in which it becomes impossible to deny that we are all part of the same thing, at least when Lil Jon’s Get Low is blasting through the speakers.

It makes you eternally grateful to be part of an entity in which whiskey-aided field repair of complex electronics by the light of bicycle headlights takes place and soon results in that classic marker of authentic transcendence: girls and boys dancing on tables in their underwear.

And while, in the Western tradition, spiritual pilgrims searched far and wide for their Holy Grail, mine was right there: a night-time swimming hole with an outdoor fire to boot!

Seems just like what the Vedanta is saying: this is simply too much for a single self; a more likely explanation is that it’s all our Awesome.

Addict

I don’t have a problem with marijuana or alcohol; my problem is when there’s NO marijuana or alcohol!

One thing that’s become apparent to me of late is that I don’t really like bike-riding; what I ceaselessly enjoy is getting stoned and riding my bike; one might wonder whether the cycling part is even necessary.

I can easily go weeks at a time without smoking or drinking; the fact that those weeks are prior to 1970 or after 2060 seems to me irrelevant.

And I can stop anytime I want to; in fact, if I ever want to, I will.

No one needs marijuana or alcohol to have a good time; I realize that.  But seriously, why take the chance?

Weed isn’t a crutch; it’s more like a motorized wheelchair.

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers always said that dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope; I guess I’ll just have to take that one on faith, preparation being key here.

I’m certainly no role model when it comes to the consumption pot and booze; I can, however, in a pinch, be an illustration.

Sometimes I worry that I may be smoking too much weed; but that’s when I replenish my stock and worry no more.

The advent of legalization hasn’t really affected how much I get high; it has, though, made a huge difference in how often I break the law.

Have I ever regretted something I’ve done under the influence?  Sure, but it’s a poor workman who blames his tools.

Many memorable events my life have occured thanks to the help of cannabis and alcohol; the challenge, of course, is to remember them.

I’m sure I'd be a richer, more productive person did I not enjoy getting stoned so much; on the other hand: environmental sustainability.

Finally, if you  think this suggests an intervention, then you’re the one who’s high, not me.

Sports

In his 2000 best-seller, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, political scientist, Robert Putnam, argued that the demise of informal social organizations like bowling leagues has led to, or at least been concurrent with, the decay of community cohesion in the United States.  Because fewer people participate in experiences that force them to interact with people who may hold very different opinions from them or come from socio-economic circumstances with which they are unfamiliar (as happens when your bowling team is playing another), we have, as a society, become less inclined to hold an inclusive attitude about who qualifies as fully-fledged members of our shared community.

I’m sure he’s right about the basic claim, but wonder if his data about participation in recreational sports leagues are accurate.   He ought to come out to the Woodland Park fields in Greenlake, where I umpired on Tuesday night, and see for himself just how many people are playing games together. 

The complex has six baseball diamonds and every one was booked, all night long from about 5:00 to nearly 11:00.  On half the fields, teams were playing softball; on the other half of them, spirited games of kickball were being played.  Bookending these six are two soccer fields, both of which hosted games.  And just down the block is a gym, in which a spate of basketball games was being played.

So, maybe it’s bowling that has declined in popularity; maybe all those keglers have become infielders and outfielders or maybe forwards and mid-backs, (or whatever it is soccer players are called.)

Admittedly, my sample is pretty small, but it’s impressive that, on a mid-week night in a mid-sized city on the far edge of the continent, so many folks were out running around playing with each other.  Granted, most of them were white, apparently middle-class, twenty and thirty somethings, but presumably, not all of them hold the same political opinions.

Hope for the future?  I hope.

Accidents

I remember the very first time I rode a bicycle: my six year-old second-best friend Jeff Wilcox held the rear rack of his green Huffy—a little kid’s bike with neither freewheel nor brakes—and pushed while I gained balance.  I held my legs wide so the cranks could spin freely.  He gave a final shove and let go, and suddenly, I was riding on my own.  Joyfully, I looked up and, in doing so, turned the handlebars slightly, guiding the bike off our neighbor’s flat driveway and down the embankment that led to our house.  I recall trying unsuccessfully to place my feet on the pedals as they whipped around before slamming into the gutter downspout on the corner of our red brick house.  I tumbled to the grass.  Jeff appeared at my side, apologizing for letting me go so quickly.  I stood up, retrieved the bicycle, and asked if we could try it again.

Since that first crash, I’ve tried to avoid spills, but even the ones I’ve had haven’t powerfully dissuaded me from riding.

There was that time in 10th grade, commuting home from school with my friend Michael.  We were probably stoned.  He began to ride by me going up the final hill to my house.  Half in jest, half in teenaged boy testosterone poisoning, I exclaimed, “Nobody passes me!” and turned my wheel into his.  The wingnut on his front dropout (this was before quick-release hubs) caught in my spokes and we both went down.  Some scrapes and scratches and a slightly out-of-true rim were the only casualties; we climbed back on our rigs, pedaled the last few blocks to my house and almost certainly got stoned, or more so.

Most recently, a couple years ago, I rode off a curb in a parking lot and face-planted onto the asphalt.  A cracked tooth and a fat lip for me, a bent handlebar for the Saluki.  We’re both better now and still riding.

Combinations

Summer is great all by itself, but it’s the combinations it makes possible that propel its excellence into the stratosphere.

Case in point: swimming in Lake Washington is a superb way to spend time and would provide sufficient entertainment on its own, but when you get to combine it with a beer, a book, and a beach towel, then we’re talking transcendent enjoyment.

Similarly, there’s much to be said for a bike ride; if that’s all you’re doing, you’re doing well.  In summertime, though, one has the opportunity to combine pedal-powered transportation with early evening cannabis consumption: as the sun begins to set on the slightly stoned cyclist, he or she realizes how wonderful it is to be alive in the verdant bubble of our fair city; the addition of the THC molecule to what had already been pretty great makes it even better.

The combination of reading a book on the couch in the middle of the day and eventually dozing off for an afternoon nap is one of the hallmarks of summer delight; either of those two activities are commendable; put them together and you’ve got something out of this world.

Who doesn’t love pink wine?  And isn’t a salad with butter lettuce, green beans, boiled potatoes, and blue cheese just about the tastiest summer meal there is?  Put them together and dine al fresco on the back patio: such a combination, were it judged solely on the basis of how much pleasure it produces, should surely be illegal.  That it isn’t—that it is both possible and legal—is yet another combination not to be missed.

I suppose it could be construed as a little greedy to embrace such amalgamations of pleasure when, in most cases, a single helping would do.  If a dip in Lake Washington is enough, isn’t it a bit excessive to include the beer and book, as well?

Perhaps, but the combination of joy and guilt improves the experience, too.

Hole

I miss my bikes.

I miss riding the Kalakala to yoga in the morning with my mat laid over the top of my Wald basket.

I miss putting both panniers on the Hunqapillar and pedaling to the grocery store to stock up on provisions for the week.

I miss riding the Saluki out to Bothell along the Burke-Gilman trail and then, after a day at school, enjoying a smoke n’ spoke on the way home.

I miss stuffing my umpire gear into the Nigel Smythe saddlebag on the Tournesol and hurrying to Queen Anne or Mercer Island to officiate two or three softball games.

I miss my occasional spin on the single-speed Quickbeam, usually to Red Apple to pick up some forgotten grocery item or off to the library to drop of some overdue books.

On vacation, earlier this week in San Francisco, and now, for a few days in Los Angeles, I’m enjoying the pace of walking, but there’s a bicycle-shaped hole in my heart not to mention splints in my shins from covering ground on two feet that I would normally cover on two wheels.

I stopped into a junk shop today that had a sign outside advertising “Burning Man Bikes;” it featured a generous pile of rusting department store cycles that normally I would hardly look twice at; today, however, I pored over selection and it was all I could do not to offer the proprietor a couple of twenties for an aged Huffy that I could have pedaled to the coffee shop down the street.

In San Francisco, I saw a guy on the BART train with a moustache-bar equipped Rivendell about my size; it took a good deal of willpower not to ask if I could take a spin.  The likelihood of his consenting to my request was small, but had he acquiesced, I wouldn’t have given it back until I recalled just how much a person can really miss his ride.

Hitting

Ted Williams, the “splendid splinter,” the last man to bat over .400 in a major league baseball season, once opined that hitting was the hardest task in all sport.  While there may be a case to make for pulling of a successful onside kick, there’s no doubt that the oft-repeated truism that a person can fail seven out of ten times and still be an All-Star is a good reminder that taking a round bat and trying to hit a round ball square with it is indeed a formidable challenge.

However.

The way the Mariners are struggling at the plate seems to suggest that the difficulties are underestimated; you look at shortstop Brad Miller flailing away, for instance, and you’d set the level of complexity even higher—something akin to solving the crisis in the Middle East or finding a good bagel west of the Mississippi.

There must be some simple trick that a hundred and fifty years of players has simply missed.  Maybe arranging one’s hands in an opposite grip or turning the bat upside-down could help; such techniques certainly couldn’t hurt where the M’s are concerned; as I type this, I’m watching them being shut out once again, a phenomenon that would be more painful if it weren’t so ubiquitous.

Anyone who’s ever stood in a batter’s box, facing a pitched ball, knows how hard it is to get on base.  Even a recreational softball player like yours truly is aware of that.  But for heaven’s sake, you’d think that professional athletes, nearly all of whom are being paid millions of dollars a year to perform this feat would be able to do so with a bit more aplomb.

Maybe my favorite hitter ever to watch was Pittsburgh Pirates’ outfielder Matty Alou who won the National League batting title in 1966.  He used to use a bat as big around as a tree trunk; he’d choke way up, rather than just choke like M’s hitters.

Entire

A dream realized.

A sublime route revisited.

All you had to do was look up to be reminded that there’s no more beautiful spot on earth and so, when you get to glide down one of the smoothest descents in the city with several hundred other gobsmacked two-wheelers, it’s no surprise that the aftereffects might not have been as compelling as they might have been.

The Dead Baby Downhill has always been about limitless possibilities; today felt a little bit more like a superbly-crafted thrill ride: I was sure to be amazed and delighted, but my life wouldn’t change.

On the other hand, I left pretty early, way before the time when people tend to lose their bikes.

In some ways, the ride out to the starting line was the most salient feature of the event: I took Delridge, which—true to romanticized form—wasn’t really all that steep.  Before I knew it, there I was in White Center and then, after a brief visit to Aaron’s shop, was, thanks to GregSomaFixed’s advice, pedaling over the last little steep hill in order to wind through the curves of High Point.

You couldn’t ask for a more ideal starting point: 2 dollar tallboys and spaghetti that made the eyes of all who sampled it glaze over with satisfaction.

The Mariners lost on the bar’s TV, but besides that, there was nothing, not nobody, I wasn’t delighted to see.

It’s a once a year thing, like Christmas or New Year’s, a holiday that absolves us of the responsibility to make the world a better place.  Surprisingly, however, it is just that freedom which makes possible incremental changes in our lives.

It doesn’t matter what you’re striving for it you don’t know why you’re striving (maybe); mainly, the advice is to get much of what you want without hurting anyone else.  This doesn’t guarantee that you’ll take first place in your age dvision, like I did, but it’s a start.

Advice

You should never take unsolicited advice; consequently, since you didn't ask for this, you ought to resist it.  If you do, however, you haven’t, so you might as well take heed.  Or not.

Never text while walking across the street.  It’s not only dangerous, but more importantly, it makes it seem like you had a mom who didn’t love you enough to warn you against doing so.

Don’t drive stoned.  It cuts into the buzz.

Nelson Algren said, “Don’t eat a place called ‘Mom’s;’ never play cards with a guy named ‘Doc;’ and don’t sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”  Sound counsel to be sure, but to be on the safe side, you ought to also resist sleeping with a woman called “Moms” especially if she is cooking for a  guy named “Doc.”

My friend, Chad Worcester is of the mind that one should never purchase perishables like food or drink with a credit card because when the bill comes, you’ll have nothing to show for the cost.  I think it makes more sense to only purchase food and drink with a credit card; you just need to make sure it’s not your own.

“Never mix, never worry” is what they tell novice drinkers.  For the more seasoned alcoholic the counsel should be simply “Never worry,” an outcome more likely to be achieved insofar as one keeps mixing all evening long.

The most important piece of advice anyone of a certain age can offer to someone who is approaching their golden years is to always refrain from wearing khaki pants to an all-day meeting.  If you don’t know why, then you’re just not old enough to understand the reason.  But one day, you will be.

It’s not a good idea to eat a heavy meal right before bedtime, but if reading this has made you tired, then you should fix yourself some toast and Tabasco sauce.  That will perk you right up.

Arbor

One of the things that makes trees so easy to admire is that, for the most part, they’re older than you.

All of the big ones—the massive American elm down the street, the huge Coast Redwood in Volunteer Park, the giant-sized Bigleaf Maples all over the place—have seen at least a hundred summers, meaning they were around before I was, a feature of the world (at least the world where I live) that becomes less common with every passing day.

Many of the buildings the pre-date me are being torn down to make room for brand-new condominium developments and a good number of the people who peopled the earth before I did are making their ways off to the great beyond.  The old trees, however, are, for the most part, still sticking around to see what’s going to happen in the current century and probably, for many of them (unlike me) the one after that.

A team of arborists did just remove an ancient maple tree down the block whose trunk had split apart in a recent storm, but they left the mighty base of it to serve as a reminder of its presence and a pretty cool throne on the parking strip of the house it used to dominate.  That seems like a decent model for one’s own demise: to fall apart quickly in a single event but be able to have a memory of you remain for little kids and lovers to enjoy after you’re gone.

It’s a bit too woo-woo to imagine that the trees remember the events they’ve witnessed during their lives, but it makes scientific sense to assume that the conditions under which they grew are somehow embodied in their cells.  The black locust across the street from my house doesn’t literarlly recall Seattle’s development over the past 150 years; it does, however contain molecules that were around before 1900; in that sense, its memory is way better than mine.

Patience

Patience is alleged to be a virtue, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find many examples from real life where people view it as one.

Maybe there’s a case to be made for it when baking bread, but in pretty much every other walk of contemporary life, impatience rules the day.

Employees never get rewarded by employers for asking the boss to be patient about completing a project; students aren’t encouraged to be patient when it comes to submitting assignments; we don’t ask the barista to be patient in filling our orders for double lattes; and who has ever wanted to exercise patience when the possibility of sexual intimacy is at hand?

So, it’s something of a mystery as to why patience has earned a reputation as something desirable; perhaps it has a good press agent.  If so, however, you can be certain that such a successful representative exercises little, if any, patience in getting the word about patience’s virtues out to the world at-large.

When you sit in meditation practice, you get to notice how impatient you really are.  And then you get impatient about being impatient and can’t wait until the impatience goes away.  Under normal circumstances, you’d make an effort to stop being impatient as quickly as possible.  But presumably, the lesson here is to simply observe one’s desire for what’s next and wait patiently to see what happens.

Fat chance.

One important question is whether in order to be patient, you have to be waiting for something.  Suppose, for instance, you are told to be patient until dinner is ready, but in the meantime, you start reading a book, get really into it, and forget about dinner altogether.  Are you still being patient, or are you just doing something else?

Or, perhaps you are reading this, patiently waiting for an important point to be made or an amusing phrase to be turned.  But now that it’s over, have you really been patient at all?

Blue

You might think there’s not much at stake umpiring recreational league softball games; it’s all in good fun; nobody wants to get hurt; and people have lives outside the diamond so they’re not going to get too worked up about what happens on the field.

But if so, you’d be wrong.

As it turns out, there’s plenty on the line: players get so into it that a single questionable call is enough to incite cursing, dirt-kicking, and the throwing of bats by people who work in cubicles.

Consequently, you do your best to not screw up and hope that those bang-bang plays at first base don’t happen in the later innings with the score tied.

One good thing is that, in virtue of having read the official rules of the game, you’re likely to know a little bit more about what’s permitted and what isn’t; still, that won’t stop a 77 year-old man in the Senior League game from getting in your face and complaining that he shouldn’t be called out because he swung at an illegal pitch, hit it, and was thrown out at first when he stopped running.

Here’s the kind of thing that happens after the game: a player comes up to you and says, “Let me say this as politely as possible: that call at first was the worst call I ever saw,” and then proceeds to hang out in the stands second-guessing every judgment you make in the following contest.

Or, the captain of a team on which you called an infield fly theatrically asks your name so he can supposedly report you to the Umpire in Chief because he’s displeased with your assessment of whether the ball could have been caught with ordinary effort.

But still you keep showing up and taking your place behind the plate because it remains perennially intriguing and usually delightful and how else will you have the opportunity to see a 94 year-old man throw pitches?

Absurd

Doing yoga asana practice is inherently ridiculous. 

Why would you want to stretch your body into somewhat painful positions, anyway, when you don’t really have to?  Surely, the health benefits that accrue from the practice could be achieved by some other means. 

And even if posture practice is a superior means of health care, it’s far from obvious that doing as much as the Ashtanga model calls for is optimally salubrious.  Presumably, you could derive just as much with far less effort and save yourself lots of time in the process, as well.

Some days this is more salient than others and it seems particularly strange to engage in the practice.  Your alarm goes off before six AM on a summer day that doesn’t require you to get up before noon, if at all.  Nevertheless, you rise and ride uphill to a cavernous dance studio where you unroll a plastic mat and spend the next ninety minutes getting all sweaty and sore when you could have far more easily remained dozing beneath the covers.

The nonsensical nature of the activity is made more apparent by the presence of a dozen or so other human beings doing essentially the same thing; you can’t help noticing how weird it seems for others to be spending their mornings in this way, too.

Maybe we actually are all stilling the fluctuations of the mind so as to be able to perceive that which we really are—our true nature as the indivisible Oneness of All.  If so, great, but couldn’t this be achieved without having the opportunity for forty more winks?

I often observe, on my ride home from the studio after practice, someone standing in the morning sunshine, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette; I wonder what my days would me like if they started that way. 

Perhaps I wouldn’t feel as good about myself afterwards, but is there any reason to believe it would be a more absurd existence?

Consumption

You can poke around on the internetz for hours, reminiscing over old Talking Heads videos and feeling aghast at various types of excess that can be purchased by people with, as my mom used to say, “more money than sense.”

If you do that, though, you’ll get to this point where you might long for the days when the closest analog was flipping through magazines and mail-order catalogues and if that happens, you’ll realize it’s time to create some content, or at take a walk around the neighborhood.

There’s only so much you can take in before you have to expel; it’s like breathing in and breathing out or other forms of evacuation, equally common if not quite so polite.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors no doubt faced a similar challenge: they could spend many an idle hour examining leaves and tubers or they could rise up from their haunches and head out to slay a mastodon.  While the former may have provided them with plenty of fodder for cave-paintings and ceremonial dances, the latter would have been required, eventually, for their protein needs to be met.

Today, we experience something akin when we’re compelled, at length, to stop diddling about and head to the supermarket for dinner items: one’s hunger, however slight, will never be satisfied simply by perusing recipes online.

All of this seems to suggest that human beings are hard-wired to make some sort of contribution to the world at-large; it’s not enough for us, in spite of what we’re told by Hollywood and the wireless technology industry, to simply observe the world; we also want to make it in some way.

Of course, it’s important to be skeptical about essentialist appeals to human nature; just because we’re genetically disposed to desire something doesn’t mean we ought to embrace it.  Case in point: sea salt and vinegar potato chips.

Which reminds me: while the internetz will be here perpetually, the supermarket closes in an hour.

Overstimulation

It’s pretty amazing what you can pack into a mere 18 hours on two wheels: beer on a patio opened just for you and your friends; a ferry boat ride with more than forty fully-loaded cyclists, all of whom are cleared from the “poop deck” by the power of Derrickito’s crop dust; something remarkably similar to bike touring on country roads past naval bases on a peninsula; then up and up to a vista point that really afforded one some swell vista, and all this before setting up a campsite where beer and spirits far outnumbered water, and many, if not most, stayed up way beyond the horses’ bedtimes; afterwards, come morning, there’s still plenty of time to roll downhill, make a return boat, and be showered and shaved at pretty much the same hour you would have anyway had you never experienced the entire whirlwind in the first place.

Many a rule was broken, notably the one about not following the Angry Hippy up a mountain, but it turned out to be well worth it, even if coming down meant a snapped front brake cable for the effort and since you learn something new every time you go bike camping, the lesson here is twofold: first, bring a spare when you go to the woods and second, in a pinch, you can substitute a gear cable if you jam the leftover end of the broken wire into the lever socket to keep it from slipping.

I lay in my tent with the sound of a screech owl behind me and a lilting chorus of Karadactyl squawks, Botorff bellows, and TicToc gongs towards the front—animals and humans in the wild, making their own presences being heard.

Somehow, if you’re lucky, you may even get forty winks in before dawn breaks, but if not, it hardly matters, since, like Fancy Fred, you remain in a waking dream state with all that happens at the speed of bike.

Reading

Stay in school; don’t do drugs, natch.

But if you’re gonna indulge, then at least enhance your academic career with the illustrious combination of marijuana and great literature.

The stereotypical stoner does bong hits and watches cartoons; however, a far more original version of the model can easily involve a well-rolled joint and a classic of, say, Russian literature.

I’ve come to know from experience, for example, that few experiences are more enjoyable than getting reasonably baked and curling up on the couch with Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy’s prose, which is already luminous, takes on an added burnish.  His imagery and characterizations spring doubly alive and rather than just observing the action, you start to feel as if you’re really in it, curled up—literally—on the couch with the Princess Karenin herself.

Now, granted, one’s ability to recall some of the details may be slightly compromised.  Thankfully, my copy of Tolstoy includes a character list so I can flip back and forth to distinguish among the various Alexei’s who populate the story.

And it’s not uncommon to find oneself reading the same passage over and over and over—although given the beauty of the Russian master’s language, this is hardly a point against the practice.

Which isn’t to say that all reading materials lend themselves well to the combination of toking and text.  I’ve assayed contemporary analytic philosophy while under the influence; let me just say that a passage like this: “Reflection on any special discipline can soon lead one to the conclusion that the ideal practitioner of that discipline would see his special subject- matter and his thinking about it in the light of a reflective insight into the intellectual landscape as a whole,” does not get any easier to make sense of when one’s senses are slightly deranged.

On the other hand, as long as you’re not going to understand something, you may as well go whole hog.

Hopefully, therefore, you were stoned reading this.

Nothing

Nothing generally gets a bad rap; think of all the times, for instance, that your parents complained you were spending your summer doing nothing, or recall that time you got fired for doing nothing on the job.

Or consider what a drag it is when you have nothing in your belly, your wallet, or you bank account.

Nor is it particularly pleasant when someone you care for says he or she feels nothing for you.

And who hasn’t ever felt like a big nothing?  There’s really nothing worse.

So, we will agree that by-and-large, nothing is to be eschewed.  If it comes down to a choice between nothing and something—so long as it isn’t something that requires a trip to the DMV—the latter is to be preferred.

And yet, perhaps the case against nothing is overstated.  Nothing may have something going for it after all.

Take, for example, the important role that nothing has in professional sports: a baseball game in which a pitcher gives up no hits, or a nothing-nothing tie in soccer. Nothing clearly makes a big difference in such cases; the absence of something turns out to be something quite significant.

Similarly, if it weren’t for all the people in the world who aren’t nothing, how could there be anyone to be construed as something?  It may not be a logical necessity but it does seem a practical requirement.

Of course, I’m saying nothing new here, which is really much of the point I’m meaning to make: nothing matters, and in the end, it does.

If I have nothing else to say, I may as well say it and so, here I am, making nothing of this, over and over.

Many philosophers have long considered the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” to be the most fundamental of all philosophical questions.  I have nothing to offer in opposition to that and indeed, have nothing but praise for nothing at all.

Shopping

As I understand it, the big appeal of Amazon’s new FirePhone is that it makes shopping easier.

Really?

Is shopping actually that difficult?

I’d rather have a phone that made shopping harder.  That way, I’d be far less inclined to end up with half a dozen unworn pairs of shoes in my closet and that weird chopper thing alleged to julienne onions with a single pulse but which really only grinds them to an inedible pulp before jamming and clogging the sink drain with its detritus.

The idea that we might need to buy a device to help us purchase other things breaks my heart and blows my mind.  Have we really gotten to the point as a species that we’ll spend money on things that help us spend money?

Oh, and by the way, get the hell offa my lawn!

I realize that this sort of complaining marks me as an old crank; so be it. Many new developments are great: the widespread availability of Greek yogurt, LED bike lights, Wes Anderson’s latest film, for example.

But just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it.  Even if science and engineering can make a phone that shops for us isn’t carte blanche that it should do so.

I have no doubt, for instance, that Apple could invent a device that would enable people to have multiple orgasms while driving on the freeway.  As pleasant as that might be during long drives through Nebraska, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be a good thing.

I’m in favor of natural governors on our behavior.  One of my longstanding rules is that if I’m too intoxicated to unlock my bike, then I’m not allowed to ride it.  A corollary to this is that if you’re too stoned to light the joint, then you don’t get to smoke it.

Some things should be a little difficult.

Really: if you’re too mixed up to buy something, then you shouldn’t.

Umpire

As someone with predilictions for and training in philosophy, I’m not used to having answers.

In my field of academia, appeals to authority are generally considered fallacious ways of arguing and, for the most part, one is encouraged to avoid dogmatic stances on the issues under examination.

When people ask me what I teach, I usually say “Nothing, really.  Just questions.”

Consequently, it’s quite strange for me, but actually quite refreshing, to be in a field where my word is gold and what I say goes, no backtalk or second-guessing permitted.

This field, of course, is the baseball diamond.

An umpire calls them as he sees them and, as I’ve learned, sometimes calls them even when he doesn’t.  But the calls still stand, as long as I stand behind them.

Inevitably, some douchebag on one of the teams starts riding me about my strike zone or because he didn’t agree with my judgment that that tag at third base was indeed made.  If I were teaching a philosophy class, I’d have to entertain his perspective even-handedly, and offer a supportive response to his position in keeping with the principles of charity and understanding.

As an umpire, however, I can turn my back, walk away, and even threaten to throw him out of the game should he keep at it.

Now, that’s entertainment.

This isn’t to say that, as an umpire, I’m not open to self-examination and self-criticism; I’m trying to do a better job all the time.  But that’s my own internal umpire, the one making calls on the calls. 

I don’t need some thirty-something ex-jock reliving his glory days of high school to get in my face over a questionable call in a Sunday-afternoon co-ed recreational softball league game in which his team is already winning by twenty runs in the fourth inning.

You don’t have to be a university-trained Anglo-American analytic philosopher whose area of expertise is in ethics to ascertain the wrongness of that.

Tribe

On my way home from the day on which I cleared my desk to officially start summer vacation, I took a route I never take and stopped at a store I never stop at to buy beer and lo and behold, upon exiting, there was a Wild (well, actually at this time of day, Mild) Joeball, waiting for me with an invitation to a pre-funk picnic in Myrtle Edwards Park.

That’s the sort of day it was and such good fortune extended well into the night.

The plan, as I understand it in retrospect, was to ride to a bar we’d never go to again and start another streak of getting 86’ed from a bar—a worthy ambition indeed.

So, we crossed the water going east and kept on going. 

I thought when little Stephen would appear at intersections and say “The goose is just down there,” he meant the proverbial wild one being chased and so I kept on pedaling on through the lingering twilight.

My only sadness was when the group got split and there was just a pair of us gliding through the miraculously well-tended paths and boardwalks of Bellevue’s Wilberton Hill Park; it broke my heart to imagine that my fellow Thursday night riders might be missing out on such transcendent rad-getting.

So, I was delighted to hear that, when eventually the main group arrived at our chosen destination some twenty minutes and half a pitcher after we did, they had found the dirt, as well.

As it turned out, our efforts to get thrown from the Goose fell short; instead, it was mainly convivial and commensal; I made a new best friend of a truck sales executive from Kansas City who remained flabbergasted by our favorite statue of the Revised Code of Washington, the one that makes these unusual shenanigans so usual.

And then the tribe leads you home; you’ve no idea where you are, but even so, you’re somehow never lost.

Work

If you won the lottery, what would you do? 

Most of us—those telling the truth, anyway—admit we’d quit our jobs.  But then what?  Lie on a beach drinking pina colada for the rest of our days?  Maybe for a while, but after some time, that, too, is going to get old.

The simple truth is, even if we didn’t need to work, we’d still have to—in some form or another.  We’re hard-wired, as human beings, to be active.  We’re compelled to contribute, whether we need to or not. 

The 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that it was irrational, and therefore, in his view, immoral, for a people to let their “talents rust;” we are obliged, he says, to seek to improve ourselves out of the very same impulse that motivates our survival instinct.

You don’t have to buy Kant’s moral philosophy to agree on the necessity of bettering ourselves; as he implies, the daily act of feeding ourselves is evidence of our desire for self-improvement.

Point being: we work; that’s what we do.  Even if we didn’t, we would.  Even when we don’t, or can’t, we are.

Unfortunately, most of us are too busy at our jobs to recognize this.  We’re so consumed by taking care of business that we overlook the most important aspect of what we do: that it IS what we do and that we’ve got only one life in which to do it.

It all comes down, essentially, to a sense of purpose, a feeling that we are doing something that makes a difference—at least in some small way—to something we care about.

It doesn’t have to be world-changing; it need not be lucrative, or beautiful, or even something your mom would approve of.  It just has to connect you with yourself and, by extension, to people you care about, your “kin,” or what we might call your “tribe.”

And when work does that, it works.

Trees

One of my goals for this summer is to get better at identifying trees (talk about setting the bar high).  It’s easier than birding, since they don’t fly away, and you can pull off leaves, unlike wings, to examine while you page through your field guides.

It’s daunting, however.  The sheer variety of specimens boggles the mind.

I try to distinguish between compound and simple, lobed and unlobed, toothed or smooth leaves.  I look for bark patterns that are representative.  I examine flowers and berries, but in the end, stumped (no pun intended), I turn to the Seattle Street Tree site for confirmation and/or correction.

I’m not sure why I’m fixated on this, although I have had periodic bouts of similar activity.  When I was a wee hippie lad living in San Francisco in 1975, I used to wander through the Golden Gate Arboretum testing myself on tree names.  At least I got to the point where I could pick out a eucalyptus.  (If you’ve ever been to the park, you’ll get the joke.)

Maybe I just want to be that guy standing around the backyard barbecue who knows the names; if so, my tenure will be limited.  I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before there’s a phone app you can hold up to a leaf and it will tell you want the tree is.  (If not, get on it nerds; I’ll buy!)

Or maybe it’s about reconnecting with traditional ways of knowing and folk wisdom; I just found out, for example, that the Tree of Heaven dominating my neighbor’s back yard is used in Chinese medicine for all sorts of ailments, including baldness and itching; one never knows when that may come in handy.

Or perhaps I simply want to know the names of what I’m looking at in order to be slightly more aware of things.  Distinguishing a beech from an ash, for instance, might be one way to be incrementally wider awake.

Dab

A guy I ride bikes with told me about this place in the International District where you can ask for and get what’s called a “dab”—a hit of “butane honey oil,” which looks to my unsophisticated palette like a waxy pellet of hash oil and which, to my somewhat more experienced frontal lobe, packs a wallop in terms of consciousness-altering and mind-rearranging.

I had envisioned a typical smokes store, but this place was more like a hipster gift shoppe.  There were cool t-shirts to buy, a rack of books and zines, some fragrances and candles, a few video game machines, and a glass counter full of pipes, papers, and other paraphernalia.

I poked around a bit and then asked the proprietor if I could get a “dab;” he said “Sure,” and took me upstairs to a loft that was mostly empty except for a drafting table on which sat a large glass pipe which resembled, I couldn’t help thinking, a transparent bass flute.

I was given a choice of two products, one a hybrid, the other, a sativa that was billed as “pretty cerebral.”

I chose the latter and was then advised that what we were doing here was “pipe-testing;” that’s what cost five bucks; the cannabis was free.

The proprietor scooped a booger-sized portion of the honey-oil on a nail; he then took a butane torch and heated up a metal cylinder attached to the pipe; touching the “dab” to the cylinder cause the pipe to fill with smoke.  “Take a slow steady draw,” I was advised.

I tasted the characteristic sweetness of hash and then burst out coughing, eyes watering.

Immediately, I was very stoned—excellent visuals, lots of profound thoughts.  I almost got that scary dissociative feeling you can get on edibles, but unlike with eating pot, the topography of the high was all downhill, so I wasn’t too worried.

I may go again, but for now, a little dab done did me.

Change

The Ashtanga yoga practice in the tradition of guru Sri K. Pattabhi Jois is a six-day a week repetition.  You learn a set series of postures and do them every day in the same way; the reiteration of the movements allows the practitioner to still the fluctuations of the mind and observe things as they really are—or at least proceed through the practice with a minimum of distraction and fussing about.

It’s easy enough, especially when one’s regular practice is done solo, to fall into patterns of behavior that do little to advance one’s development, physically, mentally, or spiritually.  These are the ruts known in Sanskrit as samskaras—those habitual ways of being which are the inevitable result of our minds’ tendency to recognize patterns in things and apply them to make our way in the world.  There’s nothing inherently bad about samskaras; we simply want to be aware of when we’re perceiving and acting habitually and in so doing, resist the tendency to sleepwalk through our lives.

One of the traditional roles of the yoga guru has been to shake students out of their mental and physical complacency; the teacher challenges students to try something new or do something old in a new way; this wakes students up and requires them to notice what they hadn’t been noticing—to exercise what, in the Buddhist tradition, is referred to as “mindfulness.”

Of course, as a student, this sucks. 

The last thing you want to do is change something you’re used to, to forsake a trick you’ve developed to make the practice easier, to have it pointed out that the way you’re doing it could be improved upon with a little work on your behalf.

Prudent practitioners, therefore, will studiously avoid taking classes that might encourage them to examine their practices in a new light; others, like me, who don’t know what’s good for them, will seek out a teacher—at least for a month or two.

Summer

You need some sort of organizing principle, something that gives your days a shape.  Otherwise, you’re not really on vacation, you’re just being a bum.

My plan for the next seventy days revolves around the classical trinity of yoga, cycling, and pot.  Although I should probably be abashed by the addition of that third element, I’m not.  One need not take the cannabis consumption piece literally; it’s more about a certain sense of freedom.  It’s not as if I’m actually expecting to be stoned at every hour of every day; it’s simply that I could be if I wanted to.

It’s entirely possible, after all, that free will is an illusion.  It may be that we live in an utterly deterministic universe and that everything we do is just the playing out of physical laws ever since the dawn of time.  In that case, the very idea that what I do with my days is up to me is absurd.  Yoga, cycling, and pot might just was well be napping, skeet-shooting, and beef for all the difference it would make.  Thankfully, if that is the case, then there’s nothing any of us can do (or could ever have done) about it.

I’m sympathetic to the philosophical position known as “Compatibilism” or “soft determinism.”  According to the Compatibilist view, we can essentially set aside the question of whether the universe is deterministic or not because, in our own lives, at least, we can distinguish between choices that are forced upon on us and those that are not.  I may be no freer in my decision to loan you five bucks when you kindly ask for it than I am when you hold a gun to my head and demand that I do, but it sure feels that way.  Consequently, I can speak of my actions in the former case as “free” even if, technically, they’re not.

Thus, I am free to smoke a joint, even if I don’t.