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.