Nothing Nothing Nothing

Just more putatively cathartic rambling. I always thought I would do something. Something big or at least something that was mine. Time seems to be running out. And more importantly motivation seems to have run out a very long time ago, if it was ever there to begin with in any sort of non-pretend way. I feel like I should give up, but I don’t exactly know what it is that I am giving up and why it would really be a loss. Really I’m just conceited and don’t want to think of myself as common. But that’s probably not true either.

Schools II:Very Unfinished Drafts

I figured I would just put these here as is because I have no idea when I will finish this.

Things grow and fill the framework around which they are built, water conforms itself to the shape of its vessel, our skin and guts don’t really go much past our skeletal framework, economies follow and shape themselves around the presence and absences of regulations, people adapt themselves and operate within the confines of the mores and traditions of their communities,,, and schools and everything which they do and don’t accomplish all conform and build themselves around the basic unit structure of the traditionalclassroom.

For uniformity or convenience or modularity’s sake, almost all public schools that I know of take the of form of scheduled daily instruction, in a centralized location, in yearly or bi-yearly intervals, segregated by age. This is a very convenient and easily reproducable model because various ideas and educational objectives can be plugged into these set schedules, all you theoretically have to do is vary the curriculum and or the teacher.The problem with this solid and simple model is that it forces students to conform to the needs of the model instead of the model being able conform to the needs of the student.

Through the first 12 years and particularly the first eight, all students, except a few outliers, are grouped and taught according to age. period. In a centralized tiered school sytem where success as a person basically means advancing to the next level, everybody has to move at the same pace. This single speed instruction model means the kids who don’t get it are made to feel dumb and inadequate (and become dismissive of learning, for their own self defense), the kids who do get it feel entitled and unchallenged. And because it’s a one-size-fits-all non-voluntary system, almost everyone is bored out of their minds and could care less.

In seventh grade, one of the most exciting things(schoolwise) was being able to pick your own “electives”, the excitement kindof wore off when you realized that the elective classes were all basically filler “skill” classes and all the core classes were still being force fed to you mass production style, but the notion of choice was still very enticing and even more importantly, it was engaging. Choosing a goal for concrete reasons is the definition of caring about something. If you are just doing something because someone told you to do it, not only do you not care about the actual success of what you are doing beyond its ability to pacify whoever told you to do it, but you are also imprinting the counterproductive moral lesson that success comes from doing what you are told and not from doing what you care about. Though maybe in too many cases that is unfortunately true..

But imagine an education program where students really want to participate, and not in a cheesy let’s sing songs, eat candy, do arts and crafts kind of way, but in a way that is truly meaningful and rewarding on a substantial level.

Many people have recognized and pointed out these problems with the traditional school system before, even suggesting means of mitigating them, but the problem is that most of these solutions don’t really fit into the current framework and end up stifled and unsuccessful or difficult to scale up to a relevant and meaningful size.

I think in order to really make education what we want it to be, the whole organizational design principles of the system need to be flipped. The current system is one in which the objectives of the course have to fit themselves into the predetermined structure of a typical class framework. But If you build a system where the time, shape, composition and curriculum of all courses are all designed around the explicit objectives of the designers you will allow for infinitely more effective and efficient and innovative means of doing whatever it is we as nation decide education should be doing.

Honestly the closest thing to what I am envisioning that exists today is the Boy Scouts education system. I was in Boy scouts as a kid, I didn’t like it and eventually quit for reasons that don’t affect this comparison, but once I had developed some of these ideas, I was surprised to realize just how similar they were to the Boy Scout way of teaching. At the heart of it I am talking about badges, a badge is essentially an assisted self-taught class that the student pursues of their own volition. Once so many badges have been earned in so many areas according to the student’s own pace and ability, the emotional reward of “graduating” in rank is given as a rite of passage.

The beauty of this system is its openness. From an educational policy perspective the overall goals can be set, and then it is up to the millions of students teachers and parents to determine how best to achieve them.

To examine how this might work, we can look at math education. My personal first memory of math education was in kindergarten, and each student had to go individually sit in a chair in the back of the room with the teacher and count from one to one hundred, I remember at the time being amazed that there were kids in the class who couldn’t do this, obviously there were, but it just illustrates the point that teaching one thing to an entire age level of students at vastly different developmental and cognitive levels is an exercise bordering pointlessness. If however, instead of each student following a uniform course and rate of learning, they were just given a set of goals to accomplish at which point they would receive their “badge” at which point new badges would be available to them as well as old badges in other areas. Say we wanted to teach multiplication for example, you could set up a badge where the student had to accomplish some task according to the proper application of a knowledge of multiplication. It could be as simple as a set of tests or it could be something more complicated like building a structure in which using multiplication is necessary to do correctly. By incorporating a larger goal like structure design to which the knowledge of mathematics is integral, you do two important things.

One of the other significant problems of public schools is the student culture, it is the inevitable outcome of forcing large groups of students into a system in which they don’t really fit and where they do not want to be.

*******************************************************
A totally different draft
\Alright here goes…

School-
School is growing up. The environment of school is where almost everyone spends the majority of their waking hours up until they are essentially adults. To call it a formative experience would be a collosal understatement.

I think most people would agree that growing up involves learning lessons about life that teach you how to both live a life that is beneficial and rewarding to you as well as lessons on how to beneficially participate in the well being of greater society. That is pretty much by definition what we all want both ourselves and everyone else to be.

How to get to this point, what lesons should be taught to get there, and so one, is of course a more difficult question. But it is also, at this point, a question that society at large seems to never ask. And even if there a body of educators out there discussing these things, I and the rest of the world don’t seem to have been included in the conversation and I don’t really remember seeing much evidence of an overarching philosophy or philosophy of any sort reflected in the either the lessons or assignments of all of my mandatory education.

Philosophy is, according to my definition, the attempt to answer or at least ask: why. Why am giving this assignment why am I saying this, why am I reading this, to what end. Only by having real answers to these questions can we even start to evaluate how effective our policies and practices are. This stands in almost rediculous contrast to judging the effectiveness of our methods and schools by how well students do on standardized test which are basically fixed IQ tests. One would assume that the dominating role these test have in our growing up factories that we must be trying to increase the IQs of our children and therefore we need to massively monitor how well we are doing at this basically impossible task. I know that people have complained that these test measure innate ability more than “real learning” and have tried to rework the test to reflect some other notion of “things kids should know” but, to use the metaphor du juer, that just amounts to putting lipstick on a still oinking pig.

I’m not against the concept of tests, I think an absolute pass fail, either suceed or suffer the consequences, rite of passage, form of testing is vital to the growth of human beings and is analagous to the most useful way to approach so many situations in adult life or I guess life in general. I just think the kinds of tests and the consequences of failure should be vastly different from what they currently are. test where failure or success is more equivalent to winning or losing a championship football game than to whether you’re smart enough or care enough to retain x amount of information.

By winning a championship football game, I mean spending a considerable amount of time effort and emotion honing skills and ethics, both personally and within a team, for the purposes of acheiving a goal which has real value to the people involved.

To acheive this situation we would have to completely rewrite what kids spend 8 hours a day doing everyday of theri lives.

I hate compare something to the Boy Scouts that I think could be profoundly beneficial, but i think our education system should become loosely similar to the Boy Scouts; As in an elective “badge” system but with tangible rewards for completion of “badges”. We should probably call them something less cheesy than badges, maybe certificates, for now.

To start you would have to get rid of ties to campus based schools. You could get rid of grades. You would get rid of rigid classrooms and to a certain extent career teachers. Actually you wouldn’t get rid of career teachers, but hopefully you would add a significant number of freelance type teachers.

In a certificate system, all of these institutional infrastructure systems become largely unnecessary because the instruction of each course begins and ends with that particular course.

Death of a Moonman II

When we left Peter he was in the process of realizing that not only was he in a foreign country in a different time but that apparently he wasn’t even going to be able to talk to anyone due to a language barrier.

“feiz naan kurkus” said the peasant unhelpfully

Peter stared at him trying to figure out what to do next. As if in answer to Peter’s implied question, the man gave a sort of dismissive shrugg and started walking. Peter’s facade of composure dissolved. With a degree of emphasis and pathos revealing how distraught Peter was actually feeling at that moment, he managed to communicate through the universal language of wild gesticaulation, the notion of: “please don’t leave me, you’re my only hope, God and logic have abandoned me in this armpit of the space-time continuuum….please don’t leave me.”

The man eyed Peter cooly and critically. Undeterred Peter grabbed a stick and began hectically drawing in the loose dirt. First he drew an x and pointed to the Peasant. Then he crossed that out. Then he drew a line and crossed that out too. Finally fixing on the notion that what he really needed to find was a town of some sort, he drew a picture of a house. The man’s face and muttering indicated recognition. Then looking questioningly in the man’s eyes, Peter pointed alternatingly east and west along the road begging the man to please understand. The man reached out for the stick and then started drawing. He drew a line heading west away from the house peter had drawn and about a meter away he connected the line to a drawing of multiple houses. Peter couldn’t contain a hugely relieved smile. The man nodding eagerly with the excitment of making himself understood, then pointed back and forth between himself and Peter and proceeded to draw two circles on the line which was presumably supposed to be the road. The two circles indicating Peter and himself were about twelve centimeters from peter’s house and almost a meter from the man’s village depiction. The man sat back in satisfied triumph.

The decision before Peter was whether to go to the nearby small settlement or the farther away large settlement. But how far was the village? Peter got an idea. He drew a picture of a sun above the road between the two circles and the large village. The man returned Peter’s questioning glance blankly. Peter then pointed to the real sun and back to his picture, the man’s expression changed and he bobbed his head in comprehension. Peter then drew a crescent moon which the man recognized, then he drew another sun and another moon. The man looked puzzled.

“look man, how far is this town, come on. Suns annd moons what else could I be talking about”

Eventually with a lot more pointing and gesturing and at one point Peter pretending to walk down the road with his fingers, the man finally seemed to comprehend. He took the stick and crossed out the second moon and, for some reason, handed the stick back to Peter. “a day and a half, thought Peter. That’s not too bad, and I am much more likely to find something useful in a town than uh whatever the alternative is supposed to be.” At this point Peter stood up and indicated through the crude gestural language they had spawned, that he would like to travel with the man to the village. The man seemed to understand and indicated that he would be happy to have the company. As they started walking Peter hesitantly reached out for the sack the man was carrying, as an offer to share the burden, but the man put his palm up in polite refusal.

schools

This is going to be mostly for my own benefit. (this place seems to be turning into a giant sticky note)

Originally one of the main ideas in my head which might be [delusionally grand] and, as such, need some sort of repository, is a fundamental rewrite of the entire notion of education. Basically this is just a reminder to myself to like get to work on that. But also a reminder that I just read some agreeable thoughts on this subject in “Fact and Fiction” a collection of Bertrand Russel’s writing. I don’t remember what part of the book it is in , but it is somewhere near the middle. The point the he and me wis trying to get across is the idea that education should be based on a real and substantial philosophy of life and knowledge and how the world works on a deeper level. And that “education” is the process of growing whole human beings and is far far more complex than a generic and uncontested set of things that it would probably be good if kids knew.

.

.

Death of a Moonman

Peter suddenly found himself prostrate in the middle of a large field; he was vomitting. What the hell had just happened? He sat up brushing himself off, as the awareness of something truly wrong fumbled its way through his addled brain.

“I”
“huh”
“Maybe?….no”
“Maybe I was asleep and now I just woke up. But why would I be in a field? Well my head is killing me and I was throwing up. It’s possible that I got extremely drunk and this is the rather unfortunate aftermath. But where the hell am I, and why do I not remember having anything to drink for several weeks?”

The drinking story was the only thing he could come up with which seemed even vaguely plausable and yet he knew that it wasn’t the truth. Only moments before, he had been in a comfortable chair typing horribly affected prose and self-congratulatory pontifications into his laptop. Now? Now he was in a field. Vomiting? What the fuck?

He grabbed a clump of dirt and weeds as if to somehow to reassure himself that it was actually there and he was actually sitting in it and this, this totally disregard for the rules of reason and sense and understanding was actually the situation he was now in.

He sat and he stared.

Slowly a smile crept into the corners of his mouth: “well shit, I never really liked reality anyway.”

He layed back down, resting his still pounding head. Staring up ponderously at the cloud cluttered sky, he sharply sat up again, then got to his feet: “might as well find out where I am and what exactly just happened”

With the sun on his back, he started off through the field.

Peter had been walking for about ten minutes, entertaining himself with the most absurd speculation about where he was and what had just occured, when he saw a dirt path. He started to follow it, randomly turning left. Eventually he climbed a slight ridge out of the valley he had been in up to this point and caught sight of someone coming towards him. “well at least I’m not completely in the middle of nowhere” he thought. The fugure was about a mile off so details were difficult to make out but it seemed to either be a humpback or to be carrying a large amorphous sack on its back. The small adrenaline rush that accompanies encountering a stranger on a dirt road in an unkown place, fueled speculations about aliens and alternate universes and time warps that fought tentatively for acceptance in his now thoroughly disconcerted mind. “We’ll just have to see,” he told all the thoughts swirling around him.

Somewhat resolutely and somewhat incredulous that all this was actually going on, he started towards the distant figure who was walking in his direction. As they got nearer to each other Peter decided that it was at least a human being, but it appeared to be some sort of peasant who was indeed carrying a sack.

“A peasant?”
“have I really…yeah, it looks like it. Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve gone back in time?”

All the half-concieved but thoroughly ominous and confounding implications about his life and his family and his sanity and his very notions of the universe that such a realization implied, resolved themselves instead into a prodigous stream of confused explitives that seemed to sum up the situation as well or better than any full and articulated thought could have done. It was in fact hard to doubt his analysis. The man was barefoot, he was wearing what Peter could only describe as pantaloons and he had on a large loose fitting smock of a shirt that looked like someone had cut three holes in a burlap bag. Maybe he was in some foreign country but for some reason he didn’t think so. When they got within about twenty meters of each other they both stopped.

Under the bewildered stare of the man before him, Peter for the first time, became acutely aware of his own appearance. He was wearing a pair of heavy workboots with no socks which he had put on in the morning to take the dog out and fortunately hadn’t taken off, he had on the remnants of a pair of black sweatpants which he had cut off at the knee and also which he had slept in the night before, and he was wearing a white tee shirt with the word Hi written on the back. It was one of those sorts of shirts that was so stupid on so many levels that he couldn’t help but take some kind of sick pleasure in it. Though the first and only time he had actually worn the shirt in public, he ended up in front of an old guy in a long line at the grocery store who took his shirt as an open invitation to say a lot of incomprehensible things and punctuate each of them with a disconcerting laugh that was somehow a mix of blissful ignorance and deperate plea for human affection. It was, as stated before, the last time he wore the shirt in public. Peter concluded that he would look rather rediculous even in his world and must look downright absurd in this one.

“krhevizh, han gorral” The peasant blurted out.

“oh hell” replied Peter with an irritated sigh. “English?” He ventured.

“……..”

“DO-YOU-SPEAK-ENGLISH” Peter exhorted in desperation, simultaneously thinking about all the fictional people he had mocked for speaking in that exact manner.

“Han, na. Nil wrietzan”

“Well this is going to be fun”

This Election is Killing Me

I can’t stop.

I can’t stop reading infuriating stories, which are repudiated by other infuriating stories. I can’t stop leaving heroically asinine comments in responses to other people’s controverted heroically asinine comments. I find myself almost unable to read a “news” article without bias, and what’s far worse than that, I seem almost unable to find a news article written without bias. It seems like absolutely everyone in the media has taken sides. There is no longer any moderator in this debate, it’s about who can lie better and faster and louder to the most receptive audience. I was really hoping that the debates might bring some sanity and apply the coherent balm of reality to the debate. But now I’m pretty sure it will just add a whole lot more shit to the shit storm, even more crap to the pick and choose politics of eulogizing anything that makes your side sound good and ignoring anything that doesn’t. Maybe that’s where we have to be at now. The stakes have become far too high. All in. Total war. At least the framers saw to it that we don’t have to use guns to fight this out (at least not on each other)

Edit: I think I wrote this right after having engorged myself on a bit too much political junk-food. Standing a bit further back it now seems a little over the top, and kind of funy; In a – laughing at me, not with me – sort of way.

Liberalism and Conservatism

There are two fundamental aspect involved in any action: understanding an issue, and acting on that understanding.

The first is liberalism, the second is conservatism. Both are completely useless without the other.

basically – pure liberalism thinks without acting, pure conservatism acts without thinking.

I could write a whole book about this. Actually, when in the sort of frame of mind where I imagine myself as something other than the nearly inanimate object that I seem to be, both physically and in regards to ambition, I see this whole book laid out before me. In my mind I somehow secretly call it Cole/God’s gift to the human race. How’s that for an uncomfortable look into the blackness of someone’s diseased soul.

An overgrown comment that became a blog post

This was originally supposed to be a response to *this* – a synopsis by one Ms. Brigitte Dale regarding an article discussing the growing trend of guys taking ever longer to “grow up”

….Honestly though, this whole thing as a societal phenomenon is pretty interesting. It’s easy on the one hand to simply dismiss it as the inevitable negative outcome of widespread wealth and entitlement and a superficial media culture, and it’s entirely possible that that would make up the bulk of the correct analysis.

It is also possible, however that there is more to it than that. In the animal kingdom, generally the longer it takes for an animal to reach adulthood, often the more complicated the the requirements are of integrating into that species’ social structure. i.e. the longer one spends learning how to be part of the group before taking their ultimate place in the herd, the better one’s chances of success are. Acquiring “adult” status in human society is tad bit more complex than in a herd of elephants or a troop of monkeys but the benefits of spending more time in a formative state of flux are likely similar. In our parent’s time, and even more so their parent’s time, “Growing up” was a necessity. If you weren’t reasonably successful then you were either out on the streets or a step above that in some soul-crushing factory type job. There certainly weren’t student loans and forgiving parents and government assistance to make your twenties easy and fun. Pretty much finding a corporate ladder and climbing it as soon as possible was the only way to vastly improve your standard of living beyond a few steps away from poverty. Now though it’s easy to get away with not starting a career until late in your twenties, and maybe it’s even a good thing to do so. Presumably we all have inherent talents as well as inherent desires regarding what we would be satisfied having achieved with our lives. If you can spend ten years or so kicking the tires o’ life, maybe you end up with a much clearer picture of who you are and what you want than if you just dove in right away with whatever career and family were readily available and just buckled in for the long haul.

On second thought, maybe this whole thing is entirely women’s fault. (everything else is….amirite? anybody? high-five?anybody?) Before the pill, if people wanted to do what people always have done and always will do, which is engage in significant and insignificant sexual relationships, they would inevitably have to deal with what was always the outcome of such doings – babies. Once there was a baby involved, barring total assholery by the male (or occasionally the female), the outcome is pretty much instant adulthood. Job, wife and kids. As this was the norm, the culture grew up around it and shunned bachelors largely as aberrations. Now that people can have relationships without making lifelong commitments, once the exuberance of the initial discovery passed in the “hey let’s have sex with everybody” 60’s, a general pattern and culture of extended adolescence seemed to grow and solidify eventually building to what it is today. But who’s to say that that is necessarily a bad thing? In the absence of biological necessity, the late twenties might just be the more natural and appropriate time to stop gathering the pieces and to finally put yourself together in the role of an “adult”.

Digital Direct-Democracy (The Plan)

My Fello Amerricns,

The time for change has come. The time for hope has come. The time for hoping for change has come.

Sorry, that didn’t really have much to do with anything…. just amusing myself; if you can call it that.
(the rest of this article has nothing to do with any vague pointless references to the present political circus. It has everything to do with the fundamental redemption of the world’s collective political soul)

Direct Digital Democracy:DDD:D3
(no those are not emoticons)

Representative democracy has become the world standard for communal governance and the defence against abuse of power(don’t laugh, it’s true). There are many people however who would argue that an even better system would be a direct democracy, where everyone get’s a vote on everything. Instead of just getting together and picking some guy to send off for four years and crossing our fingers that they don’t spend too much of our money or bomb too many of our neighbors we could have a constant check or even active participation in the application of government powers through direct democracy. The biggest problems with building a direct democracy have been practical ones, it has just always been too hard and too messy to do effectively….Untill Now

maybe.

The argument has been made, by both myself and presumably many others, that the logistical impediments to the implementation of direct democracy have largely been rendered void by the near ubiquity of the internet. It is now theoretically possible to collect, marshal and moderate the knowledge and desires of the electorate through a networked system of moderated participation and voting; ultimately allowing for constant and total control of the decision making process by an involved and informed citizenry without the need to vest all (or any) decision making power in a single representative.

i.e. We don’t need politicians anymore because we have internet forums and optimizable voting algorithms. hoo ray.

That being said – the questions become: would/could direct democracy enabled by networking and software be an improvement and if so how would we go about implementing it?

The Tentative Plan:

First choose a government position like small town mayor or city councilperson.

Then Determine what powers that position entails and the choices that someone in that position faces.

From this information construct a set of software encoded rules to govern exactly what powers this elected official will contractually grant to their citizen constituents.

These rules will be a combination of participatory voting software, political platform, and one-person constitution, and will represent a legally binding contract with the voters to legislate according to the will of the will the voters as evidenced by the voting system.

Once this software is finalized, someone will run as a candidate, having signed this contract to uphold the integrity of the pre-agreed processes, encoded in their “mayor-ware”.

This approach means we don’t need to have a violent revolution and bloody overthrow of the existing government in order to drastically change our mode of politics, we simply quietly go about the business of drastically changing our mode of politics.

The other extremely important aspect of this plan is that each candidate will compete on the strength of their contract in the eyes of their constituents. This means the software will continually evolve and improve in order to better meet this need; with each candidate running on the strength and utility of their latest and greatest version of digital direct democracy. This market pressure will become particularly powerful and productive when it gets to the point that multiple D3 candidates are competing with each other.
(D3=test run of possibly lame, but concise and easy term)

In it’s initial form, the contract could be as simple as saying that registered members of the electorate can force their Representative to vote a certain way on a bill by preregistering for a decision and then acquiring a majority of some specified size behind a yes or no vote. By requiring preregistration say a week in advance you might curtail abuse by vote flooding.

Obviously, the larger the number of people involved in this process, the more complex the systems and controls need to be. That’s why it should be initially implemented in a small, low tension environment and start out simply as a citizen’s veto power.

Once proven as well as certain flaws highlighted, the candidate and possibly new candidates can rerun on new rewritten and improved contracts which learn from the previous implementation.

And finally, to avoid the legal attacks that the signing of a binding legal contract would invite, the contract with the electorate would stipulate that any breach of the contract will be mediated by the votes of the electorate and not sent to a judge.

This will take a lot more thinking and probably a lot of trial and error, but it is entirely possible to build a system that accurately and continuously reflects the will of the people, and in so doing, change the fundamental nature of democracy and civic involvement without changing any of the structural underpinnings. That’s a pretty amazing thought though I think.

Some more notes:

Legislation-
Legislators are rarely elected for their ability to craft quality legislation of long-term value. So there is very little selective market pressure to produce and swear in the best executors of the task which they are ostensibly elected to do: write and pass good laws. There are way more citizens than legislators – presumably some of them could write much better bills than what is currently produced.

Given the above – All that is then required is a system of allowing anyone to propose legislation to the body of participating citizens who can then choose what ideas to further develop and refine until the point that some agreed upon majority percentage is willing to agree to the final wording of a piece of legislation.

Voting-

On the surface, this one is a no brainer. If representatives are elected to vote the will of the people, it makes much more sense to just let the people vote the will of the people.

Executive function-

This ones a little tougher and such powers will likely have to remain vested in a single individual.

What would/could change in a D3 system is much greater oversight and constructive powers of the electorate over the various bureaucracies that are traditionally entirely run by and comported to the will of the head of the executive powers. On a national level, this would mean that major institutions such as the CIA, the Fed, the Department of Education would/could be forced to submit to oversight by the D3 in what would essentially amount to a (or all) seats on what would be the board of directors of these institutions if they had boards of directors.

Much of the argument of vesting power in a single executive comes from the fact that some decisions simply have to be made right now. Timely decision making is not generally a feature of any system that allows and encourages dissent, therefore we occasionally need a momentary totalitarian. However,presuming this is the argument for having a part-time king, one would have to accept that once the timeliness factor is no longer an issue, the power to overturn any choices made by the executive should return to the democracy; something like a six month time delay on the ability to overturn an executive decision. This will needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more but the overall result would be that a significant chunk of the sovereignty of both the executive and legislative functions of government would be transferred directly to the people.

Judicial-

Obviously there is no way this system should be allowed to touch the actual judicial process.

If anyone manages to read this in its entirety and sees some of the at present unaddressed concerns that adopting such a system would bring up, please weigh in..

I don’t know what this is actually

(this appears to be some sort of bizarre abstracted self-analysis of the sort that I sometimes subject myself to. I found it recently while acting on my new compulsion to dig up and post on this site all the shit I have written over the years. I will say that it was certainly not written to be read by anyone -including me. I don’t know if that makes it worse or just not quite as terrible)
(also I kindof wish I had been using a different word than passionate but I’m not exactly sure why)

3/22/08

Ethic

Seriousness. Choosing a passionate existence over a perspectived one. It is a dichotomy that has followed me throughout my life. Even now, I sit down, with a purpose, a passion, a serious intention to codify a set of principles by which to orient my gut, and I immediately digress into the practice of pondering or gaining perspective on the nature and repercussions of passion itself. To continue this line of thought: one might say that perspective is necessary, one must understand in order to choose. But ultimately, understanding and choosing are mutually exclusive: choosing can only start when understanding has finished.

I started writing this as a means of determining a proper life for myself, presuming that such a thing could be found through a keyboard. I

A life of passion. I want to believe. Desperate to care. Apathetic. One presumes or is taught or somehow comes to the notion that there are better modes of life than others. One presumes that such things can be reasoned out; That life can be improved upon: sought and found. I started.

I started writing this with an explicit notion of what it would be and how it would help. I don’t remember what it was. I t was compelling. There was a sense, I wanted to capture, of belief. Of trusting the analysis of my own mind. This is a problem for me because my analysis has almost always been inconsistent if not directly opposed to those around me, and often opposed to itself. I don’t trust it and often for good reason. It is a wayward son of a bitch. But it is wayward because it is looking deeper and harder, and sees things that other people ignore. I have often described my perspective as trying to walk around while looking through a binoculars: Intense, fleeting and disconnected details, fascinating in themselves but extremely inefficient and time consuming for the purposes of building a coherent narrative crucible with which to try my decisions.

I keep thinking that I “should” go to sleep, and then the part of me which I believe to be correct, the part of me which I am most content following, asks: why? The point being that what I have been trying to say is the fairly simple: “go to hell” to everything that doesn’t matter. The foot I started off on, of passion verses perspective was a red herring. Perspective matters and I might as well be passionate about it. I might as well be passionate about all sorts of things. I might as well be passionate about deflective and absolving humor. It is a stance that looks for the gold and polishes it. That doesn’t proscribe beforehand what it is looking for and only accepts right on its own limited criteria, but realizes that we are built to know good, by definition, and anything that fits that sense should be burnished and bolstered and brought forth to prominence. Defiance. That somehow seems appropriate. I have always tried to hide myself, and that is really probably what this is about. What I do has always brought me too many questions that I can’t handle…

The courage to be weird. It is largely a difficult thing. If you are aware beforehand that most everything you would naturally say and act upon will be met with puzzlement and confusion. How do you continue to act naturally? Drink. It works. Sort of.

I am superego.