Neuroscience is all the rage. We are mapping the brain these days with all of our cool imaging technology and color-coding the spots with Sharpies so we can get back in there later and do, uh, what? Well, improve! Get better, faster, and stronger like The Six Million Dollar Man. Remember shock treatments? Or, more properly, electroconvulsive therapy? Hey, it’s back, just new and improved, and it’s more like biofeedback now, very groovy and benign. Turns out pro athletes are doing these things as a matter of routine. It’s even making it’s way into major league baseball, which means it’s become mainstream. The particular product that inspired me this morning is called Halo Sport and it doesn’t strike me as particularly radical or bizarre. Frankly, the whole thing might be the frammis in a simple con, after all ballplayers have plenty of disposable income, and if the so-called Steroid Era is any indication they are willing to do almost anything to try and improve their performance.

Even ultra-hip entrepreneur Elon Musk is interested in the cybernetic future with his Neuralink venture, hoping someday to use body-machine interfaces that connect living beings with artificial intelligence networks. The headgear the athletes are playing with is nothing close to that of course, but it’s a step on the same path. The cyborg is the future! We are already there with our smartphones, carrying around in our pockets the collective knowledge of the human race. We can also “network” and “crowdsource” and all that other sort of collective distributed problem solving so much better in today’s hyper-connected world. I suppose one way to get at, or potentially get at, the nuggets of wisdom buried in all that information is to tap into the power of the global village. But one has to think that the vast archive of human stupidity is also available! Amplifying a beautiful voice is one thing, amplifying a blackboard screech is another.

But I don’t worry about the Dr. Frankenstein’s of the world very much. I know we’ll destroy our food supply with GMOs and ruin our kids’ brains with video games so it’s all good. What’s a few half-baked experimental cyborgs run amok? We’ve seen it play out in Blade Runner, right? OK, seriously, I’m not the doomsday type. I’ve no doubt that the human race is capable of colossal stupidity, but most of the time we just stumble along and muck things up a bit without initiating Armageddon. Not that we can’t, but I tend to think our collective survival instinct is pretty good and that, like the army of ants we are, we’ll adjust and adapt and figure out a working solution. It probably won’t be elegant or pretty or even efficient, but it will buy us some time until we get a little better at whatever we are doing.

But the new era of brain hacks is here whether we want ’em or not. We can’t run without our training watch, drive or hike without our GPS, get a ride, book a room, reserve a table or even birdwatch without the right app on our phone. This is the new way of being in the 21st century, sort of a ‘soft’ cyber-existence, stopping just short of hardware implanted in our flesh. If we are willing to go this far, then the next step of direct brain stimulation (like these Halo Sport thingies) shouldn’t be so hard. In fact they may be useless, or even harmful; they strike me more like groping in the dark than fine tuning performance!

The desire to improve athletic performance has resulted in some remarkable technologies like reconstructive, arthroscopic, and laser eye surgeries which are now available to ordinary people. The chemical enhancements never caught on, people for some reason are bothered by pharmaceutical solutions but not mechanical ones. That is unless you can show you have a medical condition; ballplayers can get exemptions from the banned substances list and take stimulants for example to treat ADD/ADHD. Students who are otherwise healthy sometimes take such drugs to improve their memory and academic performance but that remains controversial. I wonder if they used headgear with electrical stimulation and/or feedback to achieve the same end would it be as ethically troubling? Amphetamines have a long history of use in combating fatigue and helping people perform long and arduous tasks and there is evidence of coca leaf consumption going back several millenia. Brain hacks are nothing new!

Imagine a world without technological advancement. We’d have nothing to talk about! All the things that religion and philosophy achieved without science would be the sum total of human thought. Science came along and challenged every single conception that had come before it. Think about it: everything we fight about today in our political and cultural arenas have come about because science upended traditional viewpoints. Two genders, male and female only? Factually, biologically outdated. Race? Genetically a worthless, outmoded notion. Mental illness? Not a moral failing, but a health issue just like cancer, TB, or an enlarged prostate. That’s not to say humans didn’t have good ideas, just that science required them to pass the experimental test, and lots of them failed. And now that technology has jumped the rails and started to grow all on its own without the need for its scientific underpinnings we should expect a lot more experimenting.

This neuroscience stuff has been great for people with debilitating conditions and much of what we know we learned from treating schizophrenics and other people with both physical and mental disorders. And there’s always an acceptance of such things; when a paraplegic can use his limbs because of implanted electrodes we have a hard time arguing with that or seeing the more sinister implications of the technology. But once the Pandora’s Box is opened that means anyone gets to play. Perfectly healthy ballplayers can now get “preventative” Tommy John surgery, they don’t have to wait until they trash their ulnar collateral ligament.  Perhaps we’ll all get little gizmos we can attach to ourselves so we can be smarter, cooler, and more accomplished at whatever we are doing, whether it is housework or jai alai.

What do you think? Are you ready to plug in?

I used to have an opinion on everything. Even stuff I didn’t know shit about. I watched pundits on TV go on and on about things they were ignorant about, so why couldn’t I do it, too? “Pundit,” by the way, is from Sanskrit and means “learned man.” Ideally a pundit knows what he’s blithering on about, but thirty seconds of any news or sports show will quickly reveal that’s not the case. I’m amazed by the numbers of well-dressed, blow-dried, and face-pancaked assholes who jabber incessantly across our airwaves and opinion pages and yet have nothing to say. Nothing to add, that is, nothing to say that hasn’t already been said ad nauseam by some other bunch of assholes. So I got tired of opinions. In fact, I got so tired of opinions I didn’t even want to hear my own!

What I’m interested in is learning new things. No, your opinion is not a new thing. Not usually, anyway. Sometimes you encounter people that have original notions. Their thoughts on things are not just re-hashed arguments but unique insights. Their minds aren’t bound by the usual strictures imposed on us by our culture and upbringing. Those sorts of people are unusual but they are the sorts of people I want to talk to. In a media-saturated world it is difficult to escape mental conditioning. We are bombarded 24/7 with information all of which contains explicit and implicit assumptions about how the world works or ought to work. You whack a puppy on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper enough times he starts to get it and stops crapping on the carpet. We are the puppies and the information networks are the rolled-up newspapers. Over time we get tired and just let the stuff wash in and mold our perceptions.

Inventors and poets have a similar ability—to see links between things most of us don’t see. The inventor sees opportunities and solutions where others see problems and roadblocks. The poet is the master of the metaphor, that is, seeing one thing in terms of another. Good poems express a familiar thing in new and unfamiliar terms, or just the opposite, make an unfamiliar thing seem ordinary. My late mother-in-law was an artist, and she could see faces and human figures in the rocks, rivers, and trees. It didn’t seem to require effort on her part. She just looked around and there they were and then she would illustrate them. My mind seemed dull and pedestrian by comparison! I was always envious of her mental freedom.

I’m paralyzed by an ability to see every opinion. When people talk to me about “both sides” of an issue I want to kick them in the face. I’m not violent, don’t worry, and I’m good at controlling my rage. But it’s how I feel when a complex, multi-faceted topic is reduced to a pro/con argument. We love to make things simple and so you gotta be “for” or “agin” or folks will think you’re an idiot. My mind doesn’t work that way. I get to looking at people’s notions and I start seeing how they come about and fit in with this or that or the other and that leads me on to more and the next thing you know I’m somewhere else and can’t remember where I started. I might start an evening arguing one thing and by the end I’ll be arguing something else. I’m not trying to be contrary, really. I can’t help myself. I have to try things on mentally, just like trying on trousers or shirts. I have to see what I look like in different hats. It’s like finding a pretty stone on the beach and turning it over and around and looking at it from all the angles and watching the light glint off it. I can’t learn anything if I don’t do that.

So what’s a fellow to do? In the States we have freedom of speech, mostly that is, certainly more than most places in the world. So that means we have to give our opinions about stuff. At least that’s what we think it means. I taught teenagers for thirty years and they have opinions about everything, and those opinions are a big part of their self-image. It’s almost as if they believe their opinions are who they are. I can forgive them for that because finding your own viewpoint and your own voice in the world is a big part of growing up. We all need self-confidence and we all need to believe in ourselves. Expressing our beliefs and feelings is one way to do that. I heard a lot of opinions in my work and mostly I had to say “isn’t that nice?” or some other platitudinous jive because my opinion about their opinion mattered not. Part of being a teacher is accepting that all the kids are different and they don’t fit neatly into boxes. And keeping my opinion to myself meant the focus was on the student, not the teacher.

Maybe that’s all we are—a bundle of goddamn opinions! I hope not. In fact, I don’t think so. We are a bundle of perceptions, and those perceptions interact with our pre-conceived ideas and we form a picture of the world. We cling to that picture because the world is ceaselessly dynamic and we need a life raft in the swirling ocean of change. Life IS change, but changing our minds is tough. We feel better when we are “right” and our notions are vindicated. Never mind that much of that vindication is just seeing what supports our ideas and rejecting what does not. All of us do this. We are selective about what we allow to be real and true. A truly free mind would be, I think, a great challenge. The possessor of such a mind would find it hard to deal with the rest of the world as they would seem to be standing still all the time. It would be a bitch on relationships as one of the things we count on from those we love is their consistency and dependability.

Educational research consistently reveals that students take the new material that teachers show them and they twist it all around and cram it into the conceptual frameworks that already exist in their minds. Rarely do they adjust their attitudes and outlooks because of new information. It’s only when students confront the limits of what they already know and see its shortcomings that they gain insight and understanding. But this is nearly impossible to do in the classroom. And it’s even harder to do over a few pints with an opinionated drunk on the next stool. But that’s what I’m interested in: the biases that limit our knowledge and the assumptions that strait-jacket our minds. How do we shake those off and see the world anew?

We usually get our beef delivery about this time of year. It used to be we bought meat in the market just like everyone else. For some time now we’ve been getting our beef directly from the ranch, a very small-town thing to do. The outfit is called Prather Ranch and their main operation is near the town of Macdoel in eastern Siskiyou County, about an hour’s drive from Yreka. When we called this week to inquire about our beef, we were told that the long, cold winter (and it was indeed a long, cold winter!) meant that the animals didn’t grow as fast as projected and were “too small.” Now that spring is here and we’ve had warm days and sunny blue skies things should pick up. “A few more days like these” they told us and the cattle would be ready for processing.

Prather Ranch is unusual in that they have a closed herd. The last breeding cow was introduced into the system in 1975. Originally they raised cattle for hides, bones, tissues, and organs for the pharmaceutical industry. The beef, in essence, was a by-product! We purchase a quarter of a steer, called “half of a half” for some reason, and split it with another couple. In good years we get about 120 pounds of meat. In the lean years maybe only 80 pounds or so. (When you place your annual order you are actually assigned a specific calf.) It’s grass-fed and dry-aged and thus tender and delicious. The animals are slaughtered on-site as the ranch has its own USDA-certified abattoir. They maintain both an “organic” herd (no hormones or antibiotics, no animal parts in the feed, raised on organic pasture) and a “natural” herd (minimally processed, no artificial ingredients, but sick animals can be treated with antibiotics and some may have eaten conventionally-raised feed).

I’ve become so used to eating this high-quality beef that I rarely eat beef anywhere else and avoid ordering beef in restaurants. It mostly doesn’t compare. Even the ground beef is exceptionally flavorful and I’m not much of a hamburger fan. The steaks, roasts, and ribs are always delectable. It’s nice to know that sustainable practices and an ecological outlook are compatible with a superior product. I appreciate that these guys are open to the public—I’ve yet to visit, though—and interested in transparency. There’s a talk by one of the family members about the relationship between food consumers and producers at TEDxRedding. You can see it here.

Growing up in the supermarket and TV-ad era makes food seem just like any other consumer product, no different than t-shirts or televisions. But food is a lot more important than stuff, don’t you think? We know much more about our stuff than we do about our food, and it’s amazing how little we know about our stuff. We are a rich country, wallowing in abundance, and we can afford to be fussy about what we eat. Places where the food supply is uncertain don’t have the luxury of demanding “natural” or “organic” products. They are fortunate if they get enough to eat! We live on the other end of that spectrum. We can turn our noses up at food that doesn’t meet our particular desires for freshness, healthfulness, or sustainable agricultural practices.

In this modern world of agribusiness and factory farms there’s a desire by many to embrace a farm-to-table approach. Buying fruits and vegetables at farmer’s markets, for example, is one way to do that. It’s not always practical. One of the reasons we have massive corporate producers is economies of scale, that little bugaboo you learned about in Econ 101. To feed the millions of hungry mouths requires a huge system that can deliver safe, abundant foodstuffs across the country throughout the year. One of the results of this techno-industrial marvel is consistent supply. You can go to the store any time of year and get almost anything you want.

This delay in our beef delivery got me thinking about the old days. People had to live in the boom-and-bust cycle of nature. Lean years meant just that. You didn’t get the yield from the farm due to the vagaries of weather and thus you weren’t as well fed, didn’t make as much money, or encountered rising prices as a consequence. Even fat years could have a negative impact as over-production could cause prices to fall and the market to drop on the product you raised. In today’s world we see the prices of food go up and down but, unless we are commodities traders, we are usually disconnected from the cause-and-effect.

It’s fashionable these days to overlook the good part of our food production system. Yes, all the critiques are true, we are too energy-intensive and use too many petrochemicals for example, and we only nod in the direction of sustainability instead of embracing it. But we are well fed. We have, in comparison to poor countries, cheap, healthy food in abundance. Many of the health problems of our nation are due to our eating habits. We have obesity and heart disease in abundance as well! Having too much food is a problem, too. (But it beats not having enough, eh?)

There are about 3.2 million farmers in the States out of a population of about 320 million. One in one hundred is one percent. One percent of the people grow ALL of our food! One hundred years ago there were ten times as many farmers but only one-third as many mouths to feed. It’s not often we get reminded that our food comes from somewhere other than the store. Living up here in farm and ranch country gives me that chance.

. . . and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry. (Luke 15:23)

I like to think that we live on The Ark. You know, THE Ark. Noah and Genesis and The Flood and all that. Remember? God was pissed and told Noah to build a fuckin’ boat. “Drown with the rest of these assholes on this shithole planet, Noah, or build The Ark.” Well, Noah built The Ark. Probably a good move. You don’t want God pissed at you. And all the animals two-by-two and some wives (Noah had sons) and yadda-yadda-yadda and bullet dodged.

Now there are seven or so billion of us on this ball of rock hurtling through space. The Earth is The Ark. Outside of The Ark in Noah’s time all about was water and there was death by drowning or there was staying on The Ark. Outside of The Earth in our time all about is the vacuum of space and there is death by asphyxiation or there is staying on The Earth. So, in effect, we are on an ark. Thus, The View from The Ark. And we’ve got the all-the-animals thing covered, because, well, all the animals are already here. Except the ones we made go extinct. And plants. And insects. And microbes. And fungi. I like fungi. Noah didn’t make allowances for fungi. That means no mushrooms and no yeast. What kind of life is that?

Anyway, here we are on The Ark. God is probably pissed, like before, but no one knows for sure. Either way, this is it. Noah, ultimately, got to disembark. We don’t get to disembark. We are on The Ark for the duration. If you don’t like The Ark, how about The Cruise Ship? Or The Luxury Liner? Or The Jumbo Jet? They all work. In the 70s “Spaceship Earth” was the metaphor du jour, and I use that a fair bit, being a 70s kid. But I wanted to update Spaceship Earth and I did so by going back in time to the Ancient Hebrews and their Mesopotamian brethren. The Flood story is in a lot of places, especially in what we now call The Middle East, and I’ve no doubt there were plenty of historical floods behind the myths. The Chinese don’t mention a deluge, nor do the Egyptians, which means these floods were local, not global, but I imagine they were catastrophic nonetheless. Most folks lived in littoral zones as these were the most fertile, obviously they would also be the most prone to flooding.

But I don’t really give a shit about the historicity of The Flood. I like the big boat. There’s some nutty folks in Kentucky who have a replica built to Biblical specs that you can visit. Hey, “whatever floats yer boat,” right? I’ll bet there were plenty of guys who built boats and put their livestock on them (and wives too, women were mostly livestock back in those days) and floated to safety when a flood came. Enterprising suckers, I’ll bet. The genetic stock of today’s entrepreneurs, the ancestors of the Uber-ians and Lyft-opians. But the big boat that saved mankind and all the critters? That’s some serious lack of genetic diversity!

No, that Noah stuff is strictly for true believers. The rest of us can just enjoy the tale and think about that big goddamn boat. Spaceship Earth, you know, is a pretty damn big boat. 8,000 miles in diameter. 25,000 miles in circumference. 200 million square miles in surface area. Now I’m going to switch to metric because the numbers are cooler: a volume of ONE TRILLION cubic kilometers. And a mass of 6 x 10^24 kilograms which we can of course render as SIX HELLAGRAMS! (Thanks, Austin.)

It’s a big boat. And we’ve got first class, business, coach, and steerage. And worse than steerage, but I don’t know what to call that. We’ve all got a view though, which is nice. So I’m going to spend more time on My View from The Ark. If you have not noticed the waxing crescent moon the last few nights you’ve missed out. It’s been quite beautiful. And Jupiter is up and easy to see, along with some constellations like Gemini and Leo. While we are all stuck on this goddamn boat we might as well enjoy the view, right?

I suppose I am one of those Apollo kids that saw the moon flights and were forever brainwashed by those “blue marble” images that flooded the public consciousness in the 1970s. This image in particular. The vast, harsh emptiness of space containing one tiny planet with a life-sustaining veneer of air that all the humans we know about have to share.

Forever.

Yeah, I figure we’ll eventually get some folks to Mars or wherever, but it’s going to be a loooooong while before any such place is inhabitable. Right now we’ve got a habitable place, The Ark. So, watch were you take a dump, OK? That might just be where I’m planning to sit and check out the view!

p.s. Check out BLUE MARBLE NEXT GENERATION.

Back story first. The popular king goes off to war leaving his wife and three kids behind. Halfway there he finds out the gods need a virgin sacrifice from him. Not just any virgin, his eldest daughter. He tricks his wife and kid into joining him and then has the daughter hauled away for slaughter. The grieving wife is sent home and the now mighty army goes off to fight. It takes ten years, but they win. The triumphant king heads home with a new mistress, a war prize. The wife in the meantime has taken a lover. When the king comes home he is killed by the new couple. The son is exiled and the youngest girl is married off and disinherited. The wife and the new husband live sumptuously and are hated by the people they rule.

The king is Agamemnon and the wife is Clytemnestra. Their kids are Iphigenia, Orestes, and Electra. The murderous husband is Aegisthus. The myth is Greek and follows events after the Trojan War.

In Euripides’ Electra we meet this unlucky youngest child in front of her hovel where she lives a peasant’s life. She is old enough to be a bride but too young to remember her father or her brother. She is consumed with hatred for her mother and step-father and thinks of almost nothing else but wreaking vengeance upon them. Her peasant husband lives apart from her yet treats her kindly. He had been ordered by Aegisthus to marry Electra so that her children would be too low-born to be considered heirs and threats to the throne. Their marriage is chaste though as the peasant is unwilling to have sex with a king’s daughter as he feels unworthy of her. He had been a loyal subject of Agamemnon and reveres his memory. They keep this fact secret, especially from Clytemnestra.

The only other thought that enters Electra’s mind is that of her brother Orestes. The uncertainty of his fate gnaws at her, and she feels powerless to seek revenge without the help of someone stronger and more cunning than her. Alas, Orestes arrives, at first hiding his identity, but recognized later by an old servant of the king’s. The siblings are re-united and they plot together, aided and abetted by the servant as well as Orestes’ companion Pylades. Killing the step-father turns out to be easy for Orestes and when the word gets to Electra she is emboldened to finish their grisly task.

The tortured daughter, denied all these years her birthright as a princess, her youth and beauty wasted in a sexless union, lures her mother to her with a fake report of a newborn. Clytemnestra, despite the estrangement, hurries unsuspecting to see her grandchild. At the moment of crisis, Orestes has his doubts, but the determined Electra urges him to finish the job. They kill their mother, but the joy they had hoped to feel leads to despair. Clytemnestra was not the monster they’d imagined and was as imprisoned in her rage as they were. She had never forgiven Agamemnon for sacrificing their first-born, Iphigenia.

In typically Greek fashion, the gods arrive at the end to sort things out. Castor and Pollux show up and cast some of the blame on Apollo for messing up things early on. They admonish the children for the crime of matricide, but they recognize the justice for Clytemnestra’s treachery in killing Agamemnon and abandoning her remaining children. Electra and Orestes are given their penance, but live on.

The deus ex machina aside it seems to me this would make a pretty damn good noir melodrama. Blood ties are the toughest and open up the oldest and ugliest wounds. And murder for good old-fashioned reasons like greed, lust, and revenge is always preferred. Statecraft, politics, and palace intrigue can’t compare to family dynamics for supplying motives! A 21st century version won’t have kings as today’s royalty will be CEOs, but there will still be plenty of peasants. They’ll be people like you and me. The gods won’t show up and put things right at the end, but the lawyers might work out a settlement.

I don’t read Greek so I’ve been experiencing the wonder of these plays in translation. That’s a funny thing, translating a work from one language to another. So often there are no word-for-word equivalents and liberties have to be taken, especially with ancient tongues. The Greek originals are in verse, but the meter and rhyme can’t always be captured. As much of the translator’s voice comes through along with the author’s. Here’s a passage, the first from Elizabeth Seydel Morgan (verse) and the second from E.P. Coleridge (prose):

Electra, Agamemnon’s child,/ I have come to your farmhouse/ to tell the message from Mycenae/ brought down today from one/ who drinks milk on the vineless mountain . . .

O Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, to thy rustic cot I come, for a messenger hath arrived, a highlander from Mycenae, one who lives on milk . . .

I wind up having to read at least two versions of these old things. The modern versions tend to be more accessible, and the older ones filled with more colorful language. Think of the King James Bible, and all that baroque phrasing, compared to contemporary translations in American English. I think that the interpreter of the play might color the characterizations a little if they had feelings about them. If you think Electra is a whiny brat instead of a heroic survivor that would affect the final product, don’t you think?

Regardless, translations are what I have to settle for. I’ve read six different Odysseys. I like Robert Fitzgerald’s the best, if that means anything. It could be that it’s just a nice paperback with a pleasing typeface. Plus my edition has line drawings that are pretty cool as well as a thoughtful, in-depth, and illuminating postscript by the translator. Stuff written more than two thousand years ago in a very different culture thousands of miles away is still interesting! Times change, but people don’t.

My goal was to post at the very least once a week. I note that I last posted on the 18th of April. As today is the 26th, I missed my self-imposed deadline by one day. I must have rested on the seventh day. A venerable custom, to be sure. The biggest thing is having something to say. Those of you who know me know that’s not normally a problem. The problem is “say.” Saying is easy, writing is hard. The maelstrom of bullshit that I call my active mental processes is not lacking for material, just lacking in structure and clarity. Imposing order on chaos feels a bit like work, and I hate to work. Being retired, I don’t have to!

So is writing work? It feels like work, but only because it’s hard. It’s not work unless you are a professional and get paid to write. I’m not just a hack, I’m an amateur hack! No one has ever paid me a nickel to write anything, so I’ll leave off equating writing with work. Novelists and journalists and copywriters have to work. I don’t. That ought to be liberating. I ought to be able to spew whatever I want on the digital page. Or the printed page for that matter, digital is just more convenient, less messy, and a lot cheaper. But I can’t. I can’t always herd the proverbial cats in my mind and get something worth typing out of it. Truman Capote was right—it’s often not writing, merely typing.

That’s the rub there, my notion of “worth.” What’s worth it? Given the spectacular number of blogs out there in cyberspace it seems almost anything is worth blogging about. Add in all the posters and commenters on Facebook and that’s a lot of writing about any and all things. Wondering whether or not something is worth posting about on my blog is folly. The digital world is proof that anyone can write about anything. And at any time and from almost any place.

So what’s my problem? Fear. Fear of doing something lousy. Fear of looking stupid. The usual fears. I used to be afraid to ski off-piste. I’m not anymore. Mostly I conquered my fear which was between the ears and not between the poles. Sure, my technique is better, and so is my equipment, but getting better was mostly mental. And there was a feedback thing going on: because I took the risk and skied off the groomed runs and into the trees and untracked mountainsides I learned how to do it better. The freedom found with a little dose of courage opened up the technical improvement.

The risks with creative acts, like writing, are different. With skiing if I fall down and look bad, that hurts nothing but my pride. Maybe I hold up the group, that’s not a fun feeling but it’s small stuff. I could hurt myself in an accident, maybe even seriously, but it’s a mostly controllable risk as I can stay away from dangerous places. But when I write I delve into myself. It’s personal. I start learning about myself. I’ve been writing about baseball, specifically the San Francisco Giants, for ten years now, and that’s hundreds of blog posts, I’d guess around fifteen hundred or so. I’ve learned a lot about baseball, but even more about myself, and the experience has been transformative. I don’t think about things the same way, my view of the game and my relationship to it is very different than what it was. What started out as fan fun morphed into something else and it changed me along the way. I’m better at it, too. The posts sound better and come out more readily because I found my “voice” as part of the process.

When I started teaching I used to put on my mask and costume and go to work as my alter ego “Mr. O’Connor.” Over time I embraced that person more fully and the gap between real-life Mark and his on-the-clock version narrowed. Eventually the schism was healed and I could be both Mark and Mr. O’Connor. The teaching part of a teaching job is creative and requires you to reach inside yourself in order to connect with the student and be their guide and helper. (The job part of a teaching job is just as crappy and mind-numbing as any other job.) That creativity helped me grow as a person.

I’ve fiddled around with writing half of my life. I’ve never pursued it with the zeal and passion that professionals exhibit because writing is hard. And I already spent a bunch of time in this life working hard. Maybe I just need to remember that all the writing things I’ve done that I feel good about were, in the end, fun. Sure, they caused me sweat and anguish, but overall they were good times. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it has to feel like work. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

That’s a long-winded way to say sorry to my fan club for not keeping up with the regular posts. I realize my fan club could all meet comfortably in a VW bug, but I’d be happy with a fan club that could fit in bathtub. Even one reader makes it worth it! I’m getting back on the train and will have new stuff at a minimum of once a week, I promise. Twice if I want twice as much fun!

No one worships Zeus anymore. There was a time when he was the biggest bad-ass of them all, but now he’s just a character in a mythology book. How does that happen? How does a god go extinct? I mean, he’s a GOD. Dinosaurs and dodos go extinct, they are flesh-and-blood. But Zeus? He was immortal. Note the oxymoron: “was” immortal. If you are immortal you can’t be a “was.” But Zeus is a big-time “was.” Historically we know it was the emergence of monotheism in the person of Yahweh/Jehovah aka The God of Abraham that did in the Greek deities. Jesus Christ and the early Greek-speaking Xians held the nail, and Constantine the Great wielded the hammer that finally finished them off. And they are dead, dead as a doornail.

So where did Zeus and Athena and the like go? I suppose contemporary religion-istas would tell me they never existed in the first place, that there is only The One True God. But for the many thousands, perhaps millions, who were devotees of the Olympian pantheon, Zeus was very real, as were Hera and Artemis and the rest. I’m going to suppose that once a certain critical mass of adherents is reached, a belief, no matter how ridiculous, becomes a truth. It takes form and becomes real. Once the number of worshipers drops below that critical number, the gods disappear. A consequence of that supposition is that the gods should re-appear if the people choose to follow them again!

In our time, our gods, other than those in the primary religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.), are the fruits of capitalism. Automobiles, smart phones, and affordable hot tubs are our new deities. We worship a concealed carry permit, a single-family dwelling, and fifteen minutes of fame. A piece of the pie is the raison d’être of our existence here in the hustling, bustling US of A. It’s no wonder the old gods are suffering! They can’t compete with ATVs, streaming porn, or Amazon Prime.

But what if people decided to worship Zeus again–would he be real? I have to think so. And what’s the critical mass needed? Would half a million be enough? In fact, if half a million people fervently believe something, doesn’t that make it true? At least it’s true for them, that gang of 500,000 folks. I suppose if you had 500 fanatics that might work, too, as enthusiasm might be more important than roster size. Remember the Moonies? The so-called Unification Church and Sun Myung Moon? How many of them are around? There has to be at least a million, and you have to figure they have pretty strong beliefs to go along with all that stuff, particularly since most regular folks think Moonies are nuts. Remember the Rajneeshees? The so-called Bhagwan and his followers? There were hardly any of them, a few thousand if I remember, but they caused quite a stir up in Oregon and we got a real-live bio-terror attack out of them. They poisoned dozens of locals with Salmonella! You have to be a true believer to pull off that shit, that’s like these ISIS assholes, willing to do whatever to whomever to advance the cause.

That guy, the former Bhagwan, re-named himself “Osho” and went back to India and preached his thing and re-habbed his tarnished image and died surrounded by worshipful followers. Go figure! You can be a dickhead and yet people will still see you as their god. After all Zeus was no prize, exhibiting the worst of human traits, regularly inflicting violence on his subjects over petty grievances and jealousies. But I’m not interested so much in the quality of these god-like figures, just what it takes for them to be real. I know that both those guys, Moon and Osho, were real men but they became like gods because enough people believed them to be special.

And that’s what’s got me thinking. How many believers does it take? And, if that many people truly believe, does that make it true? I hate to say it, but I think so. Scary, this thought. The implications are indeed terrifying. Think about the Holocaust. There are persistent un-believers out there who truly do not think millions of Jews and others were slaughtered by the Nazis. There are Americans among this bunch, sad to say, people who don’t believe the stories brought home by their own fellow citizens, soldiers who served in Europe in WWII and liberated the death camps. In some countries denial of the Holocaust is a crime. On a sillier note, there are people who believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked.

It’s easy to dismiss these people as simply mean, deranged, or stupid. But their beliefs are real to them, and our reality is the sum of what we believe in. Our current president believes certain things to be true, like three million Californians voted illegally, and it matters not to his followers whether there is evidence for that claim. They believe it too, so it’s real. “Fake” news isn’t fake at all. It’s just an expression of one’s beliefs. Over a billion people believe Jesus of Nazareth is a divine being who rose from the dead. It matters not to them if science supports or disputes that, their faith is sufficient. The Irish Christian Brothers who taught me in high school rendered unto science what was science and rendered unto the Lord what was the Lord’s. They didn’t see a conflict, their faith was even stronger than their love of scholarship.

I’m not sure how I dug myself into this solipsistic rat-hole. If anything can be true, then everything is true, and nothing is false. In science, repeatability is the real nut. Recreate the initial conditions and you should get the same results I got. If it’s not repeatable it’s not science. But belief trumps science, and if the belief is fervent enough it’s as real as a repeatable result. Perhaps I’m just too good at being open-minded, too facile at seeing other points-of-view, too tolerant of differences that I can’t help but see them all as equally absurd. I’ve un-moored from my philosophical anchors and now I’m just splashing about, looking for the life ring. Some of the realities out there are a scary; others inconsequential. But they’re out there. And they’ve got that critical mass, either in number of adherents or sufficient passion or both.

By Jove, we have to come back to Zeus! He’s out there waiting to be revived. He’s just as real as you or me, in fact he’s more real. Add up all the folks we know, have known, or will know, and it won’t come close to all the Zeus-ians who ever lived. So don’t be surprised if you get a thunderbolt tossed your way one of these days.

In many ways, we are living in a Film Noir world, where the ordinary person, in order to survive, has to be hard-boiled and occasionally hide in the shadows to avoid the predations of the powerful.

—Christa Fuller*

The so-called film noir period in American cinema is my favorite, and much of the reason has to do with “the predations of the powerful.” The protagonists of these movies are always at the mercy of some villainy like vengeful mobsters or crooked cops. All of us can imagine an entity more powerful than ourselves that could make our lives hell. Surely the government, with its panoply of law enforcement agencies and it vast prison system, can run amok and trample on the rights and property of its citizens. Certainly our gigantic global corporate empires with their trans-national make-ups and enormous war chests can wreak havoc on the ordinary folks that have to work for them, buy their goods, or merely inhabit the same space. We can all picture these powers and know we’d have little chance in a fight of any kind.

We know, too, of actual real-life examples in today’s world and throughout history of the powerful abusing their power and stomping on regular people. So yeah, I think we’d have to say we all need to be a little hard-boiled in our outlook. The world is filled with assholes, and assholes have a tendency to run their shit downhill, which means it falls, of course, upon the non-assholes.

What does it mean to be hard-boiled? The typical noir anti-hero lacks idealism. He sees the world plainly, without sentiment. He is cynical and matter-of-fact. He has heroic qualities though, his toughness, his sense of honor, and his rigid ethical code. He’s not a moralist, but he acts on what he thinks is right, regardless of the consequences. Ultimately he’s a realist, he knows that the world is what it is and he isn’t going to change it. He is motivated instead by a desire to make a tiny corner of the world a bit better than it was yesterday, even if it is for someone other than himself.

How does one live a life, doing one’s best to be a non-asshole, and yet maintaining sufficient hard-boiledness to survive? For one, you have to be tough. I don’t mean you have to start learning mixed martial arts, although that’s a perfectly fine hobby, I mean emotional resilience. Bad shit is going to happen to good people every goddamn day and you won’t be able to do shit about most of it. It’s one of those lessons you have to learn on the cusp of adulthood, in fact, it may be that it’s the distinguishing characteristic of adulthood, this ability to see horrible things and keep going.

It is suggested in the quote above that hiding in the shadows may be an effective strategy. No doubt. Don’t bring attention to yourself, unless of course attention is what you seek. Keep those vices under wraps, share them with fellow travelers, but don’t advertise. That’s why you get brown paper bags with your forties and skin mags. It’s hard to hide in today’s electronic shadows, there aren’t any, unless you are some kind of super-user and can encrypt yourself and your transactions. The rest of us are open books. Maybe the mountains of data will be so big one day we can all hide in plain sight. We’ll see!

I was going to say don’t be an asshole, but it’s probably easier to be a non-asshole. That is, most people get contrary whenever someone says not to do something. It’s better to think in positive terms, even if it is a negative action, like avoiding assholiness. Most of the world is non-assholes, and I don’t really have a proper term, perhaps citizen works, but I need something. Describing something as a not-something isn’t helpful. With citizen I don’t mean salute the flag and pay your taxes, though those are perfectly fine things, I mean more like a neighbor. Pull your weeds and fence in your dog and wave back when the guy next door waves to you. Be tolerant of people and their foibles. Look both ways before you cross, signal your turns, and put the shopping cart in the return bin. That sort of thing.

To be a neighbor or a citizen, that is, a non-asshole, requires fortitude. It’s easy to get angry. Lots of things piss us off every day. Any of a thousand little pricks could turn us into raging beasts. But if you are a wee bit hard-boiled, you can accept much of it, and it can roll off you like rain on a duck’s back. If your eyes are open and you see the world as it is, you can see what’s coming in time to duck. One of the problems with both philosophy and psychology is that they deal with idealized people. Generalities about humankind are fine, but they don’t help much with actual individual humans. The world is peopled by persons, not notions. If you make a person the subject of your thoughts, and not people, you’ll understand better. You’ll be more empathic, and thus more humble, and more willing to forgive.

I like to see solutions and not problems. I like to argue in order to understand something better and not necessarily to make a point. I like to be wrong because it gets me closer to being right. I try to be nice, and to act like a gentleman. All of this requires me to be positive, which is hard, because deep down I’m grumpy and cynical. And I know I can be a dick, just like everyone else, but I also know we all need a bit of that dick-ness around to face the oft-times cruel world we inhabit.

*from Film Noir in Today’s World, p. 225, NoirCon 2014 program (ed. Lou Boxer)

. . . if you cling to what you once knew, you’ll be left behind. Keep learning.

That’s from Joe Sheehan in a piece (“When Statheads Age“) on a baseball-geek site I frequent called FanGraphs. But that matters not. A similar sentiment can be found in many places. One of those is the heart of an old teacher. All my professional life I exhorted students to pursue the path of lifelong learning. We work our muscles to stay fit, why not our brains? But I have to say I didn’t really know what I meant by learning. Oh, I could have recited the usual list like learn to play the guitar, or learn to play golf, or learn a new language, or some manual art, or whatnot. But it’s not what I wanted. I wanted them to do what I thought real learning was, which was being wrong. I found it hard to say that in the context of high school in which quite a bit of energy is expended on being right. So I just encouraged them to stay curious and open-minded, the usual platitudes, not such bad advice. I like to think I mostly gave out not-too-bad-advice over the course of my career!

But real learning is when you run down the maze and smack the wall head first. Back, left, or right—going forward is clearly wrong. That’s good stuff to know. One does not have to be bloodied or bruised to be wrong. We don’t have to burn our hands to know something is hot, that’s one of the benefits of age. It’s hard to be wrong, the bruises to the ego are as lasting as those to the skin. That’s the key for me, that we really learn best when we get rid of the ego. I think the entire notion of ego, in the Freudian sense, is hopelessly out-of-date. Much of that man’s work has undue influence on how we think about ourselves, he was certainly a bright and creative fellow but let’s get rid of these old-fashioned mechanistic schemes of the mind, they don’t help. Newtonian mechanics gave the world a lot of things, but is applicable only in a narrow subset of all the interactions science has shown us are possible. The universe requires an update of those notions, turning on their heads such fundamental things as mass, energy, time, and space. Shouldn’t we expect our ideas about how the brain and mind work to require similar updating?

I’m not mystical enough to go with the spiritual view of ego-death, the state of full awareness and transcendence. I’m more of a day-to-day, down-to-earth guy. It’s more that I think of the mind as an ecology, a system of interactions rather than a set of structures. And one of those interactions is to cling, that is in the sense of hold fast or adhere to. The verb to clench is of the same lineage as cling. Our ego is our cling-mechanism. It’s not surprising we have such a thing, it’s a sea of uncertainty out there and a good instinct in such a situation is to grab on to whatever flotsam is closest. But we aren’t machines, we are organisms, we are in a state of flux, inhaling and excreting and moving and metabolizing and repairing and consuming. The fists we use to clench with in our minds are not fixed steel clasps, they aren’t cinched or bolted. They are free to move on their own, to come and go as they please. Those hooks in our head we use to hang things are alive, they can evolve and adapt and become un-hooks just as easily.

This is the letting go that I mean. To unclench, as it were. We don’t have to let it go in the sense of letting it get away. Whatever it is, it is still there, we just don’t grip it as tightly. We can put it down and pick out something else, like trying on a new pair of trousers, and don’t you think trousers is a more splendid word than pants? But I could be wrong, and that’s where I started. We have such an inverted value on the word wrong. Wrong is just a note by the universe that this path isn’t as open to possibilities as another path. It seems to me to be a powerful learning opportunity, this idea of being wrong, and having to unbind your mind and embrace the new.

We love our opinions and assumptions, they are lifeboats in the ocean. We nurture our biases, they are safe and comforting in crazy world. Learning is hard, it is filled with unfamiliar and discordant notes, but those are the ones we need to tune in to if we want to keep our minds fit and ready for what comes next. No one knows what comes next! Isn’t that wonderful?

But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.

Jehovah, the God of Moses and Abraham, was a hard-ass motherfucker. Like a mafia don, he expected absolute fidelity and his wrath was severe if the rules were broken. The Israelites were always screwing up and forgetting to toe the line and so Yahweh had to come down again and again and straighten things out. This bit from Isaiah is lovely, don’t you think? That image of the filthy rags—that is, stained with menstrual blood—is particularly good, in olden times women’s monthly emissions were as unclean as the guys writing this stuff down could imagine. I think shit is a lot worse, and microbiology backs me up, but the Hebrew story-tellers had a particular thing about periods. Maybe that’s why women will never be Catholic priests!

I also like the image of the leaf, fading in color and texture, being borne off by the wind. I love autumn, and the fall of the foliage from the trees and its scattering always makes me wistful, all that energy that went into the making now dissipating with the coming of winter. I came across this last week when I was killing time in a motel room the night before a ski adventure. I usually poke through the Gideon at one point or another in my stays, it has lots of organized quotes in the preface, this passage was one of them.

I took it to mean that we are all posers, that we put on a show of being good, but in the end we will all be shown to be as equally full of shit. Or, at the very least, we’ll all wind up the same in the cosmic sense, that is, fertilizer. But I think the more religious types see the moral differently. That no matter how good our works are, they pale when compared to God’s goodness, and if we think that good works will get us to Heaven, we are mistaken. Only God can do that, and only if we accept that any goodness we have originates with God, not within ourselves.

That’s a little harsh in my book. People are clearly capable of goodness. All you have to do is observe people being good to each other, that’s clear evidence that people can be good. Of course the opposite is true as well. We are capable of being rather wretched beasts, right? We see that, too. The fact that people actually do things is proof that they are capable of those things.

So, are we losers who need to accept our complete loser-ness in order NOT to be losers? Or, are we better than that, rather decent in fact most of the time, and will it hurt us to say so? Perhaps the sages of lore were worried that if we thought too highly of ourselves we’d get into worse trouble. Hubris has its price. Humility is a difficult art to practice, and it is especially tough in this can-do, boot-strapping, self-made all-American capitalist enterprise we live in, where self-worth and self-belief are the cornerstones of economic advancement.

If you are poor in the US of A, it’s because you lack virtue. You didn’t get up early enough, study hard enough, or work long enough hours. You weren’t thrifty enough, hungry enough, or tough enough. At least that’s the free market credo and it works for enough folks that we take it for granted. I’ve no issue with ambition and I’ve no problem with getting ahead—more power to you and may you find success. But the world is more complicated than that and the exigencies of life are often outside our control. Bad stuff happens even to good people, no one is exempt from the vagaries of existence.

I don’t really know what to make of Isaiah 64:6. I found it rather poetic, and it made me contemplative. I thought it was telling me to be humble, to see that what makes us human, both good and bad, is shared by all of us, and that our fates are all the same. I’ll leave it to the biblical scholars to parse out the deeper stuff, I don’t read the Gideon for spiritual strength or mystical insight. I like the language, and the history, and the characters and their stories, and the great panorama of human nuttiness, all the crazy stuff we believe and all the crazy things we’ll do in service of those beliefs.

How we see the world is a product of our culture. What’s really out there depends on who and where you are. Anytime you can get a group of folks all together in one place experiencing the same shared reality you have to figure it’s a bit of a miracle. I’m a big fan of civilization and I hope it keeps chugging along and we keep muddling through. That’s a tall order what with seven billion of us here now and still growing. We’re all connected, like it or not, we are all passengers on the same spaceship and there aren’t any escape pods. I guess that means we’ll all have to figure out how to get along, eh?