Vegans Just Don’t Get the Painful-Praying-in-Weird-Bathrooms Thing, Do They?

It dawned on me today as I found myself in an old, familiar position of being stuck in a place I did not want to be, surrounded by wet things and scents that call into question my city’s promise that they “turned the taps off” and “rerouted the 60-mile block of fatal licorice-water” cruising west down the Ohio: since giving up meat thirteen months ago, I’ve lost that touchstone of male living that is holding back tears on a foreign toilet, swearing to start dieting as soon as this is over, pondering if one can truly get crabs from a toilet seat, maddening at the sound of a fellow man being denied entry into your painful-but-as-of-now-safe situation atop the sewer line by the lock on the door.

While I can’t claim to be a vegan, nor would I really want to use terms like that since they end up being more divisive and take away from actual growth, I can say that one of the numerous positive side effects I’ve experienced since giving up meat consumption and greatly reducing dairy intake is a decrease in restroom uncertainty and rates of use. I’ve no real explanation for today’s slip back into the fighting pits, but it appears to be a one off and wow are we really talking about this no we’re not.

Eat healthy y’all. Do your best.

Nihilists Don’t Not Believe in Anything^

^ – not a typo.

When I first read this snippet by David Foster Wallace, reviewing  Joseph Frank’s lauded biography of author Fyodor Dostoevsky, I went through the 5-10 second range of emotions that is typical for me when my constructed reality loses a beam:

To inquire of ourselves why we – under our own nihilistic spell – seem to require of our writers an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of profound issues or else try somehow to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or juxtaposition, sticking them inside asterisks as part of some surreal, defamiliarization-of-the-reading-experience flourish.

* Pause for “huh… yeah… wait a minute, that is right… *

Aside from the holy shit truth that DFW spews throughout that review, I want to address this word “nihilistic.” Upon reading this man, one who possessed what I have long deemed to be a solid outlook on reality, bashing something that I, by default and through misunderstanding, had always deemed to be a close-to-the-mark depiction on what we might as well do, I spent a few seconds wondering what was wrong with me before determining that I must either wholly misunderstand Wallace or nihilism itself. Thankfully, it turned out to be the latter.

Since The Big Lebowski introduced the concept of nihilism to my generation of high schoolers a decade-and-a-half ago, I’d considered the belief in nothing a learned, mature, comedic, realistic-though-jaded rejection of religiosity, ideology, exclusion, fraudulent concern and self-importance. Since I don’t believe in a bearded man surveying the ever-decaying ecosystems beneath him, because, you know, fuck Sauron, I figured this nihilism thing was closer to being “right” than religious dogma. Similarly, ideologies themselves tended to pervert into dogmas, which are nothing if not terrible arguments. I don’t want to be a terrible arguer; I went to law school. (*Thumbs up, smiley face.*)

The disdain for fraudulent concern and self-importance is, aside from the blatant opposition to human rights that the grandiose tax shelters have aligned themselves with, the single greatest catalyst in what has been our culture’s movement to nihilism. (That we have moved there would be something I used to dispute, but the more I look at it, the more undeniable our nihilistic anti-ethos has become. Except, we’re doing it wrong. More on that later. ) I’ve come across a great many people that I consider to be smart, well-rounded, funny people that see these progressively dark and stupid times as irreversible, and therefore, not worth the trouble. If the multi-national corporations are throwing together commercials about making the world a better place while simultaneously chucking even more money at anonymously fighting the conservation of all living things, then why should we who know how to read fall for it?

I get it. I’m largely still there, to tell the truth. But our rejection of humanity and descent into aspirations of unified distrust are not at all the enlightened, reasoned conclusions that we so evidently believe them to be. Getting burned is part of everyone’s maturation process. Those who continually get burned through their own failure to think critically or make decisions in their own interests are naive. Since we don’t want to be naive, the tendency is to trust no one. That way, we can avoid the self-hatred-inspired round of reprisals that are sure to come when it becomes clear that we got duped. This lone wolf mentality is especially infectious because so many people have made an effort to adopt it. Someone should call Alanis Morissette. The culture has bought into the idea that to appear smart one must layer irony and detachment, lest the illness of looking stupid, borne on colorless, unforeseeable gusts, navigate our defenses. What empowers this mentality? Other people of like mind, of course. How brave we are. How utterly unique.

I read an article on Medium about our obsession with the show Breaking Bad and what the author, Dr. Nolen Gertz, calls “nihilism porn.” As a fan of the show, I’m the last person that wants to skewer it. And I won’t – neither did Gertz. Rather, I want to point out how sick it is that we watch Walter White with awe rather than revulsion. We hail his ability to lead a double life for a while. We apologize for his murders with the line about doing it for his family. And after all, little Brock didn’t die, did he? What we want to ignore is that Walt’s life is in shambles. He put his wife through hell, got some very good men close to him killed, caused his son to hate his guts, and was at least the ultimate cause of Jesse losing the only two women he loved during the two-year setting of the show. What would Heisenberg do? Um, probably not anything you’d want to do. Sure, he earned an episode titled “Ozymandias,” but he ended up the last-resort stray dog. The actors and creator get that, as Bryan Cranston expressed in one of those Apple meet-the-people-involved stage talks: “I don’t think anybody would trade places with Walter White… This guy’s going to hell.” Sadly, what seems to be the retaliatory response is, “Yeah, well, hell isn’t real, so maybe I would trade places with him,” which misses the point and is a horrifically dangerous, adolescent way to think.

Gertz’s editorial notes that nearly all of his students claimed to be distrustful before realizing all of the familiarized acts of trust in which they had engaged just in the previous five minutes. Then, when presented with a Chomsky vs. U.S. Government hypothetical, they either sided with the last argument they heard or decided not to decide – “This was why they didn’t watch the news.” Those who didn’t jump ship to the latest and greatest argument resolved to trust no one.

Of course, this is exactly what would happen when critical thinking skills are abolished from the classroom of the world. Siding with the team to shoot last reeks of gullibility. Blowing the whole thing up so as to avoid picking incorrectly is the darkest shade of jade. But neither are right. What is “right” is up for its own debate, but I can say with confidence that none of Gertz’s students spoke up with the “right” of it. And how could they? It takes critical thinking skills to tame emotion enough to consider what is being argued, to weigh the pros and cons of each choice, and here’s the kicker, to have enough confidence in the process used to decide to choose and move on. Confidence is its own topic worthy of a long form deconstruction, as the word has been perverted to confuse people and prevent them from truly possessing it, lest the ruling class come up with a more costly way to turn a profit than pushing french fries and ending over mending.

A snarky, falsely authoritative evisceration of “confidence” aside, the inability to trust one’s own judgment enough to pick a side naturally leads to aspirations of nihilism. I say aspirations because, as Gertz pointed out, we disillusioned folks don’t actually distrust everyone, we just want to. Distrust is up, there’s no doubt about that, but claimed distrust far outscores real distrust, I think. Feeling lied to by “everyone” would naturally cause a person without years of practice to be unwilling to believe anyone. (See: “The man on my left says 2+2=4. The man on my right says 2+2=5. Who is right? We cannot know, but the answer is probably somewhere around four-and-a-half.” A.k.a. cable “news,” which has meteorically risen just as critical thinking skills have petered out.)

This worldview seems to be centered on the ideas of addition and subtraction, where the valiant goal is to end the meaningless existence as close to zero as possible. Our new nihilism is risk averse, yet unable to curb the urge to *carefully* respond to that text while driving. It is petrified of the prospect of loss, unable to see both that loss implies possession, and that very few of our fears have merit. It cites Icarus, not realizing that it is a deception. It sees debits and credits, addition and subtraction, rather than the division left by horrible acts and the multiplicative power of connection. It is truly a fear-based way to live a life. If it even allows for that.

Part of the issue may be a failure to take comedy all the way (I’m sure someone scholarly on the subject could set me straight here). Most of my favorite, and as far as I can tell most successful, comedians are those who are intellectually honest and demand the same from everyone else. They get fans because, get this, there are a lot of smart people in the world. There’s nothing quite so nourishing to the souls of folks like me as dead-on, holy-shit-drop-the-mic eviscerations of intellectual dishonesty and the fabricating dishonorables who spout it. As social media continues to sort out the morons from the rest, some talents in the world of comedy have been brave enough to take on nonsense and tell the truth. Twitter has allowed for more comedy writers and stand-ups to gain a following that they probably could not have built even ten years ago, at least not all of them, but they’ve done so in a way that mimics what the best of all-time probably would have done given the technology.

The only problem with smart comedy as a force for cultural progress is that it is built on prerequisite knowledge that is not always possessed by the audience at-large. The problem with going all the way, connecting all the dots as it were, in comedy is that what makes something funny is leaving something out. Nobody spoils a joke quite like that numb nuts who pieces it together out loud and then has to tell you why something is so funny. Because, you know, you got it the first time.

Another key as to why smart comedy requires at least some awareness of how the world works is the tactic of reversal. Acting like life is pointless and nobody is important is so funny and connective precisely because it is so opposite of our default settings. We all slip into micro-level analysis every day – probably most waking (and certainly sleeping) minutes of each day. Our lives are über-important. Our daydreams aren’t about leaving zero marks on those around us. So it feels nice to be reminded that, oh yeah, this too shall pass and we are only one of over seven billion people in the world and shit, we will eventually die too. Remember that we have to be reminded of these facts. It feels good to do so en masse.

The unfortunate next stopping point for a lot of us seems to be, “Well fuck it then, none of this matters.” Without wanting to get derailed on this ever-so-concise journey that we’ve been on so far with pontifications on the appropriate definitions of the terms “none,” “this” and especially “matters,” I just want to point out how forced this worldview is. Not only is it irreconcilable with those mantras from which it appears to have spawned (at least for some people), but it is decidedly unnatural. I don’t mean that in a judgy, “dudes shouldn’t be kissing dudes” kind of way, of course, but I mean it in a “you have to actually go against your nature to even claim to believe in nothing and nothingness and life’s total absence of meaning, purpose and intrinsic value” kind of way. Sometimes going against one’s own nature can be a good thing – it is often quite necessary to change diets for the better, to get off the couch and move five feet to do some pushups, to stop defaulting to anger, to opt for responses other than fight or flight, etc.

But when it comes to a worldview, I think the current culture of western civilization not only drives a wedge between one’s true nature and developed default settings, but logically manifests itself into aspirations of the false refuge of nihilism. Consumerism naturally tips the plane vertically, spilling an ever-increasing percentage of the population into the group of the have-nots. This leads those in the bottom 95 (or is it higher?) percent to wonder why they are where they are, never coming across those who would teach them of the ever-verticalizing plane of consumerism. In fact, most people are trained by the church of consumerism to implement alarm bells that go off any time a person even uses words like “consumerism.” If I cannot understand why I am where I am, my ignorance would logically manifest itself into anger and distrust. But even if I can understand, there is the danger that the explanation involves a macro-level understanding of economics, which does nothing so well as tossing the importance of the individual into the proverbial recycling bin. Like I said earlier, this nihilistic spell we’ve put on ourselves isn’t solely caused by or held strong by stupid people. Many of us tend toward the refuge of it. It makes sense to downgrade your own importance when you figure out how the sausage is made.

I think our move toward nihilism is a reaction to The Death of God, an outflow from the dissatisfaction of the victory of oligarchy, and for me above all, the exact response in the smarter half that the ruling class would desire. Keep those without critical thinking skills happily funneling their money where it “belongs,” and cause enough of the pestering would-be do-gooders to become disillusioned and passively accept this idea that they have no power, that nothing matters, that life sucks and then you die. It is in the plutocrats’ interest to desensitize as many people as possible to injustice, to beat back dreams of making a difference, to alter and craft meaning if it cannot be abolished, to make people tap out.

And that’s what nihilism is, really. It’s an active tapping on the mat to the idea of the threat of future pain. It’s a false opposite to theism or self-importance, both of which are to some degree to be avoided, or at least tempered. It’s fear-based and it’s not even what it claims to be. Because our new nihilistic spell isn’t the absence of a belief in anything – just ask a few questions of anyone who seems to be enchanted. “What do you mean by that?” tends to get you where you want to go. No, our own nihilistic spell is both pervasive and against-the-grain. It takes an active decision to try to believe in nothing. You knew I’d eventually get to that title that might have otherwise looked like a typo! And of course, nihilistic distrust itself is false, as evidenced by the many trusts that Gertz’s students displayed without even recognizing that they had. It’s a response to not knowing, and to the anger that there are so many illogical phalluses using logical fallacies to justify why they claim to “know.” It’s a detached fear of looking so naive as to care. It’s the Inception of irony, since the whole point is to try hard to make sure others think that you don’t trust anyone or believe in anything. You know, so some of those others will like you and you can build mutual trust. It’s bothering to craft an image of one who can’t be bothered.

The saddest part of the religion side of our nihilistic spell is that whether you believe in hanging out in a wallless room where nothing ever happens nor can ever happen because time does not exist, and that is brighter than any friend’s couch next to a window with no curtains on the morning of a hangover, or you believe in an unceasing dreamless sleep, the fact is that this is your life, and it will one day come to an end. That what you do matters ought to be self-evident.

It is time to start questioning this nihilism in ourselves and our friends. It is time to start bothering and being bothered. Don’t worry, not being able to be bothered by something so inconsequential as life can still be used as a reversal tactic. It’s still funny. But remember, it is really supposed to be satire. We can still tell the difference between satire and earnestness, can’t we?

Wallace concludes his review of Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky accurately and with a layer of suggestion:

Part of the answer to questions about our own art’s thematic poverty obviously involves our own era’s postindustrial condition and postmodern culture.  The Modernists, among other accomplishments, elevated aesthetics to the level of metaphysics, and ‘Great Novels’ since Joyce tend to be judged largely on their formal ingenuity; we presume as a matter of course that serious literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.  Add to this the requirement of textual self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism, and it’s fair to say that Dostoevsky et al. were free from certain cultural expectations that constrain our own novelists’ freedom to be ‘serious.’

But it’s just as fair to observe that Dostoevsky operated under some serious cultural constraints of his own: a repressive government, state censorship, and above all the popularity of post-Enlightenment European thought, much of which went directly against beliefs he held dear and wanted to write about.  The thing is that Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius – he was, finally, brave.  … who is to blame for the philosophical passionlessness of our own Dostoevskys? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t – could not – laugh if a piece of passionately serious ideological contemporary fiction was also ingenious and radiantly transcendent fiction.  But how to do that – how even, for a writer, even a very talented writer, to get up the guts to even try?  There are no formulae or guarantees. But there are models. Frank’s books present a hologram of one of them.”

How unfortunate it is that we’re in a period where open contemplation of unanswered questions is deemed not serious enough for public consumption. How unfortunate that to just examine the human condition is “brave.”

The Fall, Classic.

As a recovering sports zombie, I’ve often wondered if autumn’s ascension to the top of my season rankings was driven by the American football marketing machine. After three years of not watching college football and at least as many of dwindling bother for the NFL, I finally cut the cord with fantasy football at the end of this summer. No teams. No leagues. No weekly contests. No need to pay attention. It’s been great.

Autumn finally rang Cincinnati’s doorbell this week, and came with sensory gifts before hanging its coat in the closet nearest the door. Situated for a quick exit, yes, but it’s here now and let’s all enjoy the time that our favorite friend opts to give to us. Football, I am finally assured, factors not at all into the function that still yields such a positive outcome for me. I can see my breath. The air is crisper, as are the colors beneath the gray visor Earth puts on most of these days. The trees’ teachings have their leaves displaying such cordiality that one would feel comfortable slapping their backs and calling them Roy G. for reasons more closely associated with first-name familiarity than acronymic accuracy. In short, life is fucking beautiful.

Autumn is a test of mindfulness for me – an opportunity to accept home and deal with tendencies to sour over the fact that sleet and salt will batter emaciated branches before long. As I’ve gotten older, zenning has become easier. Apologies if the use of that non-word suggests a nihilistic sarcasm toward the whole subject. I assure you when I typed it I had positive thoughts regarding what it may very well mean.

In the American sporting landscape, it would probably be argued by most that baseball is the sport most closely aligned with the principles of being in the moment, forming the right physical and mental habits, the existence of randomness and interconnectedness, brushing off the past, and some element of outdoorsy nature. Sure, the more every new ballpark looks the same, the less that most latter element can thrive, but there are still some holdouts.

One such relic is Boston’s Fenway Park, home to the Red Sox. That place is so quirky that it has many of the hallmarks of what previous generations might have referred to as a place. And this weekend, it will host a game or two that I don’t even regret to say that I will care about. Don’t get me wrong – the outcome won’t matter, and I will be an adult rooting for a privately owned team that drains not only the public coffers to the point of city-wide bankruptcy, but also to the competitive detriment of another privately owned professional sports team that I care even more about, but for whatever reason, I’ve taken a litmus test, and my Detroit Tigers’ blue came up just shy of infrared. Perhaps this is evidence that I drink too much coffee and eat too few Tums, but it was metaphorical anyway so let’s move on.

Justifications for remaining a viewer of televised sport seem like good fodder for a later blog post, indeed one I’ve intended to sort through for a while now. But for now, I’m coming to accept that when the time comes for ALCS and World Series games that involve my hometown former-worst-team-of-all-time, well, I enjoy that time. Perhaps the passion is enhanced by the autumnal surroundings. I hope so. All I know is that an old pro will be providing color commentary for the last time, and without so much as a read-through for tires or soap or my aforementioned stomach relief chewables. Averages and trends will both hold up and be “disproven,” depending on which conclusion one wants to prove. Old friends and relatives may come back into contact, remembering this thing they used to have in common that seemed so central and existent and now. The unelected international consortium representing the Motor City will try to abandon their Garfield and aspire more to their inner Tiglath-Pileser, minus the literal warring and genocide. It never hurt anybody to figuratively come through and crush the building though, even if the building is one of the last vestiges of personification left in American sport. On the line will be a spot in The Fall Classic, which is a term I find to be self-evident, the opposite of an oxymoron. None of that depends on baseball, either.

Under Armour Hits Back With Their Own Self-Unaware Kids Tees

Updating a previous post, wherein I lament my findings of a couple ridiculous Nike T-shirts in the kids section at a local department store, I found another gem at the same place.

This time the shirt intended for children is made and distributed by Under Armour, and quite possibly comes with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek that I found utterly lacking in the Nike nonsense. It reads, in all caps of course, “CALL MY AGENT.”

Not nearly as eye-rolling as “Your Mom Knows” or “Play Me or Trade Me,” but still adults teaching kids to miss the point.

It’s kind of funny, sure. But douchey too. I’ll keep you posted on this whole racket, since I find it indicative of our culture. In the words of the late, great George Carlin, “You know what I say? Fuck the children!”

Divide & Monger

I’ve been caught by a thought today. It seems to me that for a lot of special interests that I consider nefarious, a key strategy is to divide people — even persons. Divide the human interest. Create a smokescreen of issues, fabricated and real, potential disasters that are dealt with by Other people on a daily basis, bullet points on what kind of people fit into what tribes and bullet points on how to hold one’s own in an unmediated mock trial against a member of a tribe that has been sold to one as “opposing.”

Then, just in case too many well-meaning sponges get swayed by the power of counterargument or disarmament, the powers that be give us Games that humans invented over a hundred years ago and hotties that always seem either muted, self-edited or too unconscious to be either, lest we impressionables get to thinkin’. The advertising culture has become so entrenched in sports that we can no longer imagine a major professional league (which includes the NCAA, as it simply redirects the “professionalism” from player to promoter) that is not wholly owned by corporate interests. Don’t get me wrong, the public is the entity funding the erection of all the new arenas and stadia, but alas, no ownership is conferred with such generous gifts.

Speaking of semi-private erections, the sex industry, and by that term I do not mean anything relating to actual sex, which continues to be assaulted by an ongoing mind-fuck intended to sell everything but human intimacy, but instead I of course refer to the virtual sex industry, is by now asymptotically ubiquitous. When you find a product being advertised to you without the overt or barely nuanced claim that this product will get you laid by either a hot chick or dude or by your begging-for-it hand as you lust for what’s beyond the mirror, you let me know. The “hot” formula has become so twisted that Maxim magazine just gave its paying subscribers and newsstand suckers a Hot 100 one-two punch to the podium of Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. Seriously. Is nothing sacred?

But getting back to that division thing, its main purpose is obvious: to divide people from their wealth. This is done pretty easily, as persons’ wealth tends to correlate with their options. The more wealth gets concentrated at the top, the fewer options the rest of the people have. People that have few options (or see themselves as having few options) see giving their labor away for pennies on the dollar as more desirable than starvation. Everyone has basic needs, but it wouldn’t do to have a massive population that only buys what it needs, so the owners have to manufacture wants in a mass of people critical enough to influence the rest of the people. You know, to divide all of the people from what could remain of their wealth.

A key tactic in the success of a divisive campaign is convincing individuals to detach from their environment. People must not see themselves in the struggles of others. They must not identify with other human beings — instead they must be shown what makes those sufferers different. The people who got mowed down in that Aurora movie theater aren’t like you, because you didn’t go see the third Batman flick the night before it opened. But if you did, don’t worry, because you don’t live in Colorado. Ok, but these people brought a baby to the showing. You wouldn’t do that, right? See! You’re not like these people, and it almost certainly couldn’t happen to you.

The same goes for all the bombings you see in other countries. I mean, that wouldn’t happen to you because you aren’t proximate to the “wars.” What’s that you say, the Boston pressure cookers on the street? Oh, well go ahead and tell me the last time you ran a marathon. See? You’re not like those people, those unfortunate ones. No, you are blessed, just so long as you don’t identify too much with the unfortunates. Detach and survive.

But, of course, it could happen to you. Every moment you exist in the world you could be the victim of random or targeted violence. So be afraid. You’ve seen what we do to protesters, right? Now see, that really could be you, if you were dumb enough and hated freedom enough to join those angry people in complaining about their lot that they’ve inherited through their own unwillingness to just work harder. But you’re not like them — those angry, lost souls who are pushing a socialist agenda, which by the way is totally what the Eastern Bloc was if you just don’t look anything up and unquestioningly take our word for it. And you will, because you don’t want to get beat down by our brute strength that you should be in lust with by now anyway, thanks to your conditioning.

See that? You’re not like them. You’re like this other group of people that should spend energy bickering with other groups within the same dwindling economic class over whatever issue we tell you is on the line and whatever rights we insist are endangered. But beyond that, eat our salty, genetically modified foods, drink our beer, go into debt to drive our cars (but don’t drive them if you’ve drank our beers, pretty please), take out loans that we service but for which we are not on the hook to go to college and beyond to get watered-down degrees that by now must have a median ROI that is in the red, which is exactly where you’ll always remain, but don’t worry about it because it’s just the way it is and you’re totally immortal but you’re gonna die someday so go big or go home while we go big and have you bail us out. Buy our flatscreen televisions and subscribe to the biggest cable package you can find, because somewhere in that fifteen-hundred channel list is a sliver of happiness that you didn’t even know you wanted, but do not consider the ever increasing bill that comes with it.

Get the highest high-speed internet because just super-fucking-fast won’t satiate you because who knows when you will want to masturbate to videos of Giada de Laurentiis swirling some gelato while you download the latest episodes of your favorite twenty-six podcasts and stream the latest Katy Perry song that we’ve pathologically Rorschached into emotions of tall, ravenous women with racks so unlikely that they happen to be multiple standard deviations from the mean of fit, dateable ladies whilst also being the actual mean of American women as a whole. Think about that. That’d be like if dudes’ members got bigger and longer as said dudes got fatter, but somehow Ryan Gosling was still hung with the average length and girth of the entire population, including those using those performance enhancers known as shitty diets and lack of exercise.

Ellen’s reaction indicates their status as “unlikely.” Katy’s dating record indicates she, and by proxy all women of comparable physical desirability, is totally into mindless consumers who categorically lack the capacity for sarcasm.

My point is that it seems a strange dichotomy that our owners are trying to plant within us. On the one hand, detach from your fellow human, it won’t happen to you, keep it moving, but on the other hand, fear everything. Remain in a constant fear of, amongst other things, the Other, so that you can not act rationally or in your best interest. But also detach, which connotes a dialing down of emotional doses. The dogma thus appears to be: “Be afraid, do not be joyous, surprised or sad, and we’ll get back to you on whether you can be angry, disgusted or contemptuous, and, if permitted, where you shall direct your anger, disgust or contempt. But whatever you do, do not care.” The whole thing feels incongruous. I guess those that are less responsive to fear are the ones targeted for detachment. The marriage of fear and detachment seems like honey wrapped in motor oil. I can’t figure out how to describe it. Just quit voting to fund arenas for billionaire owners.

Baseball: A Metaphor for Life

Baseball is famous for being a game of averages. As the number of events grows, so too does adherence to the mean. This is why Yasiel Puig’s upcoming decline can be predicted with confidence, and if it doesn’t happen in the second half of this season, it will happen next season. Or the next. Or he’s just the best hitter of all-time.

Life is a lot like baseball. Every day there’s a game, and most don’t feel all that important. Some days you obliterate your average — you may even do this for a chunk of days in a row, which in baseball would be called being hot, or in the zone, or on a streak. But then the roller coaster comes down, and you lose a friend or get fired or get wasted and make an ass out of yourself or unwittingly insult someone or sit around and stare at a television screen or don’t pursue your goals or just go 0-for-4. These days bring your batting average down, and at the end of it all, you will have batted your average. That much I promise.

Raul Ibanez – The Whiff

So then, the trick is to do the things that are necessary to improve your average. The highs can be higher, or more frequent, with a higher average than they can be with a lower average. The lows will still come, but maybe they won’t be as low. In the end, you hit .300 rather than .250.

Today, I went 0-for-4. I came home and planned to do a quick load of laundry. In the words of Walter Sobchak, “my dirty undies, dude. The whites.” As I’m putting together the load of darks that will make me feel like I’m washing clothes more efficiently in the adjacent machines in the basement, I look at the pair of shorts that I plan to wear around 2 p.m. when the whole excursion is over and done with. They’ve been worn, probably only once, and not yesterday. They are sitting on this trunk-thing that I use to store shit that I don’t need. It’s not hoarding if you can’t see it. Anyway, they are my favorite khaki shorts. I have some other shorts to go to, but these are the ones I want to wear today. I look at them and consider, for a long three seconds, putting them in the laundry basket and guaranteeing the freshest possible future me. I decide against it, because they aren’t dirty and over-washing shit just ruins it faster. I take the two loads downstairs and start the washer. I come back upstairs.

At this point, it’s high time for my second coffee of the day (and first in six hours). I rinse out the reusable foil K-cup thing because I’m a piece of shit with a Keurig machine at my house and the trash islands are my fault. So is all the flooding. Fuck me… fuckin’ asshole. But in all seriousness, I only use it as a hot water dispenser. An oversized, overpriced, underperforming hot water dispenser. And at the time French pressing just seemed like too much work, and I tend to drink All Of The Coffee.

Step 1: Fill the mug this high. Step 2: Lift mug. Step 3: Walk around and bend to pick things up next to the clothes you want to wear. Step 4: It’s okay to cry.

So, given that I want the 10-ounce size, what do I do? I act per my average, and go for the 11-ounce mug with the solid three-finger handle. Why do I do this? I don’t know, maybe it feels more efficient, again. I’ll tell you what it actually is: stupid. It’s stupid to fill any container with liquid and an open top to 91% capacity. That is not smart. Obviously, I take my coffee into the bedroom to grab my laptop that is just to the right of the shorts, on the trunk-thing that never gets opened. Leaving the room for error that I did, my error overcomes the “room,” and I end up with the only pair of shorts I wanted to wear today blotched with a splatter pattern similar to at least one I encountered when teenage me met pictures of Marisa Miller. All this while my two shittier, not special pairs of shorts are three flights below in the midst of the only wash cycle that I am willing to go through today.

Hey… are you watching that coffee mug?

The first thought was, “Fuck, are you serious?” The second was, “Of course you would do that you dumbass. Why did you grab the small mug?” The third was, “What happened here was simply below your average. The problem is not that below average performances or results will happen, because that is a guarantee for everyone anyway. The problem is that your average is not high enough. The problem is that you chose not to wash the shorts you specifically picked out to wear when the laundry was done, and also that you chose the smallest possible mug from a plethora of options that would have easily held the waving line of coffee between their rims.”

It is for reasons like these that it is imperative that we work hard, work smart, and learn from our experiences in order to raise our batting averages. An 0-for-4 is always around the corner, but they tend to be fewer and farther between for .320 hitters than for .260 hitters. Ergo, we gotta raise that average. To infrequent-ify shit like today.

Constant Conversations

I like Passion Pit.

On a related note, there’s this gem…

Insomnia Jeopardy

Brianpickings’ Curation of the Meaning of Life

I love Maria Popova. What I mean is, I love her curation of interestingness, Brainpickings.org. By extension and subject to only a few airtight assumptions, I love her as well.

Popova’s post from almost a year ago features quotes from a handful of people on their impression of the meaning of life. It’s a quick and interesting read. It also links to related articles in the introductory paragraph.

I suggest Brainpickings to anyone and everyone. If nothing else, the Sunday newsletter alone is worth the zero dollars it costs to discover the site.

Check Out My Revised Podcast Recommendations Page

Hey all, no new post this weekend, which leaves Friday’s self-indulgant, narcissistic post about not eating meat for six months and whining about my foot hurting as the last piece of actual content I’ve written for this blog. But it hasn’t been for naught: I’ve spent some hours today updating my podcast recommendations page, and it’s up for your viewing, and hopefully listening/enjoying/growing, delight. Click the link in the previous sentence to see the list.

Please feel encouraged to comment with any criticisms or suggestions.

Six Months a Veg

Today marks a few things: the summer solstice, the six month anniversary of the Mayan apocalypse, and randomly, the six month anniversary of my decision to stop eating meat.

I lived most of my life about as close to the opposite of a vegetarian as one can get, but the idea had been in my head for a while before one day all of the influences lined up and I decided to see how it would go. I didn’t have a specific duration in mind, but I knew I had to go at least two weeks just to see if I felt any differently. I’ve never been the cooking type, so I knew it was going to be difficult if for no other reason than the ratio of vegetarian easy food to all easy food. Not sure what that ratio is, but it’s low.

My cooking has increased somewhat, but more than that has been a forced consideration of what to buy at the grocery store for a person that no longer has fast food as an option. I had neglected the produce section for far too long. I still default to those packaged steamable bags of vegetables so as to assuage the effects of my laziness while still maintaining the option of being lazy, which is one of my core values.

Of note is that I remain far from a vegan, as cutting out all dairy products was more work than I was willing to do for phase one of my attempt to confront this jog toward thirty with any kind of preparedness. I’m a sucker for cheese. I mean without the option of eating cheese, how’s a person supposed to order a pizza? And remember, laziness is a core value of mine. I’ll let you know when I figure out what another one is. So yeah, pizza still happens every now and then, but I throw broccoli on that bitch, and I have to think the florets sweep all the goo away before it sinks in to my two-pack. Then there’s the whole bread thing, which manifests itself mostly in the form of these new (to me) thin pretzel crisp things that come in the shiny laminated bag. Don’t know the brand, wouldn’t promote it if I did. Oh, and I’m a cookie monster, but only when they’re available (I have the willpower and hypocrisy to avoid buying them). And ice cream… yeah I’m not ready to go vegan. More power to those that are. Seriously, respect.

So, how do I feel after six months? Better. I’ve probably only lost a few pounds, but that’s more likely due to a couple months of taking a non-workout streak one day at a time and the recurrence of this forsaken plantar fasciitis, which I’ve gone through a few years ago. It came back at some point around March, which caused me to run only inconsistently, sometimes needing six days off to let my heel get back to the point of even feeling able to run again. After a recent race, which I had to take a week off prior to for reasons of pain, and an ill-advised and impromptu 10k through three counties (sounds way more impressive than it was, but I’m kind of a douche bag like that) three days later, the foot got to the point where I had to stop everything. No running, no standing more than I already had to, no being barefoot. This lasted six weeks. I got back into it the other day, and aside from looking to the east and seeing a shadow that looked like an alcoholic smoker trying desperately to beat the closest liquor store’s closing time, it went well. I’m rambling – the point is that I think I’d have probably lost a solid 10 pounds if that’s what I was going for and my left foot hadn’t turned heel.

The best way to describe the difference I feel after six months of not eating meat is the difference between going out to a restaurant and ordering a coke and going out to a restaurant and ordering a water. Same meal, but going with water always makes you feel a little bit cleaner on the inside. Cuz I mean, you’re already at a restaurant, so odds are the food is loaded with salt and calories and the portions are double or triple what they need to be. But it’s that damn coke that always puts you in that “why did I do this” mode. Ok, it’s those damn cokes. Honesty. My second core value. See, we’re making progress.

Anyway, thanks for reading. If anyone is wondering what the tipping point was that put me in the frame of mind to stop pondering going veg and actually doing it, check out Rich Roll’s podcast (entitled The Rich Roll Podcast) episode 7 with Michael Greger, M.D. Greger is the guy who runs NutritionFacts.org, and honestly if you don’t want to listen to the podcast (although I really do like Rich Roll, just can’t go to his level of commitment) I would strongly recommend a perusal of Greger’s website. Information is king, especially as we continue to move toward another informational dark age. That’s another topic. Cheers.