7:30am First snow of the year and it’s January 21st. Makes one nervous, like maybe next year we won’t get any at all. My perception of what we should get in NYC is skewed, though, because the last few winters have included major but rare snowstorms, and I’ve only been here for a few years, so my expectations are calibrated high. The rest of the state is full-on humid-continental, with big snows and long winters, but the city is different. It averages slightly above freezing during its “winter”, which lasts just a couple months usually. This is because it’s mostly surrounded by the Atlantic, and the whole metro area is shielded from the colder, northern, lake-effect climate by a few mountain ranges. If it snowed a whole lot more here, I would love it. Coffee and spicy foods come alive in real winters and I guess the last couple years I’ve been spoiled.
I just came in from shoveling the sidewalk in front of our building and putting salt down. This is my first winter doing it– our super quit last month and the rest of the board are elderly women. The building supers at the adjacent buildings were out shoveling too and we exchanged knowing looks. That’s right boys, new kid on the block.
I’m back inside now and it’s 8:00am, and as I look out the balcony window I can see my work is already mostly covered up. Forecast says 3-5 inches and I’m pretty sure I did at least 3, so the next round will be light. It’s pretty good PT for the back.
I’m resuming light training and pretty late last night I did my 10×10 pull-ups and 6×50 push-ups in a nearly empty gym. It’s nice to see my body breathing and circulating again. I still can’t (or shouldn’t) work out on the heavy bag or with sparring partners because any sort of twisting motion isn’t worth the risk yet, but I’m getting closer.
For no clear reason I enrolled in a philosophy course on Aesthetics, and that starts on Monday. So, with a big coffee in one hand, Plato on my lap, and the sound of plows every ten minutes or so, the morning is set. I’ll try to get a chapter done before going for round-2 in the snow.
My body is sore and growing again and I’m thankful.
Nope, I do give a fuck. I might reflect often, and it might cause problems, but I’d definitely rather care. Caring less would be like castration, which would be like dying.
The thing that keeps me from people is that my inner peace is discontentment. Not with them, but with every problem I see. I’m not a good ignorer. Our whole consumer culture is so fucked up it’s like, if I ignore it and fake a smile about its inherent, obvious fuckedness, I’d be the most inauthentic, lying motherfucker every waking moment. If I were just peaceful and content and not caring about the fuckedness of the way things are, where people spend 8 hours a day moving numbers from one column into another column and in that year get 10,000 times what the woman who makes incredible art on a beach in India needs for 5 years of food, if I didn’t care about that, I’d be dead.
My balanced state is intense commitment to something. I’m at my best when biting down and when chances of success are low. It makes life exhausting and difficult, and if it weren’t that way, I’d cease to exist. Every job I’ve had where I bled on a regular basis was when I was happiest.
It might be nice to just not care about anything. But for me that’s the same as non-existence. I have way too many fights to consider non-existence. My day of non-existence will come by way of explosive, purposeful rage. There are times when I can’t wait.
You can go as far as you want, but people try to slow you down, mostly. I’ve learned it pretty much everywhere. They don’t understand you. You have to pretend that they do, that they’re even really there, just to get along for a couple hours, days, sometimes months. But in the end you remember (though it always feels more like a realization) that it’s just not that way. They don’t know you. They don’t hear you, they can’t. You’re too weird.
Letting someone in is the best way of isolating yourself completely. That’s such a weird feeling, man. That is the biggest lesson of all.
Sometimes when I lie in bed sleeplessly like this I move my pillow to the side so I can put my ear on my mattress and hear my heart beat through the springs.
”Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
I feel similarly. My version goes something like this:
“Our lives don’t matter if we’re silent about the things that do, and are noisy about the things that don’t.”– OD
Full day of hyper-work, getting ready for the big stuff, the big time, the big fun. I have a big surprise coming down the pipe.
In the meantime, the regimin continues, this is eggs and garlic potato, maybe a bit of orange paint for extra flavor?
The Regimin
As I get healthier, as my back gets back to 100% and my body gets stronger, stuff in my life is starting to get back on track. Over the last couple of months some things have been under way that I wasn’t too sure about at first, but that are looking sweeter now. A number of you will be happy about The Big Thing. My mom, who I’ve already told, is very unhappy about it because I’m her child. But she’s ever respectful of what some people need to do in order to feel fulfilled, and has supported my decisions and my personality my entire life, so I knew she’d be supportive, and she was. Unhappily supportive, but it’s from the best of places for the best of reasons.
I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get into on here just yet, but it’s heavily on the mind today.
Let’s get brutal today, for the good.
Sorry for the brevity, the overbooking has persisted but all for the good, don’t worry you’ll see.
I woke up in the afternoon after catching up on sleep and recovering from a later-than-usual night. I get baguettes from my favorite supermarket some weekends, and that began after learning that if you stick them in the oven for a while they make for excellent breakfast sandwich housing. Very sorry for the shitty picture, I usually use my real camera for this but what you see here is iPhone work, indoors, on a cloudy day, letter from a friend on the left.
I haven’t been going out much lately, in fact for a couple of weeks almost not at all. It’s OK, but occasionally I do step back and am like wow, I haven’t hung out since… I can’t even remember, two weeks ago? Three weeks ago? I get into these modes where after a regular workday all I want to do is race home and resume wherever I left off on whatever I started the night before– aside from little things, there’s a dissertation underway in there somewhere.
But yesterday a friend called and asked if I wanted to try a place that just opened two weeks ago called “Jacobs Pickles” on the Upper West Side, a few stops down from me and like two blocks from where he lives.
Example Pickle Platter
The main idea is that they have tons of pickle varieties, beers, and a few main courses that are complimented by both. It’s not like I’m in love with pickles or anything, but I was definitely interested to see what they had going on there.
I arrived at around 8 and we stayed until 1:30a, which is pretty insane, but time flew. I’d never actually hung out with the guy alone before and we ended up covering many interesting things while knocking back high-powered speciality beers and weirdo pickle varieties in massive quantities. Evidence at right.
The beet pickles were the best.
The bartenders were all hot chicks and they had huge tits (sorry mom), apparently all chosen for that reason and possibly/probably told to make sure everyone was aware of it. A couple of them chatted with us the entire time, too, so it wouldn’t be accurate to say staying there until 1:30a wasn’t influenced by that. When you haven’t been out in a while, something like a pair flirty tits can seem appealing for an extra hour or two, even when you know it’s for the sake of a tip.
At least that’s what you assume… and you question for a moment…
… and then realize that it’s about tits and faces and while it’s a natural draw, life is a bit larger and there are quickly more interesting things to do with one’s time and…
… all the sudden her name is Felicity and her no. is 646 825 ****.
At that point, and only at that point do you wonder how many of the:
As if you’d ever call that number, the number of the tits.
“This next song is called The Number of the Tits! 1, 2, 3, 4!”
Anyway, wake up was very late, early afternoon in fact. I coffeed up and and helped a friend with her MBA admission essay for a while, which I was happy to do (do you use Brit spelling for an Oxford MBA essay, or do you show your American pedigree by not?), and then cranked up a new band I’m marginally connected to called Tides (demos here) and broke out the remaining Electric Orange™. Still trying to figure out how controllable the white gas combo is and worked on a few small canvasses (the last I have, of what was left here after the late unpleasantness). Here’s what came out:
painting experiments continued
I know they all suck and it’s tough going but it’s strangely cathartic to paint, I think because of things from the past year. Even though I’m just producing shit, I like doing it and it’s for myself I guess. It’s quite a thing to see what happens when you push color around for a while, almost like a form of therapy. It’s a good way to spend an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon anyway, before returning to other things that are equally underway– a grant app, a project proposal, an article…
<SOMEWHERE IN THERE A DISSERTATION>
My back is in much better shape lately and I trained again today, strong on the upper body but being careful of pressure levels and sensations. Pull-ups, my favorite exercise after the heavy bag and deadlifts, are a mainstay while my lower back gets re-strengthened. For you athletes, try 10×10 pull-ups with 30-60 seconds between sets. After the 6th or 7th set if you can still do 10 (all the way up, all the way down of course) you’re a strong motherfucker. Right now I get to about the 7th set and have to rest after 5-6 reps, essentially breaking the last 3 sets in half in order to finish. By the end, your back will be blown up like a barn door and your arms will be begging for mercy, which of course you shoudn’t ever give them. Arms can always take more and you have to train them to be able to punch completely through the bodies of your enemies, armor or not.
Why? Besides how much fun it is, the one punch knockout is the best way to go– safe, reliable, satisfying. Get your arms conditioned for it or they can break right when you need them most, like when removing douchebaggery from their conscious life, and ensuring a fast passage into their dreamworld where they’re able to be as douchey as they like, without getting in the way of people who actually matter.
Once home I did it right, sticking with The Regimin:
Boiled spinach, potatoes and then chopped garlic chicken on top. A-OK, plenty of leftovers for a late meal (which I just finished) and tomorrow. The bowl above was drawn up from a massive pot of boiled vegetables and a massive pan of cooked chicken.
Day off tomorrow for MLK day, will be going 100% on an article pretty much from wake-up, and can’t wait to dive in.
Every few minutes of idle time makes me think too much about stupid, painful things, and every sudden intense commitment to an objective keeps me moving forward.
Never, ever, ever sell out. Life it too short to be fake, or to kid yourself about your own decisions and where they come from, what the motivations are and why. Get control of that shit and you’ll be great at everything you want to do. But trying to get there through being fake, through pretending… nope. People with half a brain see through that shit in a second and write you off just as fast, and the people who don’t are probably trying to use you in one way or another because they know how insecure you are with the self that’s in there somewhere, and they’ll never want you to change or grow because then you won’t let them use you any more. In fact, their biggest fear is that you’ll catch on to what they really want, to what they really think of you– not the stuff they do or say to keep you around.
So fuck that shit, you know who you are.
Let’s bleed together so the victory is that much sweeter, as sweet as our lives are when we’re honest.
Go punch some shit for a while and I’ll catch up with you guys soon.
I spent most of the day yesterday in meetings with one of the wealthiest philanthropists in the country, essentially making a pitch for something I made for studying material objects over the web. Here’s a recording of part of the pitch and the result:
Unless you want to hear me go on and on for 7 minutes, you can just skip to 7:10 to hear the reaction. At 7:24 you can hear a secondary reaction.
I was told by his staff that this was one of the best outcomes possible from the guy, so that’s great. The secret to making a great pitch? Be honest with yourself. Do you truly believe in the thing you’re pitching? If you do, that will come through. If you don’t, then please reconsider what you’re about to do. Really. Think about what it really is, and call it by what it really is. You might then reconsider what you’re doing with your whole life. In the extreme, Bill Hicks puts this best:
To celebrate, last night I continued working on a massive canvass that was gifted to me a couple months ago. This is the first time I’ve tried painting on a big canvass. I found it pretty fun with Dragonforce playing in the background, but even then it was still very labor intensive. The paint I was using just didn’t seem to go on very smoothly.
Obviously I still had most of a can of electric orange paint around, so:
Spreading evenly on large canvass is way more effort than it looks.
Before I knew what was really happening, as celestial object was being born, front and center:
Then I brightened the center and widened the corona a bit:
To get the center so bright and spotty (like a star) I dripped some white gas on the drying paint– you know, camping cook stove fuel. It didn’t mix with the paint at all and instead caused it to form globules and then as it quickly evaporated away, it left some very bright exposed canvass in the middle.
I’ll probably paint over it depending on how it looks when I get home tonight– I fear one of those day after things where you fall asleep all proud and shit and the next day you look (or listen) to what you’ve done and can’t imagine what the hell you were thinking.
Very tight schedule today and tomorrow and there’s a larger story that’s been building over the last few days that I’ll hopefully be able to share in a day or too.
OK, out into the cold rain for another meeting downtown, catch you tomorrow.
Every 3-4 months I end up getting tossed out of old patterns and routines. Something happens and I realize I’m no longer where I was, and it creates an overwhelming urge to change my situation, surroundings, influences… everything. It usually takes some kind of event to trigger it, and I seem to never be in want of those. They can be hard on the soul, but end up bringing me to new and important places.
The injury and other things from the fall, for example, have done it– forced a positive resetting of what had become a fairly mindless routine. Besides spontaneously recreating my living environment (say yes to the orange!) and getting back on the ballwith some bigger projects, my own, my clients’, my other employers’, I’m honing in on a new standard. Thanks to the paradigm shift of the fall, right now getting regimented is easy and natural. I almost can’t help it. I’m getting up early, I’m eating good breakfasts and planning my days carefully. I’m getting more done at work than at any time in the last year, working mostly independently, starting my own things and finishing them to get on to the next. I’m planning big things outside of work for the spring and summer, side projects that could turn into more once I finish stuff up here. And to avoid thinking about some fairly traumatic things I’m still trying to fully move past, I’m regimenting the fuck out of my daily habits.
A big part of this is getting all regimented with food.
In NYC it’s easy to eat out every day, twice a day, sometimes more. Since the beginning of last summer I started doing that, sometimes four times a day, grabbing sandwiches and salads and stuff like that. Besides the thousands of dollars that have gone into overpriced and usually mediocre food, it’s also been shitty for good training. You are what you eat, literally and obviously. Nothing is truer, it’s a matter of physical law. I just sometimes so badly didn’t want salad, or even have its parts in my house. But I knew I needed less of certain foods in me, and way more of others.
So now in addition to a kickass self-PT program, I’m also preparing all my own meals. It’s been great.
Recently, I discovered boiling. I know it sounds boring, but boiling stuff is turning out to be a pretty good way of getting good-tasting nutrition. I’ve been heading to my favorite grocery store, loading up on many different greens, potatoes, carrots and other things, clean chicken breasts, tuna and other fish, and then heading home and boil it all, not necessarily together. I’m basically keeping the proteins separate.
I started with just potatoes, spinach and tunafish and it turned out surprisingly well. I had some leftover bacon from breakfast that I tossed in, not a very important ingredient.
It was actually pretty nice.
potato, spinach, tuna, bacon soup
The next day I went totally different: tuna, spinach SWEET POTATO.
spinach, tuna, sweet potato soup
This one tasted good and I was quite surprised. The broth is just water with some salt in it– something must come out of the sweet potatoes that actually turns it into a real broth, the kind you can see, and I ended up drinking down every last drop.
Tonight I went totally bananas. I boiled a week’s worth of food at once, with 4 giant, mutant chicken breasts tossed in and also three giant bunches of kale and also turnips, radishes and a whole container of fresh spinach. The pot in the picture below is huge… not sure of the exact size, maybe 4-5 big lobsters sized?
It turned out well. I mean, it tastes like actual soup and I really like it! I added salt to the broth and that’s all… it’s seriously just water, salt and tons of vegetables and a protein source all boiled together for a long time, maybe an hour or so, and it tastes great. I took some containers of it into work today and heated them up for lunch and second lunch and it remained excellent. I could hardly believe I had done it myself and I can tell this will be my thing for a while, especially as my back continues to grow healthier and I get closer to training with more intensity.
I have started doing basic, non-twisting movements in the gym and am getting on pretty well with it. I usually hit the sauna afterwards for 20-30 minutes and feel really good afterwards, enough that I’ve stopped going to PT and am just doing self-PT. It’s a nice feeling to have blood pumping through me again, feeling the muscles fill up a bit, and feeling like they’re hungry for some great, hardcore training and sparring this spring.
I’ll start posting the ingredients I’m using and general diet, and over time my training routine and weight chart in case any of you want to see the plan, or even give it a try.
Resetting a patterned life is one of the best things a person can do, and I think it’s important to do it all the time, as often as possible. Routines can make time go by fast, they stifle potential, they make you weak. A routinized person loses their ability to adapt and overcome challenges or disruptive changes. Their comfort zone shrinks as time passes, which can result in missing out on many of the best things in life– those experiences that deepen you and change you and expand you. Even while you’re stuck in a pretty lame city where “routine” is the rule of the masses– where people do the same things most nights of the week (though perhaps with different people), and do the same things on the weekends (with the same people or not)– a person who can consciously and regularly break the patterns that are so easily fallen into have the benefit of constantly getting fresh perspective on everything about themselves, where they’re headed, how they’re spending time and for what. Life is a little larger than the lame routines we find ourselves in, usually by accident or when someone who cares about is points them out to us, but to fully realize when a routine has become us, we really have to clear everything out, push the fucking addictive trash away, especially the stuff that wastes our time and distracts us and brings us down to the lowest, most superficial levels of experience possible, and the brainless, meaningless states that always follow those things.
Bite down and excel. Clear out the garbage and find some fucking wisdom. Look around you and realize what’s real and what isn’t, what’s true and what is false. Grab onto the true things, the good things, and run forward with your sword drawn and thirsty for the blood of the cowards and the fuckfaces who so often seem like so many zombies all around you.
Enjoy Wednesday– I have some interesting things that I’ll try to capture and share from today, so see you tomorrow.
Q: I’m glad you’re updating since you don’t use Facebook at all. What made you suddenly start?
A: Well, a couple of things sort of came together at once. The first thing that happened was my broken back disc. That really threw me for a loop because it was so disruptive. It really caused me to put many things on hold and it was a major new presence in my life and I wanted to describe the recovery process somehow. I wanted to create a log of it and maybe give it to my PT. I thought about blogging it for other broken back people, too. I definitely couldn’t find much from the victim’s perspective when I was searching for information.
The other thing is that, as quite a few of you know, during my China years I had a blog, “Bleeding Sore”, about the training life there and happenings. I knew a few people really appreciated it for curiosity reasons, and then family and close friends found it a pretty good way to stay somewhat connected despite my distance. When I moved back to the States I figured I’d be in pretty regular contact with people here, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case. I have some good new friends in the city, but I’m somewhat isolated from other friends in different parts of the country and the world, so it makes just as much sense for me to keep updates here as it did when I was overseas.
Also, I basically hate Facebook. I think it’s a great way to find people, but a dumb way to stay in contact with people. It’s like reading an alumni newsletter, sort of, but tilled with way less interesting stuff. I’m also convinced that many people, especially the psychos, feel obligated to post pictures of their outings to make sure that everyone knows they seem to be having plenty of “fun times!”
Q: Where did the name Obsidian Noise come from?
A: I was drunk one night and came up with “Obsidian Noise” as a name for something– a song, a band, a book, I knew it’d be good for something. So I ended up buying the domain. I had to check the next morning to see if I had actually done it, and there it was.
Q: Why do you call yourself Obsidian Duck? Also, why are you keeping it anonymous?
A: Obsidian Duck came after the domain name. I was looking around for something to inspire a new handle and saw a little rubber ducky that I had painted jet black a few months before. So, it was obsidian, sort of, and a duck. It’s anonymous so I can say motherfucker and cuntpunch without wincing.
Q: What is up with the rants? I’m curious how you’re doing, but the rants are so negative!
A: Yeah, those have been a bit negative, agreed. After a while you just get fed up with trying to convince yourself that everything is just middle-path, neither too good nor too bad, always context specific, etc. etc. But sometimes you realize that some things are just totally fucking stupid and it’s important to be honest about it.
So why write about it? Some personal experiences over the last year definitely influences the prominence of certain subjects these days, so yeah, they’ve stayed in my mind a bit. It’s not something I think about much at all and I’m completely disconnected from a couple of things I wrote about, but I have pretty firm views about a couple things, that’s all. But yeah, will try to mellow out on the broadcasting.
Q: Are you a musician?
A: Not really, I play guitar for relaxation and fun and record things every once in a while. I deeply love the sound of overdriven, distorted guitar, especially rhythm guitar that sounds percussive, so I play around with that sound when I have time. I think that kind of music is really expressive and has a real voice to it, and I feel like it describes me pretty well, so I like to play it. I have a jam band that comes to play together every week, just for fun. Sometimes we suck, sometimes we’re totally on.
Q: Are you a writer?
A: Not at all, I hate writing and I hate words. But I like creating things, little tools, that help me add perspective to my own thoughts. Sometimes it’s writing a little thing, sometimes it’s a photo I might take by accident, or something I might draw or build. So I like creating things to keep me thinking widely, and writing is one of those things sometimes.
Q: What are the plans for Obsidian Noise in the coming year?
A: I’ll keep the journaling up, the primary purpose. I’ll also be doing a Noise piece just about every week, I hope. That’s authentic, self-produced and recorded conversations and instrumentation blended together. No idea where it will go but for some reason I really like doing it, I find it enjoyable to work on. I think the first piece on there with the old woman who was stalking me was pretty killer stuff, if you ask me.
Q: Why don’t you have comments turned on?
A: It’s just that this was intended to be more or less one-way, not a place for conversations to happen, though I’m happy to take your mails. Not everything has to be part of the 2.0/3.0 social media movement. Also, the comment widget is not something I have to turn off for every post or something like that, it’s off by default in the entire theme. I guess if I had an open question or something I could turn it on, maybe I’ll do that soon.
Q: Do you know how many people check out ON?
A: Not specifically, no. I have a little hit counter in the admin view and I see it gets about 40-50 hits a day and about 20 of those are repeat readers, but I have no way of knowing who’s who. I haven’t listed it anywhere and don’t plan on it… this is really just for you guys who are already reading it when you have time or feel like checking in, family and friends, etc.
Think about experience; how we understand the acting self; how we represent life in time and space; how we judge value in material, political, and cultural life; what we choose as our controlling purposes; and how we shape and situate our efforts in life and for what aim.
