Long, late night at a friend’s place. Dinner party, just 5 people, homemade Indian food. Exquisite. Highly motivated to cook more after learning so much last night. The guests left, one-by-one, until it was me, my date and the host. We kept almost leaving, but he would start another interesting thread and we’d continue. We hit religion, we hit society, we hit philosophy and history, and we drank bottle after bottle of red wine, which I don’t even like, but it was good at that time and for that purpose.
My date and I left at 2:30a and took a cab back to my place. She lives further away, so it made sense to crash at my place. I had to quickly neaten things in my room before she came in, and definitely had to make sure there weren’t obvious signs of other women having stayed there as recently as last week, which was in fact the case. No problems. Red eyes today, that’s all.
Busy day planned, all work. Tonight I have other work to do. Tomorrow I have yet more work to do. Also the weekend, and thus we remember that life is, in fact “work”, and there’s no way out of that, nor should there be, and it’s important to choose work that we actually have some kind of interest in, to experience that kind of labor of love, so we can be at our best and be fulfilled before before our time is over.
“Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.” Homer
We will never be here again.
Posted injournal|Comments Off on September 3rd, 2013
How do you decide what you’d like to become? What informs that decision and how can you know it’s the right one?
A very good friend of mine will be returning from Burning Man in a couple days. I am eagerly awaiting the report. My sources have thus far painted an overwhelmingly negative picture about what the event has become since hitting mainstream culture. This guy, though, I trust more than others. He’s been around. We’ll see what kind of experience he had.
He lived with a tribe in the Amazon for 9 months doing his dissertation, and it was a culture that used hallucinogenic plants on a weekly basis. So, in addition to having roamed the galaxy and back, he understands the human relationship to the mystical. We’ll see what Burning Man was for him. A bunch of druggie hipsters looking for the next thing to add to their tattoo collection, or actual progressive culture in which humanity can explore itself further, and in meaningful ways.
Stayed here in the office until 10:30p last night working on round-2 of moving the boxes of books out of my boss’s old office. Lots of memories still, every time I go in there.
It used to be such a pressure cooker in there. You had to be at your best when going in to chat with him because he forced you to pay attention to your words, and to say what you really mean, which means taking care with your speaking. It was great for me, because I like learning. It was terror for others.
Because I was here so late and needed special access to an underground tunnel that leads to a street exit, I got some help from a security guy. 34 years old, covered in tattoos, missing front-left incisor tooth. White, heavy Yonkers accent. We chatted a lot. He has two kids with two women, neither of which he sees much. He lives in a single room on 145th that he rents from an older Dominican woman, $150/wk, in order to make his two child support payments.
He told me stories of the secret crimes and instances that happen around my workplace that never get reported because the institution wants to protect its image and its name– robberies and suicides especially.
We commiserated about work a bit, but parts were impossible for me to connect with. He was talking about taking the next level up in security, but concerned about all the headaches he’d have to deal with, BUT “it’s a full 80 cents more, you know?” Which means an extra $0.80/hr. Imagine that. A worker who has to think carefully about an extra $0.80/hr of work.
Right down the block we had administrators who have to think carefully about an extra $50,000.00/year. Exclusionary capitalism.
Today my upper back is a bit sore from moving all the boxes, feels good. Me and the security guy are going to Dinosaur for some beers this weekend so I can thank him for his help last night. I also want to hear more stories.
West Indies parade this weekend. And I’m redesigning my living room again.
What are the things over which we have complete control? To begin with, I think we have complete control over the goals we set for ourselves. I have complete control, for example, over whether my goal is to become the next pope, a millionaire, or a monk in a Trappist monastery. Having said this, I should add that although I have complete control over which of these goals I set for myself, I obviously don’t have complete control over whether I achieve any of them; my achieving the goals I set for myself instead typically falls into the category of things over which I have some but not complete control.
I think we have complete control over our values. We have complete control, for example, over whether we value fame and fortune, pleasure, or tranquility. Whether or not we live in accordance with our values is, of course, a different question: It is something over which we have some but not complete control.
We should spend time and energy setting goals for ourselves and determining our values. Doing this will take relatively little time and energy. Furthermore, the reward for choosing our goals and values properly can be enormous. It seems that at least one key to having a good life is to value things that are genuinely valuable and be indifferent to things that lack value. We have it in our power to assign value to things, we have it in our power to live a good life. By forming opinions properly—by assigning things their correct value—we can avoid much suffering, grief, and anxiety and can thereby achieve peace within ourselves.
OK, so “correct values”. That’s where the audience comes down hard: “What is a correct value? Isn’t that tyrannical?”
The only answer to this is to ask about what criteria are being used to define “correct value” for one’s self. Perhaps those criteria are where to begin, then– what are my criteria for assigning value to things? Instant pleasure? No negative consequences to the things or people I care about? That’s a tough one.
What is your life philosophy and where do you go to get one?
Why is it important to have such a philosophy? Because without one, there is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.
So where do you go to get one? If you head to the philosophy department of any university, you’ll be out of luck. If you try the church, you might find lots of advice on how to be a good person, and very likely how to have an excellent afterlife (if you were to believe something like that), but very unlikely to be given advice or guidance on living a good life.
Our distant cousins a few millennia back took the question of “a good life” very earnestly. In fact, many of the original schools of thought– everything from the Hedonic schools, to the Stoics, the Cynics, hell even Plato’s “Academy” were all primarily concerned with this deepest of human concerns.
How do we decide what is worth valuing in our lives? What is worth pursuing with our limited time? What is our grand goal of living– and I mean grand– the goal that we should be unwilling to sacrifice to attain any other goals.
Posted injournal|Comments Off on August 26th, 2013.
Thundering morning wake-up. In my shower I thought someone might be moving in upstairs but instead it turns out the entire sky was moving in, on itself, around its own electricity, rattling my windows.
Busy morning with only one cup of coffee. Coffee works, it really does. I get amped up and type faster and think sharper. It’s a performance enhancer. Is that why people take drugs at parties? Does it enhance their “party performance”, making them more social, happier, sharper thinking, or funnier?
That’s why stand-up comics take so many drugs. Performance. The amount of cocaine deaths in the comedian’s world is pretty high. In NYC? Bankers and traders. Performance enhancers.
It’s a tricky area for humans right now. Statistics reveal that over half of all students at an Ivy League school are on prescription performance enhancers– for concentration, mood stabilization, etc. We’re all juiced up in one way or another. For me it’s coffee. But how different is that really from those other drugs.
What would I be like on extra testosterone? Or ecstasy? Or Ritalin? Would I be better than I am now, in some way? Should I experience what that is like?
I’ve had many visitors lately and that always throws me off a bit. It’s been great. Getting thrown off is what keeps us from falling into mindless routine.
My friend from LA crashed in my room with her BF and I crashed at my friend’s fancy place downtown. His shower has 8 shower heads. So, I’m pretty fuckin clean this week.
Tonight I’m off to train like a motherfucker and then I have a whole lot of writing to do.
Did I mention I signed up for the DNA home kit? Actually two of them– I did the health one, and also the National Geographic “Genographic 2.0” one. My results from both should be back in a couple weeks and I can’t wait, I’ll be able to cross analyze the ancestry component of both and test for accuracy.
For those that I haven’t mentioned it to, here’s what led to that. Pretty interesting, actually.
I started looking into the home DNA kits now that prices have come down. As I poked around and read about them, I learned that one of them is connected to a huge web database of birth, death, marriage and baptism records, all searchable through OCR plus images of the actual handwritten record. I checked it out and signed up for the 14 day trial to see what I’d be able to find.
In that trial, I added my parents and grandparents and their siblings, and the system helped me build deeper from there. The result is that my entire pedigree has been mapped back more than half a millenia, with with earliest confirmed record to be the birth of my 14th great grandfather in 1430 in a pretty interesting part of England which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
It turns out most of what I was told about my lineage–on both sides– is wrong. Hell even my first name turns out to not even be a family name, as I was told. So either my parents or their parents are full of shit. My mom is the only one still living, and she’s just pleading ignorance so far.
Firstly, I’m not nearly as German as I was told. My mother’s grandmother came from Germany, but her mother was half, the other half being English. On my dad’s side, it’s all English, but from a particular part which at the time was called “Danelaw” because it was run by Vikings. Now the really interesting part: the Vikings who settled one section of Danelaw mostly had my last name, and it means “tough” or “hard”, but more than that, it’s from a specific part of Viking Norway which still has my goddman family name in it: Hardangerfjord.
So I’m a Norwegian Viking, directly. It explains my hair, eyes, skin and general dispositions… overly physical, prone to unnecessary intensity? (Being friendly to myself here– it’s more like overly ridiculous and prone to absurdity.)
(Though Norway is the home of Black Metal…)
A web search revealed a page about my viking family name. For those who know my family name, search for it and “viking” and you’ll probably see the page there near the top. The author of the page had his address listed, so I wrote to him. Turns out he’s professor of microbiology at Nottingham University in UK, and that he studies viking culture and has my same family name. When I introduced myself and explained I’d recently found my lineage to Danelaw, he basically said me I need to go back to Hardangerfjord (and Hardanger generally– the province in which the fjord is located) to reunite with my ancient roots there.
So, fuck yes.
Back to my mom’s side for sec. So her dad was English, and using the same database I was able to easily go back through his pedigree as the English kept extremely good records, mostly because of the church.
I learned something pretty interesting: my 9th great grandfather on my mom’s side is Sir Richard Howard. He was born in Corby Castle:
Corby Castle, birthplace, home and deathplace of my 9th great grandfather
He married Lady Margret Preston there in Corby, and later died there.
It’ll be neat to go there to check it all out. I’ll bring my tree to show the occupant and maybe I can get in and check it out.
His dad was Lord Howard, my 10th great grandfather, who was was born in and lived in another castle called Naworth:
Naworth Castle, home of my 10th great grandfather
The last English connection was the daughter of Lady Margret and Sir Richard, Mary Howard, my 8th great grandmother. She was born in Arundel castle, but didn’t stick around long.
Arundel Castle, birthplace of my 8th great grandmother
Mary Howard is my last English connection on my mom’s side. When she turned 24 she
headed to the new colonies. She was married in 1639 in New Haven Connecticut, and died there in 1650, and that’s the most recent link I have to England. My dad’s side came over in 1630, about ten years after the Mayflower, though his mom’s family was here before the Mayflower, in about 1614, and has been in Vermont since the 1690s– and that family name is my middle name today. My dad’s dad’s line was also a primary settler of Vermont, with records there from 1735. So I have generation after generation in Vermont, all the way up through recent times– both my grandfather and father were born there. I lived there from age 2-4, and then across the boarder in NH for most of my childhood.
So on both sides I’m as deeply New England as a person can get. Both sides left from England, one was royalty, and the other were Vikings, coming from a Norwegian fjord with the same name as my family.
Pretty goddamn cool.
I can’t wait for my DNA tests to come back.
Out of time, catch you soon with updates.
Posted injournal|Comments Off on August 20th, 2013 ORIGINS
My friend is in town to play a couple shows at R-Bar on Bowery. We were there the night before last and it was great. The sound in that venue was surprisingly good. They have a whole backend already set so musicians really just need to bring their instruments and cables and plug right in.
Last night I was back there helping them set up again. A bunch of country boys from NH, first time playing in NYC. Quite a sight, and quite a feeling. They really executed well and people were into their sound.
The opening band was a woman, definitely a Lady Gaga wannabe-type. She got up and crooned to an electric backing track. Here’s what that was like:
After doing some wiggling and some boobing she ended up on the bar:
It was OK. I mean, she’s a very talented singer, and her sound overall was nice. People there were really into it. I just couldn’t get the image out of my head of her sitting watching Lady Gaga early videos and studying carefully, wanting to do that. Because that’s how it came across. “I’m trying to be like that thing I saw and really liked.”
Obviously all art is shared in one way or another, so it’s a weak argument that every musician needs to be completely original. In fact, it’s an impossibility. I’m just saying that for some reason, with this performance in particular, the Gaga-esqueness was very apparent.
We had a shot of Tequila before my friend’s band went on, and they did another great set. They have a nice sound and it gets very interesting at times when the guitarist starts playing with tone. That’s the kind of stuff I like and a couple of their songs do into that.
They ended around 11:30 and me, my buddy and his wife cabbed home for $30 because I have work today, which is where I am now. We did, however, drink a bit more at home.
It was great to catch up with him and it was so excellent to watch him play in NYC.
I’m two days hungover from being out drinking two nights in a row. One heavy, heavy drinking night on Weds, maybe 12 drinks total, and last night just about 5 drinks total across about 5 hours.
Tonight a friend and her boyfriend are flying in from LA for a wedding here and will crash at my place, Chez Duck. I need to clean the place up after work in preparation for that. When they get in, I’ll probably head out to my friend’s place in Chelsea. He’s out of town and I can hide out at his huge pad as long as I want to. Will be a good weekend for a staycation and to figure some stuff out, especially about the girl situation… which is now officially, definitely, hugely, a situation.
Have a great weekend monkeys, hope you’re all doing well, being healthy, and doing that thing you wanted to do but didn’t because the timing wasn’t right but now is perfect.
Last night after work I met up with my friend who’s in town to play a gig. We had some drinks and ate and then headed to the venue, down on Bowery called R-Bar. The inside was a little tacky– some kind of burlesque-themed dive-y joint with a separate music venue. There were stripper poles around and the walls were red leather. Sort of gross, but since my friend was playing there, it was immediately cool, too.
I grew up with this guy, out in the wood of New Hampshire. We met in second grade, and stayed pretty close since. Seeing him perform in NYC was a nice, special experience.
The band that went on before his was not good, and especially by contrast. His band is super tight. It’s not really my kind of music, but I enjoyed it last night. Good guitar tone, spurts of good creativity here and there. It’s a three piece band called Hug the Dog. It’s rock with some funk, all original songs. The song “Friday night” is fantastic.
If my writing is awful, it’s because I’m severely hung over. We got home at 3:30a. The girl I invited to the show came home, too. She’s in my room now, 1:30p, still sleeping. I just went to Dunkin’s for coffee. My friend is on the couch listening to a recording of the gig last night. His wife is in the kitchen making some sort of really spicy noodle dish for us. She brought her own chili peppers from NH.
His band plays there again tonight and I will go, but I will not drink much or stay out. I have to go to work tomorrow morning.
I have no idea what I’m going to do about the girl situation. No use hiding anything or pretending that what happened last night didn’t happen. I think we didn’t sleep until close to 6a. I emerged around noon. My friend and his wife had been up for hours and even went to the supermarket.
I wonder how many hundreds of dollars I spent last night on drinks for people.
I wonder what the fuck I’m doing with and to myself lately. Do I have a latent desire for trouble? Because what I let happen last night has the potential to be an absolute hornet’s nest in my life.
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.
