Cobb

Black Film: A Thumbnail Review

So a week ago, Amazon Prime started their "Black Lives Matter" advertising and put up a couple dozen black oriented films, offering a title called "Just Mercy" for free. (Discounted from 2.99). I cast it as a simple-minded commercial ploy but also defended it to a knucklehead who said that anyone or any institution that says "Black Lives Matter" is racist.

Last night we finally got around to watching Harriet, with my favorite young black pop star Janelle Monae, but not after running through the offerings of Prime, Netflix and Apple TV. Prior to going to Apple TV, the only standout films I noticed were Glory and A Soldier's Story.

During this time, my eldest daughter the most conservative and blackified of us, raised up something of a continuing issue for her as not having been raised in the same cultural milieu as some her other black friends. So she began checking off a list of films one of these friends explicitly gave her as representative. The included:

• The Wood
• Higher Learning
• Boyz n the Hood
• Set It Off
• Waiting to Exhale
• Rosewood
• Love & Basketball
• Juice
• Poetic Justice
• Friday
• New Jack City

With the exception of New Jack, I didn't see any of these films as worth the time and started to grumble about her friend's taste in film. But I didn't say anything. You see, the second context of this reading off of film titles was that I was trying to explain to them what a big deal Tyrese Gibson (who? they said) had been back in his day. He recently squared off against Jamie Foxx in some controversy or other on Instagram. I remember taking Gibson's side. But I was trying to explain that he was all the hotness back in the day along with Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs and the older Denzel Washington. But I couldn't remember what the popular movie was with Chestnut. (It was The Best Man)

With that concession, I recalled a few more that I started to see on a YouTube search. That was a short list of films which is something of a unique category of black film: rom-dram. Romantic Drama, which is what I think best describes Jason's Lyric and Eve's Bayou which were two smoking hot romances I recall.

Finally we got around to checking out the collection on Apple TV. Damn, it was impressive. They had about 10 different categories of black film and there had to be at least a dozen in each category. So now just this moment I'm going to give 50, 4 and 5 star films that I think are worth anybody's time and a couple others worth seeing as canonical pop, like Coming to America and Sprung.

Fine	Black	Films
Glory	Daughters of the Dust	To Sleep With Anger
She's Gotta Have It	Malcolm X	A Soldier's Story
Killer of Sheep	Carmen Jones	Bird
Training Day	Man on Fire	Cry Freedom
Sankofa	Hustle & Flow	Akeelah & the Bee
Hoop Dreams	The Color Purple	Paris is Burning
Do The Right Thing	The Green Book	Amistad
Us	Get Out	Thelonius Monk

 

---

Fun	Black	Films
Friday	Strictly Business	Drumline
Boomerang	Coming to America	A Rage in Harlem
Django Unchained	Purple Rain	Stand By Me
School Daze	Set It Off	Tales from the Hood
New Jack City	Sorry to Bother You	Crooklyn
Just Another Girl on the IRT	The Defiant Ones	Jackie Brown

While I'm at it, here are some ripe old stinkers.

• Three Brothers
• Dead Presidents
• Rosewood

I have no opinion on the following, either because I haven't seen them or I basically have no judgment

• Love & Basketball
• Love Jones
• Precious
• 12 Years a Slave
• Claudine
• Hidden Figures
• The Best Man
• The Wood
• 1 Angry Black Man
• Moonlight
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Mahogany

It also goes without saying that there are a lot of standout films starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson and Sidney Poitier that ought to be considered, but you already know that. Also I would also say that my favorite younger contemporary black film dudes are Harold Perrineau & Jeffrey Wright. Either of them could do my biopic. 

On The Edge of the 60s

Today is my birthday. I was born in 1961, on the edge of the 60s that dramatic moment in American history. They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Can you hear it? 

When I remember being a kid and my father told me that they shot black people I told him that we should go to the white people and show them who we are and then they wouldn't have to be afraid. "Speeches, Poetry" was my collection of child talk recorded on my dad's old Webcor in 1965. I've been doing a bit of recording myself. The other day I decided to write about the riots but I went back to restating what to me is obvious, that people want not to transcend but to transform, not themselves but others. This morning one of the heads I follow said that although some people want to end oppression, others seek to reverse oppression. He said in the Middle East it is well understood that in order to make peace you have to have blood on your hands. I believe that the Culture Wars are not over and they underly what goes on. So there will be blood. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but underneath all of this tumult is a high degree of conviction that will not relent until it has blood on its hands. Or as the little hoodrat in my head says, 'some motherfuckers need to be pacified'. Right now most Americans have a very good idea who those motherfuckers are. As for me, I can't remember ever using the word on this blog. I think most people are lazy and foolish. They're much more likely to shoot themselves in the foot. That, my friend, is a religious profundity. 

Yesterday, after the third declaration of curfew, I decided to dust off my pistols. My shooting buddies and I used to joke that Barbara Boxer, our wealthy California Senator was behind the purchase of our favorite shooting range at which our club sublet. The lessee could no longer afford the hiked rent and so the club closed forcing us into more ghetto accommodations, or the waitlist for more ritzy accommodations. Our reasonable gun club became the excluded middle the result being I'm pretty rusty from two years of not shooting twice a month. It took me 20 minutes to recall my muscle memory, but not before having loaded a magazine with the rounds in backwards to my horror and dismay. Mario Puzo laughs in his grave. Everything is unevenly distributed. Everything is unevenly distributed.

So my health is better than it has been in probably 17 years. I can still put my socks on standing up. I saw a set of stunning before and after pictures of Mike Tyson last week. He coming back. The before was from 2009. In 2009 I looked pretty good, so I couldn't make a similar comparison. I only know that in 2003 when I was so broke I literally couldn't afford a Big Mac, that I did some cardio-kickboxing and got down to 185. This past Christmas I was at 217 and now I'm at a very stable 195 or thereabouts. My driver's license from '08 says 210. I never consistently weighed myself so I was really just guessing back then. I always assumed that I could get my breath back, but it has proven fairly difficult. My VO2 max is pegged at 29.6, down from 34 a year ago February. On the other hand, my bloodwork is improving steadily. Specifically, my blood pressure is good, my cholesterol is better but still not good. My A1C is down 2 points so I am almost not diabetic something I had no clue about before January of this year. Once again, I had not been measuring. All of us are pretty sure we're OK, but OK is not a number. When it comes down to it, if you like your face in the mirror, that's quite enough. That has got to be the easiest 'like' given on the planet. I think most people are lazy and foolish. I'm working against that in myself.  

In my company, the oldest startup in the world, we remain something of a Porsche garage. We are full of very smart people trying very advanced competence on very expensive hardware. Trying to be known for service by word of mouth is a marketing nightmare. So we have finally built a product we will be branding and shouting about. Other than that, we are limping and stumbling forward, massively crippled by the destruction of the airline business and trying to pivot over to healthcare data integration. The family and the extended family is all squared and sorted. I could use a few more cans of soup in the larder, but we're all surviving these various apocalypses on a better than average basis. We are in constant pain, but not suffering. It's a tough workout. 

I have been thinking in a way I haven't for quite some time what it is like to look like I do. When I don't bother to affect any persona, more and more on these inside-only days, I look like an old black man. I'm stepping into a few paradigms that are different. While I'm comfortable on the inside, part of me is a bit conflicted, during this crisis of rationality, on 'the optics'. I am not Morgan Freeman and I'm worried about the reason that Denzel Washington hasn't stopped making action films. Nobody in America has a good idea what an old black man is supposed to be other than a 'respected civil rights leader'. I'm the same age as Obama and he remains his own unicorn, all the rest have big fat round pumpkin heads like Colin Powell, John Lewis and James Earl Jones. I'm definitely getting rid of my t-shirt collection I have acquired over these 10 years of working the home office, and I'm finally comfortable with Orvis. But on any weekday afternoon run to Home Depot, I look like just another gardener - so long as you don't look at my hands. Oh well, this could have its advantages. Esse quam videri. 

I always used to wonder, since I've always expected to live quite some time, what the hell to do for 20 years after you are 60. My parents remain stubbornly clear and present and sometimes dangerous halfway through their 80s. My grandparents, except for the polio survivor with the 2 pack a day smoking habit, all outdid the statistics. Outside of the optics, I'm very confident about what I expect to be doing. There will be plenty to keep me busy. Two of my greatest time sucks have been gaming and reading. A good 1100 books and probably ten times that many hours in virtual worlds. I'm giving all that a sharp haircut and am going back to school in software engineering. I will be taking all of my accumulated skill and wisdom in the digital arts, for what that is worth, and reinventing it from top to bottom in the language of Go. Having written thousands of essays here over the past 17 years, I will do the same in code over the next 17. I expect it all to hold together. Outside of that, I'll probably get my knee fixed and do a half marathon, get some sort of Porsche or another, preferably the kind I can beat on, and do some interesting driving, and if retirement is in the cards, I think I'll be pretty good at studio mechanics if not some more advanced bass guitar and keyboard proficiency. I have already cut 5 albums of my own material. I can easily see getting back into mixing tracks again. If I ever decide to go for it, I'll also purchase a serious 750 mm telephoto lens for my Nikon and get cranking out more digital photography. 

As you can see by my t-shirt in the photo above, I retain my humblest admiration for both religion and science, the two greatest open source inventions of mankind. While both have failed spectacularly in their organizational hierarchies and relationship to power, they are the primary avenues of disciplined discovery of the self and of the universe. They form the perfect circle of human endeavor whose programming language is philosophy but whose operating system remains mysterious. I am happiest when exploring their realms and their history. Well, that and enjoying my wife's cooking. That woman is a treasure. Oh yeah I have kids too. Well, at least I'm not paying for them any longer. Speaking briefly of money, I am also rekindling my interest in cryptocurrency and all distributed, secured methodologies that will survive the current world destruction. So much to do, so much to do. 

Anyway, I've got to go get in some steps this morning. I expect to be eating a bunch of cake and excellent home cooking today. Cheers. 

The Books That Made Me

What I discovered as soon as I thought about this subject was that these are not the best books I've ever read. They are also not the most enjoyable books. They are simply the books that changed the way I look at myself and the way I look at books. They changed me in ways that last to this day. So let us begin.

The Juvenile Years

The first important book that I read, like many on this list, was something I didn't want to read at all but ended up very glad that I did. And I specifically remember that to be true of Tom Sawyer because, not only had I not heard of it before, I read the first page several times and was bored by it. As a youngster, I was very wary of books that involved outcasts, the impoverished, or broken people. I had no room in my head for tales of woe and I refused to listen to them or read about them. That Tom Sawyer didn't live with his parents was my first clue that I wouldn't like it. I pressed on beside myself and came to very much enjoy the first book I realized could not be judged by its first pages. As I recall the book, images of Injun Joe and Becky Thatcher are fresh, though I get mixup all of my graveyard memories with those of Frankenstein. What was and what wasn't in Huckleberry Finn also is dim in my memory, but I certainly felt more ambivalence over reading White Fang than I did about Nigger Jim. Though it did come back as I learned to speak Progressive. I made something of a squawk about it in the abstract during my 1990s Boohabian Period. As a kid, I loved the book because it was such a big surprise.

I cannot remember which was the first book of Mssrs Williams and Abrashkin I read, but my favorites were Danny Dunn on the Ocean Floor and Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. Into this series of books I have to throw in a couple more. That would be The Secret Language by Usrsula Nordstrom and Call It Courage by Armstrong Sperry. The last in that category of kids books before middle school would be The Lemonade Trick by Scott Corbett. These rounded out my juvenile period.

 

First Sci-Fi
After those, and especially after reading practically all of the Danny Dunn, I read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke and The Martian Chronicles. And while my brother and I digested every one of the Hardy Boys mysteries, I went on to read as much science-fiction as I could get my grubbies on, specifically that of Heinlein. Of all of his, the one that convinced me that I was destined for space was Starman Jones. Although I and other people made a bigger deal out of the fact that I read Clarke when I was 10 years old, it was Heinlein that got to me. The Martian Chronicles were depressing and if I had known that it was permissible not to finish a book, I would have left it alone. But it was a big book, and I was proving that I was a big boy. Before I was a teen, there was nothing that got so deeply under my skin as the pathos and drive of Max Jones. He was me. My imagination was captured the moment I began reading and I saw the crashing train missing the loop in the early part of the book. The wistfulness of wanting to be elsewhere is what I recalled. It defined my youth. I understood the inevitable fact that my mind and my courage would take me far from home and the homeboys of my pre-teen neighborhood. I strove to understand nuclear energy. And suddenly, I did.

Growing Up Fast
In middle school, there were eight or so books that stuck fast in my head. Four because I read them and four because I refused to. The first I refused but read anyway was The Contender by Robert Lipsyte. Anybody who wants to know my biography and state of mind as an adolescent living in Crenshaw ought to read Stop Time by Frank Conroy. As I think about it and my desire to grow up and out, it probably ought to be paired with the song Zoom by The Commodores. So there was never any part of me that felt trapped by circumstances and place, and any suggestion that I had to adjust my way out of that with the kind of YA fiction that existed then, notably The Cross and the Switchblade was simply anathema to me. So while the Contender was good enough on its own, the other titles by Lipsyte left me cold. So too were fantastic and escapist stories, which I took to be the likes of A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, and Two Years Before the Mast. Finally they pointed me to Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. I was sick of all that depressing shit. I must have been something of a piece of work to deal with. Fortunately for all concerned, I read Jaws by Peter Benchley. Suddenly all was right with the world. Here was an excellent, real life portrayal of life in America. Ahh but that was just the beginning. For there was Fail Safe, the book that made me. As I ponder this moment, science and courage were the two signal themes in my life at this point. I might have read Silent Spring, but I was set. I read Red Alert instead. Nuclear was everything. The Cold War was everything. I was in it. And so I read the classic Hiroshima by John Hersey.

 

High School
My English classes put me in touch with some rather standard fare. Billy Budd. Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Red Badge of Courage. The Man Who Lived Underground. Taming of the Shrew. But the entire period seemed devoid with the exception of one monumental book, again something bigger than I was expected to read: Roots by Alex Haley. And while I found that I favored the work of Flannery O'Conner (not Harper Lee) and was stunned by Kate Chopin's The Storm, Ellison's Battle Royale and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, in the end it was Roots that absorbed me completely. I must have also gone through my father's substantial library but found nothing more interesting than M and J's Sensuous Man and Sensuous Woman, both quite practical in theory if not practice. In the end, there was no place in books worthy of disappearing into as with my prior younger life. Filling this period during my lonely moments were music, pinball, Star Wars and chess openings.

A Marginal Need
I had worked and earned money, got girlfriends and vehicles. It wasn't until my new job at a bank and the attempted assassination of President Reagan that I thought that perhaps I wasn't as intelligent as I should be. So with only that slim motivation I started reading. I picked three authors who seemed appropriate to the time. When I think about it, I reflected then as I often have since about the lesson I was taught in my private prep school that literature was spoken in the important world. This was the answer to the inevitable question, why Shakespeare? The answer was that someday in a job interview the boss might begin "There is a tide in the affairs of men.." to which we are obliged to reply "Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." and thereby demonstrate our worthiness. Now 40 years later I have yet to hear it, but the bell hath tolled for me. But at the beginning of the 80s it had to be about Woody Allen, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum. I also read the plays of Neil Simon and began some fantastic daydreams about New York City. But Los Angeles nourished no greater literary desires beyond the banter of Regis Philbin and Kathy Lee Gifford. So I figured I was up to speed, so long as I watched art films.

Science!
After 4 gap years, I returned to collegiate life. As an old frosh I jumped in with both feet. Metamagical Themas, Goedel Escher Bach, and The Soul of a New Machine were stuffed into my brain like buns in a hotdog eating contest. They were poorly digested, especially the second one, of which I only recall the Incompleteness Theorem. Maybe I should read it again one day. But the most significant books I read and appreciated were The Mind's I and Turing's Man. These were my blueprint. I also later read the biography of Mishima and long considered his phrase 'the unity of pen and sword'. By my fourth year, I was disenchanted with the dearth of higher though in my environment. So I struggled for a clue among my contemporaries and professors I didn't respect, especially my drama teacher who idolized Terri Garr. I found a toehold of solace in music, and the bold strokes of Ayn Rand, Henry Miller and Malcolm X. That was pretty much it. On the whole it left me nothing but the desire to remake the world digitally. Of course I still have some of my textbooks, still remember the boredom of Abcarian & Klotz. still repsect Springer-Verlag and still look wistfully at the old volume of Salas & Hille on my shelf. But outside of academics I learned a great deal by reading Thomas Sowell. While his bigger books were very informative, it was Ethnic America that I took as my personal blueprint.

Shock and Awe
So there is no black unity, the world needs to be taken over digitally and The Rise of Managerial Computing is inevitable. Shoshanna Zuboff kicked off my career with here informative book which reminded me of the terrors of Taylorism. My bets were that machines like the Xerox Workstation, distributed, graphic, object-oriented would change the world and I could ride that wave. By the time I got my American Express card and people from Dean Witter and Amnesty International were calling me at work asking for money, I guessed that I had the whole thing figured out. But something in me was disturbed. So I felt that I could take a ride on the wild side. So I started listening to Pacifica Radio and reading Ishmael Reed. As I got deeper into jazz and reggae and soca and finally dub, I recognized that I was not as cookie cutter buppie as I might have been. There was yet that conversation I could never find. But I tried seriously to see what the deal was in black literature. I kept swinging and missing. Gloria Naylor didn't nail it for me. I was highly disappointed. Terry McMillan was operatic, but soap operatic. I was highly insulted. Ah but then I found Jean Toomer's Cane and Kabnis became my alter ego. But it wasn't until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved was I swept away. During the time that I entered my professional career and began reading not to learn so much as to not insult my intelligence with the blather of conventional wisdom, I discovered many interesting books to read. Along with Beloved were the roots of the Afrocentric and multicultural era. You see, given my education, I was prone to believing that there weren't so many civilized Americans as I once believed. So my shock and discovery of a certain amount of critical work was in order. One of the first was Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by Cornel West and bell hooks. West's The American Evasion of Philosophy was a great milestone. For while I took a shine to H.L. Menken in his Fifty Years of the New Republic, and was somewhat radicalized by Theodore Cross' Black Power Immerative, it was West's description of Ralph Waldo Emerson, C. Wright Mills and Reinhold Neibhur, that convinced me once and for all that everything I ever wanted in life was philosophically consistent with American thought. No need to go to Europe or Asia or Africa or South America for that.

The Mythopoetic.
But I did go. First stop Jose Luis Borges. I can't remember how it was that I got caught up in Borges, but I'd have to guess that it came from the direction of reading Ishmael Reed. There has been a streak of attraction in me for the cryptic and complex meaning that I believe cannot be expressed through pedestrian language, at least not efficiently. The first time I saw rambling classified ads in the back pages of the LA Reader. There was a bizarre set of conversations going on that were deliciously weird, rambling and sometimes poetic. It was like nothing I'd seen before. So I might have been thinking about that when somebody suggested Mumbo Jumbo.  I blazed through a half dozen of Reed's books, but all of that changed when I finally read Japanese By Spring, as far as I'm concerned, his best work. Yet of course I'm hanging out with nobody particularly interested in such literature. It's a wonder I found Borges at all. I did. And so Dreamtigers. Somewhere deep in my psyche are the echoes and implications of the Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

During this time I was floating and flying through different worlds of mind. The sense of play was elaborate. I read Moliere, and especially loved Tartuffe. I listened to Thelonius Monk. I finally read Candide by Voltaire. This thread of reading foreign authors took me to Carlos Fuentes, to Paolo Friere's seminal work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then around to Sun Tzu. But also I found myself deeply attracted to the work of  T. Coraghessan Boyle. Little did I know that I was heading towards an interesting sort of intellectual dead-end. But in the moment, I declared myself a champion of reason and of logic, abandoning faith and filling myself with the kind of eclecticism that is at once edifying, exotic and self-congratulatory. Like everyone my age, I knew exactly what was wrong with America, and I was finding all of the proper expressions of my own humanity in the retinue of art films and the like. So I found my way to Tarkovsky's austere visions. I dug the quirky sensibilities of Eating Raoul and Repo Man. I was drawn to the films of Henry Jaglom (and Woody Allen) and the wordy narratives of Joe Frank and especially Spaulding Gray's' Swimming to Cambodia. I was digging the discovery of Kurasawa in his latest works. 

At some point I've got to stop this post. I suppose this point is just about right. I'm almost up to my late twenties when I started really taking my journaling seriously, and evolving myself to stand up and speak in public from my own poetry and thoughts. Here I was in the depths of trying to get international in my head. Sun Tsu's Art of War and the Otomo's Akira were two of the gateways. 

Stand and Deliver

When I was a skinny kid, I learned one day at Susan Miller Dorsey Pool, how to do a 1 and a half. As soon as I write this, I am brought to mind of a girl who came there one day and did a 'half gainer'. I had never seen anything like that in my life. A bunch of us kids would do a couple bounces on the board (which was pretty high quality) and manage our 1 and a halfs, but she did what I later learned was called a hurdle, which is the standard way a springboard diver gets the board to flex in a continuous motion to the edge with one final bounce. And she got height, which in our own way of judgment was as important as it is in the real world of competitive springboard diving.

Like most kids my age, I hated being shown up, but I also didn't hesitate with my props. After all, it's about being the best, and she kicked all of our asses that day as well as showing us something new. One of my friends said it was a gainer, but she told me there are five categories of dives. Forward, reverse, inward, back and twist. I knew about inwards, but was never really impressed with them. We did 'backs' off the board lots of times. I couldn't get my head around the physics of a twisting dive, although I could do a back 1 and a half with a half twist. That was my best dive. In the flip-flop world of street tumbling we called that an 'arabian' which started backward and ended with a full front. I did it often enough when I wasn't confident about the doing backs, or I was just lazy. The idea of doing a reverse dive was just frightening beyond belief. How does someone move forwards and rotate backwards at the same time?

For me, the value of diving was adjunct to tumbling. While a few of us had a number of dives, the number of tricks we could do on the grass was much bigger and so were our audiences. I was one of the best divers I knew, but to climb the hierarchy of tumbling at the local parks delivered a great deal more glory. As I went around various area parks, it was good to be king or close to king. My brother Bryan and I were constantly on the lookout for good 'FFG', flip flop grass. I still have vivid memories of impromptu pickup battles at Sportsman's Park, at Centinela Park, at Dorsey and in front of the Olympic Swim Stadium at Exposition Park. Speaking of which, I did dive off the 5 meter platform back in the days when the City of Los Angeles was not so pussified to have them around. I never bothered with the 7.5 and 10 meter platforms. I did wear glasses after all.

I never became the great tumbler I dreamed of becoming. There were a couple of insurmountable barriers. The first came in the form of money and the second in terms of opportunity. The City of Inglewood had a summer program for tumbling over at Rogers Park just around the corner from their City Hall. And like their pool at Centinela, there was one fee for Inglewood residents and another for outsiders. Dorsey pool cost a quarter no matter where you were from. Centinela charged a whole dollar, and you couldn't leave the pool and come back. Similarly, Rogers Park charged an unthinkable $100 for their summer gymnastics program. It boggled my mind. Later, when I attended high school, they simply had no gymnastics team. Also, no wrestling team. Also, no band. All of the things I was decently competitive in, were not an option. My first semester, I hated the place. But there was a diving team.

I joined the AAU diving club in Santa Monica. I can't even remember if I paid much for it. But I finally picked up on all of the techniques I vaguely recalled from the good old days at Dorsey Pool. One or two nights a week, my brother and I would take the bus from Crenshaw to Pico, take the Pico bus to Sears, and then take the Big Blue Santa Monica Bus all the way to Santa Monica High School to practice under the watchful eye of Jim Wood. Jim was probably one of the best influences I had as a teen. He demanded as close to perfection as you were capable of. He always threatened to put my toes in a pencil sharpener. Sometimes it's hard to focus on pointing your toes when you're half scared to death of the stuff you're doing in midair. Carl was our best diver. Chris Horne and Chris Monaghan were my friends. Coleen McNamee was the belle of the ball. Her blonde hair would turn the brightest shade of green of anyone. I, like a flying Q-Tip left my afro at full length. I first borrowed a pair of diving shorts from Chris Monaghan and finally got a pair of my own. Most people don't know, but when you do dives to your feet, like a double front, it is not kosher to hold your balls. But if you are ballsy enough to dive in Speedos, you won't be for long. It stings like the balls of your feet when you land from jumping off a roof. These things I knew at the age of 14.

I lettered varsity in my freshman year according to the points I earned that first season. I peaked in my junior year, making the quals to go to State which was held at Beverly Hills High School. I was good enough for highschool and AAU. I won gold once or twice and I had a decent 11 dive list by that time. My best AAU meet was the Chula Vista Invitational. My first, and worst was at the Jack Kramer Club in fancy Palos Verdes. It was at that meet where I made my first fail dive. I can't even remember what went wrong. There are three horrible things you can do as a springboard diver. The worst is just what you think. You can slam some part of your body on the diving board. That never happened to me at practice or in competition, but some time after highschool I did so doing an inward dive at the pool at Val Verde Park north of Magic Mountain. It wasn't so bad that it drew blood, if I remember correctly and it got me a good dressing down from the lifeguard. I'm sure if I impressed any girls with that stunt, they were the wrong ones. The second horror is called a balk. Just like with a baseball pitcher if you start your hurdle and then stop in the middle and then start over, it will cost you half the points on your dive. I also never balked in competition. I did land a ridiculously laughable and grotesquely embarrassing fail dive at this, my very first meet. Of all things, it was a 1 and a half. This wasn't a serious meet and unlike in more serious competitions you only needed a five dive list. But to get a zero on any dive.. well that sucked.

Somewhere else on this blog, I've thought back about my diving career. The fear of diving with a boner. The days the team called my Kunta Kinte. The win at Leuzinger that made me a role model. My mentoring of Adrian Hernandez and Tremelle Jenkins as captain of the team. My first merciless sunburn at Madera. My win at the Mexico USA dual meet at SMCC. The first year banquet at the Hennebery's in Toluca Lake. The medals and trophies. My rival who smoked me at East LA College. The non-kosher slide at Camp Stevens. The day Chris Horne hit the wooden lane lines at Northridge Aquatics. The black dude with the burn on his left ankle who was an incredibly fast spinner, and of course the mutual contempt held between every diver in California and Greg Louganis. Chris Horne healed up and made the team at USC, but didn't make varsity. California has produced the world's finest divers- the competition is fierce. But I did once get a 7, at Chula Vista.

This past weekend I got up on a diving board for the first time in at least three decades. It was a crappy little joke of a board, typical of the sort you find at home pools, not the glorious and expensive Duraflex sort you find at a high quality pool or at Colleen McNamee's house in West LA. I wouldn't be surprised if more people hurt themselves on these stiff little boards than on public high dives. My inward dive suffered horribly. But I did manage a decent forward half twist and forward pike. My daughter's Instagram of my crumpled back layout got the most likes. Fortunately, or not as the case may be, she published it in a one time fashion with no remaining record. I have yet to get the original video.

There's something dramatic about approaching a diving board. All eyes are on your mostly naked body, your teammates, your coach, everybody in the stands, your parents, other divers and of course the judges. You prepare the acrobatics in your mind, clear the water from your ears and eyeball the sprayers that mark the surface of the water. You get on the board and move the wheel forwards or backwards to your ideal spot. I liked mine a touch firmer than medium for my earlier career. As I gained weight and skill that place was still good. I changed from a three step to a four step hurdle in my sophomre year. Your hurdle needs to be smooth, you have to line up your spot so that you're not staring at your feet as you land them as close to the front edge as possible to gain the maximum momentum of the board which pushes you up and out. It takes a while to feel and trust how the board pushes you forward. You should aim straight up, not out, to get the height you need. Sometimes if you have a lot of rotations, say a forward 2 1/2, you want to grab your knees too soon or throw your arms down before you reach a good top.  The score depends upon three parts of your dive, your approach and hurdle, the 'top' of your dive which includes your form in the air, and your entry which as everyone knows, should make as little splash as possible.

It's during the approach where you have to rid yourself of distractions. They call your name and the dive. On more than a few occasions, they call a dive out of the order you remember submitting on your list. You have little choice once you place your foot on the board. Balking costs. As the crowd hushes and your coach gestures his last signal to remind you not to do that weak part of your dive (Jim makes a cranking a pencil sharpener gesture), you are under maximum pressure. Breathe in. Stand and deliver. Focus and perform. Once the thing is in motion, it's all practiced mechanics and then finding the right split second to reach for the bottom of the pool. Push your arms forward, left hand grasping the right wrist, palms forward, locking your elbows and punching a hole in the water for the whole of your body to pass through. Are you under rotating and short? Are you long with your legs going past your head on entry? Did you finish your twist square with the board? Did you screw up the top and let your legs and feet go limp with frustration? It doesn't matter. The dive is over, you swim over to the side of the pool, adjust your trunks and pull yourself out of the water, triumphant or otherwise. You listen you the judges but you knew what score you deserved the moment you hit the water.  Shake out your hair, grab your towel and prepare for the next dive.

I was pleased to learn that Jason Statham was a springboard diver. You have to have style as well as discipline. You have to be comfortable with your body and abuse it. You need to be fearless of both pain and embarrassment. You get to show off. You get to learn the intricacies of something that takes place in seconds. And other than during the Olympic Games, you don't get to show off how well you can anticipate what a judge will score any particular dive. It's a dying art, I think. The Chinese have taken over the aesthetics of diving. They are slim and smooth and elegant. During my era, the era of Phil Boggs, Klaus Dibiasi and Greg Louganis, a combination of grace and power was what the judges liked. Then when Mark Lenzi came forward, his muscular hairy chested diving was acrobatically amazing. He could finish a forward 3 1/2 pike above the three meter board which is astounding to watch. It changed the sport. Now there were many dives that were included in official competitions with greater than a 3.0 degree of difficulty. Not so graceful but exciting in a new way. The Chinese and all divers, due to the new higher DD dives tend to be a lot shorter than those in the old school. Louganis was 5' 9" and by memory I recall Boggs and Dibiasi to be taller. But the sport moves forward, alas with fewer American world champions and contenders.

I am pleased to have recalled all of this and recognize the impact it had on my life. Getting into the yearbook sports page thanks to the drawing of Gary Suard, was one of my proudest moments as a teen. And doing well in a sport that wasn't my first choice or my second I guess taught me some valuable lessons. But I think the most important was to stand and deliver under the pressure of failure and against all odds. I think I did OK.

The Second Set: Music That Remade Me

I seem to have lived more lives than I expected. These days I tell myself that in life there are two kinds of people, trees and monkeys. I'm a tree for my family, but out in the world I'm a monkey. A flying monkey. So when I looked back at the top 15 albums in my mind that I wrote 10 years ago, I was thinking back. Now a new set of music has ripened and matured in my monkey mind and I need to account for that.

I remember Puck in the first episodes of MTV's Real World. For some reason I associate it with a gig I had down in Jacksonville's Baymeadows district. I stayed at Homewood Suites and ran down to the package store past the gatorholes for a fifth of Jim Beam Rye. The riff from Interstate Love Song was in my head the whole time. Then one day I heard Vaseline and discovered that it was the same band. I had to know more. The album was a revelation, and it seemed that every song was an anthem for dark parts of me. It went in and inverted all of my rock sensibilities. As time went on, STP was for me everything that was right with the new rock, a soundtrack for sections of empty highways on my desolate consulting missions around the country. Lady Picture Show was Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. Meatplow was a two lane strip of black ice in the dead winter cold of Columbus, Ohio. Down was me sitting in a rental car in an alley in Boston. None of it mattered to be timely. I went back and forth in time with it. When I read the release dates of the albums it all seems wrong, like they've existed long before in my mind. They're that deep.

 

The second best apartment I ever had was on the top floor of a walkup brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Seventh Avenue & Flatbush. I bought my NAD amp and my Infinity Speakers for that place. That place with the hardwood floors. With the eat-in-kitchen where I never cooked. With the french doors on the two bedrooms. With the exposed brick. Where the first fat fly of summer buzzed against the windowpanes with the clear view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. It took me weeks to finally make the D Train go away. It rumbled by spooking me into thinking another earthquake was happening. Especially at night. I went to the brand new Virgin Superstore in Times Square and the pleasant young man told me that he knew everything about classical music. He was so happy that I asked him. "Hum anything", he challenged me. "I'll tell you what song it is." I was embarrassed. All I could think about were the clips in the old montage from 'Hooked on Classics'. I declined. But I did know one thing. I wanted the Appassionata. For years after I first discovered Bach, Liszt, and Debussy there seemed to be no solo pianists I could find to match their purity. Of course I didn't know where or how to look and the first person that asked to be a guide was declined. I thought too much of the encounter. I believed he was flirting with me and saw me too deeply because this was music I truly wanted to experience and I was only on the very edges of it. I was me. I wanted to do it myself. I bought Barenboim. His rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, which I didn't know at the time, has been the reference in my mind ever since. Every night in Brooklyn, I went to sleep with that album in the Sony CD player. It is peace.

 

I was bored on the plane and I had an aisle seat. I don't like the aisle because I have broad shoulders and enough bad experience with food carts and my funny bone to think there might be a conspiracy against me in the flight attendants union. At least it wasn't a bulkhead seat. So I actually plugged my headphones into the inflight station and browsed through the printed program guide in the seat back pocket in front of my knees. Hmm, what's this? A new album, a featured album no less, by Bobby McFerrin. Say what? If you know me, you know that I think there are two great injustices in the music world and they cycle around Fishbone and Bobby McFerrin. I know Bobby McFerrin to be a musical genius. I knew it back from his Spontaneous Inventions album back when people were just discovering Whoopi Goldberg's surfer girl routine. Of course the world has been fixated on that one song that paid for his mansion, but I knew better, primarily because of Medicine Music. I was entranced by Bang! Zoom, and in many ways it had been thematic for my early married life in Atlanta. Kids' Toys is still the ringtone for my youngest daughter, and Friends is to me one of the most perfect songs ever made. But nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on that flight. Beyond Words. This is one of the most inventive and transcendent albums ever recorded. As I listen even in this moment, the phrasing is sublime and the melodies seem crafted to soothe. It is a daddy album. It is a jazz album. It is both subtle and magnificent with the perfect interplay of Chick Corea's piano, Bobby's voice, excellent percussion and the most righteously mellow fretless bass playing I have ever heard. All with no lyrics. It is the landmark in McFerrin's career - he has invented something new in jazz vocals as it perhaps was inevitable that he would. OK. So I'm a fan. And yes he went even further several years later with Vocabularies.

 

There's a piano interlude between each of the cuts on this album that immediately takes me back to the days when my fiancee and I lived up near Grant's Tomb in the City. We had the tiniest of apartments sublet by one of the Urban Bush Women (thanks Christine) and it was a miserably hot summer. I had picked up the album back when I lived in Boston picking through the ruins of hiphop in the days of Jurassic Park. And there it was one complete with the Francophone edge of the Native Tongues, Lucien. And it got better from there. It was refreshing to hear the French approach to rap and I especially liked Democrat D's fricatives as well as the sad mellow of Moda et Dan. Of course MC Solaar was the standout. Some years later I found some comfort in Raggasonic, but this was the collection that kicked off my flirtation with Gallic hiphop. It lasted through a few singles later by Solaar, but Menelik and Lucien disappointed in the long run. This was the bright spot, and unforgettable.

 

 

There once was a videogame called Fez. It was a miracle of multiple dimensions. The game was highly anticipated and starred in a movie about indie game developers, unsurprisingly named Indie Game. The game was a smashing, although delayed success. I seem to recall it drove the lead programmer crazy. That was only the beginning. Its soundtrack was a simple marvel and introduced me to Disasterpeace who has gone on to relative fame. But there was a followup album named FZ: Side F that featured a collection of artists that rebirthed my love with electronic music. That included Solar Fields, Morusque, Monomer and my favorite Aaron Cherof. When I finally got around to Cherof, I was blown away, and so his album Anagnorisis has been in heavy rotation ever since 2013. It remains a standout among all of my new favorite electronic composers and DJs.

 

I got bored of jazz, you know. But I was overly into it for a long time. Obviously I loved the stuff that Miles was doing at the end of his life, and I have been a big fan of the Return to Forever crew, especially Stanley and Chick. Herbie has been a lifelong favorite and of course everybody lights a candle at the shrines of Coltrane, Monk, Basie & Mingus. There are several other dozens to choose from but everything new seemed to be a bit derivative of the best fusion and straight ahead. Truth be told I can put up with a lot of Bony James and contemporary smooth. But very little had gotten under my skin since the early 90s. Out of nowhere, really, came The Bad Plus. I was transfigured by the trio's coordination, by the drummer's prodigious fills and polyphony. It was frenetic and captivating. Their rock covers introduced me to songs I never knew - it had to be at least 5 years before I knew their rendition of Tom Sawyer was not original. (I have since put Rush in its appropriate place, I think). Flim, Velouria, too. All of their music had the energy and sophistication I forgot I was hungry for, and it was truly satisfying. I decided that Dirty Blonde would be my theme song - and I even wrote lyrics for it. The album that kicked it off still holds magic for me.

 

Jacques Loussier is one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. He did that French thing, take something old and make it new. They have said that Wynton Marsalis is one of those rare musical geniuses who is both a jazz and classical prodigy. It's true. But I think it is an even greater achievement to rearrange classical pieces that have been interpreted hundreds of ways for hundreds of years and make them jazzy in unpredictably clever ways that retain respect for the original. These are deeply inventive compositions he has put together with his trio, and it seems magical every time he performs. At least I am very convinced. It is almost impossible for me to decide which of his albums impresses me most, but I'm going to choose his interpretations of Satie. Because. I doubt even Satie could have envisioned his pieces so variantly played and I love the way he redoes them several times on this album. Taking nothing away from his performances of Bach and Debussy, this album is special because he renders them mulitple times, each with its own special flavor. For a long time, this has been my bedtime album.

Hiromi has saved jazz for me. Once again this is an amazing fusion of inventive style, prodigious skill, energy and sophistication that had me wondering why the Stanley Clarke Band's first album in 2010 was so extraordinary. I listened and listened but never read any liner notes. So I didn't really know it was her that made the difference. So I watched this video and knew that jazz was alive. What an outstanding trio. I can't say enough about this one, other than that the music is so excellent that talking about it is almost useless. You just want to listen to it over and over, and so I have. By far, I'd have to say my favorite song of hers is Labyrinth, although her play with Beethoven and Gershwin is fantastic. Watching her performances with Simon Phllips and Anthony Jackson is also a miracle to behold. I think only the Bad Plus synchronize in such fabulous ways, differently of course but spectacular. She's as much fun to watch as to listen - real passion on those keys.

 

I think one of the best things about being such a flathead as I am, so subject to the enjoyment of just about everything, is that you don't know what you don't know. That is to say, if there's a lot of things you can enjoy without getting bored, you will always have another opportunity to discover something wonderful you just haven't gotten around to yet. For me musically, that has meant Glenn Gould. As many times as I have ignored the award winning documentary about him, I should have guessed that he was phenomenal. And I have been in a lifelong quest for the perfect solo piano artist. I can remember first hearing in my college apartment bedroom Andre Watts playing live Listz Transendental Etude #10 so ballistically he popped two strings on the piano. I can still hear the KUSC announcer saying '..and survive it did.' Yes it stands as probably the greatest piano performance ever in my mind and experience. But actually the recorded album, which I eventually purchased, did not meet a very high standard of production. But this is about Glenn Gould. I can remember literally spending an afternoon holed up in a San Francisco hotel room watching the documentary of his second recording of the Goldberg Variations with commentary describing the difference between the newer 1981 recording and the original 1955 version. Astounding. As wondrous as all that is, it has been the French Suites that has captured my imagination. Am I heading down that corridor towards chamber music, after all that Prokofiev? It may be so. The French Suites stands out. It may be that his Scriabin gets me in the end, but for now it is the French Suites.

 

Steve Coleman and I have a very troublesome relationship. He represents the oversophistication of jazz that has made it fun for musicians and theoreticians, but not for listeners like me. A funny story is that my brother, who used to be a sound engineer, was a friend of Steve Coleman's original pianist Andy Milne. I knew about Milne because he ran clinics in Leimert Park at the World Stage, but I didn't know he had played for Steve Coleman. So I went to see him play at the Mondrian for the debut of his new album Forward to Get Back. My brother couldn't make the gig, but I spoke with Andy after the show. I said, I really like your music. I told him that it reminded me of Steve Coleman without the pretense. He cracked up. Ha ha very funny. Anyway, Steve Coleman did release what I say is one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Steve Coleman & Metric Tale of 3 Cities. Dude. I still don't know who the rappers are because I don't care. I expect that the golden age is over and my expectations and tastes have moved on, but damn when I was holding on the the last breaths there are two albums that stand head and shoulders above the rest. This is the first. Well I may as well mention the other which is Aphrocubist Improvisations from the Broun Fellinis, but that's going a little bit too far back dealing with a hiphop thread that is mostly dead. Nevertheless, more than even Buckshot LeFonque, A Tale of 3 Cities is the stand out, last stand standard of the most righteous genre of hiphop, serious lyrical force backed up with funky jazz. This is the last and greatest, right here. Get it if you can find it.

 

There is one last thing to say here and I'm not exactly sure how to say it because on one hand it is very conventional wisdom to say that Radiohead is one of the greatest rock bands ever. And it is also quite conventional to say that OK Computer & Kid A represent them at their most mindblowing and transformative. On the other hand, I like the reggae dub versions of these great songs, for the most part, better than the originals. This album, in addition to being a straight out genius arrangement, holds the distinction as one of the very last CDs I ever went out of my house to shop for. I recall the hybrid store out on the Santa Monica Promenade that let you pick and choose a dozen mp3s and they burned you a disc. But I had to have this entire record. It also bears mentioning that Vitamin String Quartet also Vitamin Dub has done a strikingly awesome cover of Just which is a favorite song of mine to play loud challenging the powers of my subwoofers. Radiodread's version of Airbag had been my daughter's favorite song ever, so it also has to be one of mine.

Nathaniel Rateleiff is, outside of Nancy Wilson, my favorite vocalist ever. I discovered him about 6 years ago. I looked around, bored, for critically acclaimed independent new music. The last time I did that, I found Coldplay. So I was batting 1000. The album cover caught my attention so I gave it a shot. OMG. To this day, I still haven't puzzled out the actual lyrics to half of his songs, but every time I have, it has been rewarding. His music is like nobody else's. It's like bluegrass, but not. Like country but more like western. But that voice. I've never thought I'd seriously consider the genre of 'singer songwriter', but his stuff gets to me. Like an abstract cryptogram of the heart, of suffering and of persistence. Like the souls of Modest Mouse with no need or desire to be stars, but the love of the music just comes through, haunting, vivid, like a bright red rash on the face of a hobo who just fell out of a moving boxcar. This is soul music. Soul music I say. Like Bill Frisell on a lonely day.

 

That's about it. To include more is to go beyond writing about the personal and into more generic music criticism, which I think I've indulged for the last time right here. So let's see. Here are the honorable mentions. Love Stories by Frank McComb, Treat Me Right by Eric Sardinas, Chant Down Babylon the Bob Marley covers by hiphop artists, Dub Chamber 3 by Bill Laswell. Real Enemies by D'Arcy James Argue. All kinds of stuff by Squarepusher, Tycho, Boards of Canada and Big Giant Circles, Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse, Crystal Planet by Joe Satriani and various musics by Gorecki and Elgar.

Living in Black Neighborhoods

"Your daddy's rich, and your ma is good looking. So hush little baby, don't you cry."

Q: What is it like living in a majority black neighborhood?

A: It’s kind of obvious to say they are all different, but I think it is useful to take note of the matter of class. You see since there are about 42 million in the US, that would make African-Americans the 35th largest nation on the planet. It’s also easy to remember that black median household income is about $42,000 per year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to compare that with median household incomes of other nations.

At any rate, I have used class:

Class in America
When I look at the standard definitions of class I have basically started with a compressed version for black Americans. These are from top to bottom {Hill, Burbs, Hood, Ghetto, Projects/Sticks} It was conveniently five, but there's probably enough reason to split Projects and Sticks into their own separate categories. My upbringing was in the Hood, in the shadow of the Hill, but with ample distance from the Ghetto. I think I live in the Burbs, but perhaps I live on the Hill considering the priceyness of this particular Burb. By the way, I've always considered $300,000 to be rich. In my mind you make that kind of money not just being a doctor, lawyer or businessman, but a *good* doctor, lawywer or businessman. Be all that as it may (and not so crucially important) these follow a kind of 'geography / demographics as destiny' sort of thinking that was useful in my investigations of redlining (with the subheader 'American Apartheid' c.f. Massey & Denton) and my own national search for the right place to raise my family. It also played along the dialogs of 'mentality' for those interminable internecine discussions about proper blackness.
And so I have lived like this in the following majority black neighborhoods.

Hood One - 90016
I grew up in what is now called Jefferson Park / West Adams in Los Angeles. It is in Southwest LA most notably known by its major thoroughfare, Crenshaw Blvd. I grew up in a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house with my three brothers and my sister. My parents were civil servants. I would say that we were above the median income for the neighborhood. We moved in about 3 years before the white families started to move out. It was a very nice neighborhood with a good public school and lots of friendly neighbors from 1964 through about 1980. There were some street gangs on the periphery, but none in the neighborhood. Our neighbors all went to different churches and were quite diverse. So you could immediately tell that a lot of people lived there because it was a black neighborhood - meaning this was one where blackfolks could get mortgages, whereas others were off limits. The consequence was that it was not truly organic like an ordinary urban or suburban place. A lot of us had very little in common. After 1980 when I moved out, the drug wars began and the entire area started to run downhill. But that place was, to me, a very normal and often pleasant place to grow up. The place now looks a touch nicer than it did in the mid 60s. Values in the property have gone way up.

Hood Two - 90047
I then lived near the Circle Park in Inglewood with my father after my parents split up. This was a nicer neighborhood, but I was personally very broke. The middle class families were a lot more plentiful and similar to us. But the main boulevard, Manchester, was not as economically viable as Crenshaw was at the time. Shopping was not as nice. I didn't even think about crime, so much as I did worrying about how I could get my old car working again. I was there for two years then went off to college. The place looks pretty run down these days.

Hood Three - 90016
I didn't live in a black neighborhood again until five years later when I came back home to West Adams. Knuckleheads now populated the neighborhood. Ball scratching idiots nobody respected when we were kids. They didn't play sports. They had no mechanical or handy skills. They just smoked dope, acted tough, shoplifted, did B&Es and chased nasty girls. They evolved into gangsters. When young men like my friends and I left, everything went to shit. The little brothers and punks began to rule. ('hood trending towards ghetto, but still good houses). Looked ratty those days.

Hood Four - 90043
I got out as soon as I could, went to live with my ex-girlfriend on the edge of Inglewood in a duplex on a busy street. That didn't work out long. It was on the border of one of the worst blocks in the area called Hyde Park. Ick. Lots of Section 8 housing and crackheads roaming the streets, panhandling bums at the gas stations, steetwalkers and pimps at the McDonalds. But it was a very busy neighborhood at the intersection of Florence and Crenshaw. Lots of bus commuters, kids. Not quite a solid working class neighborhood but one on the verge of that. There was a big lumber yard nearby, a regional park, a little Jamaican grocer, a busy car wash. The McDonalds there, like two others on Crenshaw was owned by a black man who was pretty well known. (definitely ghetto adjacent)

Hood Five - 90016
I then moved in with my brother into another West Adams neighborhood. We lived in a very modest back house - which was basically a studio apartment. We got on each other's nerves sometimes, but I now had a good job, a new girlfriend and a serviceable sporty vehicle. We didn't interact much at all in the neighborhood. Our landlady was a quiet older Christian woman. The place felt quiet, definitely downscale, but not dirty. It was on the edge of what I call a burglar-bar neighborhood - where B&Es (breaking and entering) were so common that people put iron bars (ornamental as they might be) on their doors and windows. Unfortunately we didn't have those on the back house and the landlady's gardener(!) of all people had his 10 year old kid(!) crawl through our window. My brother busted them in the act and we we had to testify in court against him. ('hood accomodated to ghetto behavior)

All of this time, living in Los Angeles, most of my friends and associates were what we used to call 'buppies' - black urban professionals. Many of them came from the affluent neighborhoods of View Park and Baldwin Hills. So while most of us were not affluent, we enjoyed the same middle class culture, fashion, music and everything else. None of us were wannabe gangsters and music by Rick James was considered quite risque, but yeah we danced to it. I wrote about this social scene in People of the Dons.

I moved to the beach and in 1991 just before the Riots, I moved to Brooklyn. I wanted to live in the newly hype neighborhood of Fort Greene, where Spike Lee and other wealthy blacks were gaining a foothold, but I wound up in (still very nice) Prospect Heights. As I moved from Brooklyn to Boston and back to NYC., got married and moved to Atlanta, I didn't live in a majority black neighborhood until 1997 when I came back to California and lived in Altadena.

Burb One - 91001
Altadena is a super uniquely oddball neighborhood. The feel is like shabby gentility. 80 year old houses with old electric sockets, peeling paint, unkempt lawns and basketball hoops with no nets. The neighborhood grocer had old cash registers. It felt like a small town store somewhere in the middle of Texas. There were horses in the neighborhood and we'd see riders every week. The big public park had dirty foul mouth kids I liked to keep my kids away from, but a big hearted woman who ran the afterschool program. I befriended a young Nation of Islam man who would drop by occasionally. Jehovah's Witnesses were always trolling. But the police helicopter was trolling as well - around every Saturday night. Occasionally we heard gunshots. We had a swimming pool in the backyard - one day we found somebody's rooster had flown into the yard. The house next door was shrouded in tall bushes and was on a double lot behind an iron gate. It definitely looked like a haunted mansion. Fortunately the old man there would through the kid's balls back, eventually. This was the kind of neighborhood where the McDonalds runs out of french fries. Just crazy odball dysfunctions. When it was time we went to talk to the (young black) principal of the local elementary school, Edison. He told us that 40% of his students were foster children. We couldn't get over it. The private school was expensive and required parents to forbid their children from watching television (and probably eating meat). The parochial school had a total of about 25 students. We had to move.

Burb Two - 90745
From 2001 until last year, we have lived in upscale neighborhoods where rich people were not uncommon and black families were. Last year we moved to a majority black suburban community. I realized when we got here that I had not lived in a house with central air conditioning in 22 years. This place is a joy in pretty much every way. Even though we haven't gotten to know our neighbors very well everyone we do meet is cool. I never thought I would enjoy living in a gated community, although there was one at the top of the hill in Altadena I could not afford. Although this place isn't as upscale as View Park and Ladera Heights, it's easily nicer than Baldwin Hills. But that's Carson. It has always had a solidly black middle class suburban vibe. That means people drive a Lexus to the fish market. I didn't happen to watch 'Blacki-sh' on TV but that would describe this place, though there are almost equal numbers of Asians here. A lot of late model SUVs to be found here and retirees as well.

---

Feeling Good. Feeling Bad.

I had a bad dream last night. It was bad in many ways and as I was barely sleeping parts of it were based upon reality. I was waiting both in the dream and in life for something to happen and it didn't. In the dream I was made extremely angry by a dog. I was on the street of a residential neighborhood and a large dog kept rushing me barking loudly and then backing off. I had a switch and I swatted the dog on his nose each time. But he growled and took one less step back each time. A crowd gathered to watch this dramatic standoff between myself and the dog. I asked one family who knew the dog if they would please get the owner to pull his dog away. An old woman, obviously the matriarch of the family who owned the dog went through a list of children and grandchildren in her squeaky croaky voice. "Pooter, is this here your dog? Where's Jimbo? Dat Jimbo's dog? What about Cash? Ain't this Cash' dog?" I was two seconds from pulling out my pistol and blowing the dog into swiss cheese, but I kept asking politely. Will you please call your dog off? Nobody did. I kept swatting it on the nose. I couldn't take my eyes off of it for a moment.

I woke up, dead tired, angry. I told my wife that I had a horrible dream. I could hear the sleep in my voice mumble up my words. They conveyed nothing of the sheer awfulness of the dreamt experience. I was still boiling inside, still waiting for us to go watch the next episode of The Witcher together. Still staring at the back of her head as she patiently did her work from home. Still fiercely angry at everything that went on inside my head and of very little of consequence in the real world. I wanted to communicate how miserable I felt, how much I needed some tender and kind affection at this moment, wanting both to demand it in a scream and be quietly accepting that it wasn't going to happen. My mind went to the end. I'm going to die alone. We all are going to die alone. 

I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to pay my rent. I haven't decided whether or not I'm going to max out my credit cards. I haven't decided whether or not I even care. I'm not unhappy with my life with all of its shortcomings. And I thought about what would make me the most happy would be driving a convertible sports car up Pacific Coast Highway at 100 miles per hour. I can do that now because it's very Omega Man out there. I quit my gym. I can't remember the last time I went. But I do my morning walks alone. I did my 10,000 steps alone yesterday and I only took one picture and I don't really think it's worth sharing. I have worked from home for a decade and my solitude is second nature. I am socially distanced. When I post to communicate, I only get feedback on the stupid stuff I really don't care about. I am accustomed to dying alone. This blog has over 9000 posts. I have been writing it steadily since September of 2002. Even I don't read it any longer. In a way, I don't fear death. I am angry about not getting a chance to do what's next. Death is worse than derailment. It's the situation that you never get to address or correct. Death is the complete deterioration of the self; no matter how small your self may have been in life it is completely eradicated by the obliviousness of death.

I remember looking at my grey self in the mirror. I handed out my calling card at a meetup and somebody remarked, "That's not you." It's 4 years old when I was less grey. When I was in Bogota people kept mistaking me for Morgan Freeman. There's not much room even in my own imagination for whom that old black man in the mirror might actually be. I dress like a gardener, in Dickies tactical pants and nondescript black shoes. I'm putting on only the subtlest of shows, and I don't need to show off. My joie de vivre is what it is, but I've heard most of the jokes out there. 

So I sat on the edge of the bed waiting to watch The Witcher with my wife, because I want to do it together, but I might be dead next month.  She still has work to type into her laptop. I'm probably going to fall asleep while we watch. She probably will too. I have been playing the video game of The Witcher most of the afternoon. In the villages people starve and cough. They are surrounded by Imperial troops, wolves and monsters. I can kill them all, but sometimes I die. I have no savings. I spend all of my money on the best swords and armor because ultimately I am a monster slayer and that's what I'm needed for. It's a sword and sorcery classic and the narrative gets pushed along by me killing my way through the evil, solving the mysteries, negotiating with unsavory characters, resisting the temptation to treat the sorceresses as if they owe me affection as my deeds push the plot forward. I am a mortal enabler. A freak of nature. I am heartless and honorable and I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. Everyone dies alone except heroes and martyrs. I don't want to pick a hill to die on. I don't want to succumb to the forces of nature or destiny, but all I can do is live another day. It's obvious, but nobody seems to figure it out. We're caught up in the moment.

The dead live in the tales of the living. I only ever knew one song by Elvis Presley. "In the Ghetto". People got worked up about it, I recall. I sang it. It was a good song. I didn't care that it was Elvis. What a depressing song. But there it is. You don't even have to type 'Elvis' into Google, just 'in the ghetto'. People living in one room shacks. That's what they sang about. 

I once wrote that I figured out the reason for war. It was to remind mankind of their limits. War destroys memory and truth and it becomes the reason for everything. It has an irresistible gravitational pull on history and the Jungian collective consciousness. Now we are met on a new battlefield and I can't help thinking that these might be the last blogs I ever write. These videos may be the last time my face will be seen in its animated state. My voice, now clear, will be its last true self before the cytokine storm reduces me to rib-cracking coughs. Or I might just stay right where I am behind these two monitors and this keyboard and survive it all. Laying low. Risking nothing. Moving nowhere. 

I walked 10,000 steps yesterday. On my way back home I walked past a fire station. The men were playing paddle tennis in the side yard. You could hear the ball echoing across the empty streets and parking lots. I wanted to ask them questions about how I could use my old ICS training to help in an emergency. It was my instinct. But I didn't stop. I kept on walking past the sleeper on the sidewalk, past the old man digging in the trashcan. I held my breath each time. I didn't stop. The sleeper had a full canteen of water. The old man had a rough and ready coat on. Yeah. It's about that time. As I finished the steps, I finished the Sam Harris podcast with Nicholas Christakis. Now I'm informed. I should say that 'we' are the informed. Social isolation is all we've ever had, because we expect our knowledge to make a difference. We keep changing our behavior challenging common sense. We want uncommon insight.

We want uncommon insight because we're logical and disciplined. We want our minds to save us, and we get angry because everybody else doesn't work as hard to come to the same conclusions. They know whose dog it is, but they like the drama of not calling it off. Just because you want it.. you've already hitting it right on the nose, Mr Smarty Pants. But they don't see my gun. In my mind I'm justified. I could take the screaming action and everybody would get it. But maybe I'll just die a little bit today and hold my peace. it's not my war. It's not what I want to become known for. I'm just trying to be civilized, even if I have to do it on the DL. 

I have another meeting today. I need to confirm the time. I need to fill in the hours from last week. But my company could go broke and I could be dead next month. There's a book on the periphery of my list that I might move up in the queue. It's about 10% less democracy and why you should trust the elites more than you do. They're probably looking at us like, so why didn't you just do it? 50 Cent has a new show on TV, because he was ready to die trying to do that. I'm the writer. The writer writes. And here it all is.  This is what I wanted. This is what I got. I just need to keep it all going. I thought, in Episode 001 that I could just catch this and get it over with, because we'e all going to catch the bug, right? No. Delay death as long as possible. Keep everything going. Use your mind and take the extra edge. Minute by minute. Play the barbell curve. Be prepared for extreme negatives and extreme positives. My creditors could all be dead next month. My enemies, my doubters, all of the unknown unknowns could disappear. All of the decadent hubris could get the smackdown. Yes people are starting to scream. 

Maybe we should just be what we be. It's a bit weird to be a Stoic at this moment. There's so much to explain in that. It's a consequence of living a particular life of the particular mind. Being reconciled with triumph and disaster and treating those two imposters just the same is a kind of manhood for which few strive. It's not comfortable but it's necessary. That's why there is no panic here. There is also no resignation. You could call this a moment of dealing with emotions, of concretely wrestling with the logical implications of what I have already felt without making any hard decisions yet. I don't want to be singing depressing songs. I don't want to be angry in my dreams and then with my wife. I don't want to fear death or fear loneliness. I don't want to be overcome by the futility that often accompanies deep contemplation. This meditation thus is a public expression of my will. That's how Stoicism works for me. I don't mind being corrected. I don't care who is right, I care what is right. 

I didn't shoot the dog, but I did fall asleep during The Witcher. 

Surviving COVID - Episode 4 - Shopping While I Can

I was able to get about 90% of the items I wanted on my shopping. I was a bit surprised at what was available and not surprised at what was not available.

Surviving COVID-19 - Episode 003 - Lockdown & Mythbusting

• Pandemic Czar
• Skid Row
• 231 & 2
• State of local neighborhood
• Florida beaches
• Sauna Rumor
• Food stocks
• Zika SARS MERS
• Global Health Security Bioterror budget
• Stoics & IDW

The New Pandemic Normal

"The sun warms a graveyard in December."

So mentally, I'm prepared for this. Financially, I will probably be ruined. Emotionally, I'm certain to get through it. Healthwise, I say I'm in better shape than most people my age, but you never know. I'm not the Omega Man. What's 3 or 4 Greek letters backwards from Omega? Upsilon? I'd rather be the Tau Man, so I can associate it with the Tao.

The aim here is to make use of some basic skills I have and do my part sitting at home and rapidly parsing through a mental landscape of data / information / knowledge / wisdom and present it with some common language commentary. I don't have many more than a couple thousand followers all told, but I do what I can. I hope I can keep my head when about me are losing theirs. I know I can't just data dump. So I'll do some fraction of a daily thing and interpret what it means to me, giving a sense of what I believe to be actionable and that which is just good to know. I kind of do this for a living - which is to boil down desires, aims and goals into systems that use data / information  to help people turn it into knowledge. I can't get paid for assisting people with the wisdom part. 

Background:
I'm going to start with helping you understand my perspective. So last year I suffered through what seemed my worst year in about the last 20. I'm 58 years old, and can write both essays and software. I took a salary cut and burned through 75% of my savings. I got kicked out of my apartment and started renting in a newer more expensive place. My son was hospitalized twice for mental illness. My mother suffered blood clots that could have killed her. I was diagnosed with depression, and I basically blew my top at a big family gathering. I gained about 17 pounds and I'm sure there were other things I can't think of at the moment that made it a miserable year. 

On the other hand, about four years ago, my younger brother dropped dead (of a blood clot) and then my mother suffered a stroke. I then went through the agonizing processes of dealing with my son's mental illness, and the shaky financial position of my employer. So I had a couple years of tragedy and sorrow to prepare me for 2019. So things haven't been normal for me since 2016 or so. But even prior to that I was prompted to approach Stoicism. You shouldn't call Stoicism the hero of my story, but it is a nominee for best supporting actor. So if you wonder how it is that I've managed to John Wayne through a lot of this, part of it is my personality, part of it is Stoicism and part of it is that I've had a lifetime of ups and downs. Back in 1989 I studied the Tao. It helped me to understand how to live in the present. That's a part too. It's not about me. This just helps you know who I think I am not being a medical expert trying to be helpful. 

Now:
I have a wife and two adult children who live with me and I suspect my wife will be the hardest hit if it comes to us getting infected and sick. So I am concerned for her. My father is 83 years old and has survived cancer, but is starting to be frail and forgetful. His wife has also had some serious medical issues over the past few years. I worry that they may not make it. I have an uncle who is the oldest of our family, and a couple aunts for whom I am concerned. I also have a cousin who lives abroad where things might not be so tightly wrapped. So a number of my family members are at risk, as are all of my friends who are around my age. I have watched my father see all of his dearest friends die (and one of his sons) over the past several years. I see what it's like to look backwards and not forwards in life.  

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This week:
I have Evernote and I started using it to keep track of this and that for years. This week I started taking notes about COVID-19 and now I have enough to make some kind of presentation. It started with the big reveal on Joe Rogan's podcast with Michael Osterholm. This is some of the best straight talk I've heard and it is my ground zero. Last Friday I purchased 200 nitrile gloves and sent an email to my local CERT alumni coordinator. That was the moment I started dealing with the fact that I'm going to have to deal with this. But the interview really kicked it off for me and straightened things out. I expect now that washing my hands will give me a 5% better chance of resisting infection, and adding gloves to that will add another percent or two. It's really about breathing. 

 

Here is the tweet that got me a few bits of rec.

@mtosterholm @CIDRAP And see his interview here.bit.ly/3aNVOMI and his book is here: amzn.to/2TQpxNW 

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So I'm going to close this first post by making a parallel between Osterholm and the man who tried to warn us about 9/11. So if we know nothing at all, we know that there are people who know what they are talking about, who are working on the problem and have mastered the details enough to be able to see the big picture. I'm all about the big picture. All of everything I've written here in this blog over the past 17-odd years may add up to nothing during my life, but I took no money to say what I had to say. This is an unexpected turn, but I can do it. More people are going to die from this than from that terror attack. And we survived. We survive a lot. So much that most of us don't have to think about survival. I do, because I've had to deal with death, something I'm now mature enough to reckon with - even my own. So I'm keeping my head up and my eyes open. You can too. 

More later. I want to expose more of my thinking, but this is enough for now. (It's about thinking through it, not just knowing stuff.)

On The North Face

Depending on whose fung you shui, facing north is good if you're a house with a blue door. Facing south is good if you are in the Northern Hemisphere and you want sun in your windows. I don't want sun in my eyes because it makes me squint. I don't want the sun at my back because, well I'm too pretty to be backlit. I've been thinking about my portrait reflections over the past few years and they all involve rocks. So at the moment I feel as though I have suddenly found myself free climbing. So the north face of something describes me. I have a face here that is definitely north of 40. This time I've put in a lot of filters. I'm wearing my skateboard injury. I'm in my new home office. I'm contemplative. Again. Out of a discipline, but not necessarily of necessity. 

This is my 9th month of seasonal affective disorder, or mild clinical depression or whatever you call it when you're on a very mild upper and you pay $50 a month to see a psychiatrist. On the whole I have come to understand that the thing that concerns me most is money. Weird how a small pile of money can change my mood. I understand why. I have the kind of self-confidence people usually associate with arrogance and for this reason all I ever thought I needed was money. I was wrong either to believe this too much, or not believe it enough. So I didn't ditch every relationship to make some killing on Wall Street, blind as I am to the confidence I would have made one, nor did that fantasy ever lose currency with me. Today I watched George Carlin's routine about 'stuff'. I am still surrounded by my stuff, and my family's stuff. It feels like the kind of material comfort that preachers rail against. I don't love my stuff, but I always feel entitled to it. But when I can't make enough money to keep my castle manned, it makes me edgy and uncomfortable. 

I did a calculation several weeks ago to determine exactly what it would cost me to draw level to my financial situation as of 12 months ago. That I had an answer gave me some comfort. It was really that simple. You see, I've been talking to people who have some vague idea of my intelligence and capability and I see in their eyes that I'm worth something north of what I'm getting. That too gives me some comfort. None of this comfort, however, changes the elevation of the perch where I find myself on this cold January morning. One step at a time. One fingerhold at a time. Facing the rock. I could fall to my death. This is not a moment to play. 

I have faced down three crises in the last 8 weeks. Blood clots in my mother's legs. A mental hospital commission for my son. Kidney stones sending vomit level pain through my wife. I put on my ten-gallon hat and John Wayned it again. All the way through the crises, I took the reins. I think I drove the right people to the right places. I bent over finally to take a deep breath, hands on my thighs calming myself. I stood up wobbly to find bloody hands. Suffering in the wake of this and other fine piles of shit, I conclude 2019 as the crappiest year of my life. With great disappointments comes great what? Capacity to survive disappointment. I have lurked in the shadows of my capacities for what seems like 3 years. I have grown so accustomed to not feeling my self-confident self that I have given up trying to stay in the lane I thought was mine. In 2003 I was so broke that I considered driving a cement mixer truck. It was that strange. Call me Deacon Blues. This year hurt more but I have more cushion. I can take a more brutal beating, it seems. I watched a video of an armed robbery in which everyone cowered from the gunman holding up the bar except for one patron who continued smoking his cigarette and drinking his cup. I don't know if it's healthy to stare death in the face, but I think he knew the odds. He wasn't being a hero, he was just eating popcorn. I'm drinking lemonade and eating popcorn watching the movie of my own life. 

I remember my 23rd birthday. I realized in the back of my mind that I would not be anyone's fair-haired boy. I would not be tapped by the secret society. I wouldn't have the money to survive the pranks filling my imagination. I determined that I could only experiment with myself; my personality from time to time was my only playground. And yet I never designed to make a spectacle of myself that I couldn't reverse. So I have been halfway to everywhere exciting, developing just enough skill so that I don't have to take anything so seriously that I anchor my life to it. I participate. In the wrack of these crises it all becomes apparent where I have been participating and where I am truly committed. The answer is frightening. I have been engaged in a finely honed diplomacy with everyone in my life. I am only fully open with myself and with my writing; my writing to an audience who is merely participating with me from time to time. It occurs to me in this very moment that only the completion of publishable materials may give me the satisfaction of a pure act of creation. Everything else has been a responsibility to others. Everything else is a disappointment. Offerings to inconsistent deities of our own choosing for the occasional intimacy that delivers necessary social oxygen. 

Three months ago I ventured back to my old neighborhood in several trips. The first was to an intimate concert where an old college friend would be performing with his Erykah Badu style band. He mis-introduced me as a crazy black Republican to the most likely to succeed man I ever knew in college. I picked up a conversation we had 25 years ago when he informed me of the cultural dissonance of China. We spoke abstractedly for a few minutes. I found a table with another member of my friend's entourage but we were informed that it was reserved. We cruised the bar for drinks but it was too crowded. I left, frustrated. I had been promising myself to go to a local bar I had never been, next door to the old hardware store I fetched to and from whenever my baseballs broke a window. It was halfway full when I buzzed through the security gate, full of men and women 20 years older and 30 years younger than I. All looked forlorn with their tall drinks as two football games and a reggae song played. The bartender looked like the kind of large Arab who, in cartoons, stood at attention beside a door in curly toed shoes with arms folded attending a 3 foot scimitar. His smile was gentle behind his large black beard, and he poured me a tall drink. Here, in this place I've never been, I am welcome. One of our newly empowered fat young women in exquisite makeup over flawless dark skin in a flush of florid fushia returned from the bathroom to her pink drink. I don't belong here yet. I left to go to the other restaurant in West Adams where the music is more Marvin Gaye and the red beans and fired chicken bring back good memories. Yet at the very beginning of Friday night it was closed. My heart sank as I floored it through the dirt back alley on my way somewhere else. I arrived to Jefferson where a new brightly lit healthy food cafe announced the gentrification of 'East Culver City' just two train stops past the new gigantic residential skyscraper rising above La Cienega. It too was closed. I grabbed a desktop printed menu of forgettable dishes and settled into the mood of fête manqué. I returned to the original venue but I missed the entire set. My college friend's singer didn't show up, we had little more to say. He too was disappointed. I might have thanked him again for the time he spared me by letting me paint some of his house to the sound of Tupac. Instead, I promised to come by the next time. I didn't, but that was last year. 

When I look at my face in the mirror, I see a man on the verge of looking that dismissible age. We assume in all our casual associations that anyone who looks like the old reporter Bernard Shaw, or Morgan Freeman is a man defeated, unless he's wearing an impeccable suit. Maybe he's somebody's strange uncle at a BBQ, or a retired football coach, or gardener or principal of a middle school. You never really know what to expect of old men unless they look powerful in that ridiculously manicured way. In my current affluent environs, they wear dark shades and drive expensive sports cars. It's the only casual that works. I have my breakfast club and I am as full a member as might participate. But all of the men my age that I've known tend to bunch up into a single decade or other. My relationships are abbreviated. I talk about the deep past or a shallow present. No one has more continuity than my family, and there my role is fixed. Second to that are my inveterate readers, of whom I've only met 3 or 4. Where is Kikka? 

I have been thinking about the next decade. It will be a troublesome time for all of us. Nothing will be quite right. My children will live in the Millennial sphere. I will continue to work like some old Dickensian shuffling through sooty snow in a troubling winter cold I can barely survive mumbling past the poorhouse and street beggars in frozen street sewage. My mind is ever sharp. My experience is ever deep. I go everywhere in my mind and yet it transports me not. I have to decide once again how much I want whatever riches I can manage. For this season a lifetime of average luck has brought me to handle a fistful of tragedies that make me dizzy, lazy and half crazy. Yet I can see the hell of it clearly, the hell of all of this is in stark relief. 

Mark Twain. I think I'd rather be Mark Twain than Frederick Douglass. I had better read that Twain biography. I don't want to need a war for my own satisfaction and liberation. Maybe I can turn more towards the wry aspect of my stoicism. 

The Decade That Was

This decade I left the enterprise software game and entered the open source software part of the industry. I left on-premise and moved to cloud. I went from strictly database design to that plus API level programming. I moved from ksh + Perl to bash + Ruby and played with Go and Python. I went from mostly doing data marts and outsourcing data warehouse to mostly doing data warehouse backends and data management. I went from mostly batch to mostly continuous near-realtime feeds. I completely dropped Wintel and went over to Mac + Linux. Although I always had Ubuntu, I picked up Alpine, Kali, Centos. I didn't do Hadoop at all. I went from being a traveling consultant to working at home. I became much more of a Los Angeles person than in the previous two decades. 

I engaged in a lot more business running responsibilities and a great deal more sales and marketing. I learned to do a lot more marketing which had been intimidating and mysterious. I shifted my writing attitude to be more wry and less provocative. 

I stopped following politics in the prior decade, but weighed in on a lot. I switched from Republican to Independent. I made sense of the difference between Liberals, Leftists and Progressives and evaluated them from a moral point of view. I moved from blogging more to Facebook. I attended a large number of professional meetups. I moved more off of Facebook and more to Quora. I joined Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. I wrote fan fiction. I built a computer rack and began puttering at home with that. 

I put one kid into the military and two kids through college. I moved from a large beach community to a smaller downscale suburb. I got rid of by BMW and bought a Toyota SUV. I played with a motorcycle then got rid of it. I stopped playing beach volleyball. I became more of a patriarch in the family as my brother died and my son, mother and father suffered serious illnesses. I decided that I definitely want a Porsche. I participated in more activities that are affiliated with military service as a Blue Star dad. I bought a lot of knives. I did a GoRuck light, and an all day ruck walk. Oh yeah and tea. I have given up Red Bull for loose leaf Earl Grey tea. 

I started circuit training and lost 15 pounds and put on muscle. I had a lot of dental work finally done. I earned a yellow belt in TKD. I learned to prepare marvelous salads. I cut down my fast food intake. I started wearing boots, tac pants and T-shirts with slogans. I put bumperstickers on my truck. I continued to wear my hair, and moved to keeping the beard short and clean. I started reading a great deal more science fiction as well has historical fiction. I built up my bar and learned to make some new cocktails. I settled on my favorite spirits. I tried and failed to find a local bar where everybody knows my name and ended up at a breakfast joint. I made new friends and solidified old friendships. I changed my attitude about money and adopted a barbell strategy. I massively increased my creditworthiness, and rang up a bunch of debt. I made a pile of money on Bitcoin and Amazon stock. I paid off my tax debts and then cranked them up again. 

I developed my peasant theory and made a lot of progress on my novel. I began and mostly completed my martial education. I purchased two pistols and learned how to shoot them in a combat style. I attended CERT training and a citizens police academy. I attended the FBI citizens academy. I attended a NAMI program. Each of these were at least 12 weeks long. I attended a variety of church services and cleared up my position on Christianity. I studied Stoic philosophy and that continues. I started the American Wag podcast with my best friend Marc. I volunteered and organized for Rights International. 

I marginally increased my Spanish. I visited Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Colombia. I learned to love Las Vegas, New Orleans and Bogota. I cranked up my cigar habit but drank a lot less. I began a love affair with ramen. I got used to taking pills. I went through anxiety and depression and spent a lot of time in therapy. I improved my cardio, flexibility, strength and endurance. I have made peace with yoga. I began taking a great deal more video diary and slowed down my still photography. I have increased the size of 'The Terabyte' by 20 fold and now run Southwall. I admitted my love affair with cars and followed Formula 1 and IMSA racing. 

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The next decade. 

My intention is to dramatically reduce my consumption and learn to live simpler and cleaner. I aim to produce rather than to interact. I intend to cap my martial education by practicing BJJ and learning to hunt with a rifle. I want to start my own company with venture capital. I want to buy and build a Porsche. I want to marry off my daughters, and bury my parents with the least amount of fuss possible. I want to produce a more coherent set of writings and video. I am aiming for completion. I expect to retire never. I want to visit southeast Asia and Tokyo. I'd like to get to London again and see if I really want to live in Texas. I want to begin composing and performing music again. I will try guitar and piano. I would like to correspond with my intellectual heroes and gain some academic associations. I would like to build my final audiophile system. I'd like to improve my horsemanship and go on a horseback vacation. 

 

 

The Dutzburger Tribute

This is my family. Dutz is my sister.

The Uncle Bunny Scenario

I have white ancestors. I met them when I was a child. They were my Uncle Bunny and Aunt Mae. They lived in Connecticut in a small pristine house. I loved them immediately. Uncle Bunny had a head so bald that that it shone in the sunlight. Aunt Mae said he had a special formula that consisted of eggs that he used to polish his dome. Aunt Mae was just sweet, and you could tell that they loved each other. It was said that Uncle Bunny bought stocks in Ford when the company first went public. I am thinking about that today.

Someone I've known online casually mentioned in an interesting way that she inherited a bundle. And for some reason, I actually felt opportunistic. It's something I never felt before - not in the way I did for a few hours. I happen to know that the way she particularly came into this money was the cause of some embarrassment and discomfiture. You see she had lived her life without it purposefully not wanting the power it would give her over her material circumstances, but through some complications of the law she was forced to take possession of it or lose her wish to donate it all to charity upon her death. Seven figures is no joke, it might even be eight. Now it must be parked, for the moment, in a liquid state. She's going to buy an SUV.

We all have that wish for the genie to grant our wishes. I know that I have made a number of choices in my life that made me flirt with various probabilities of riches. I originally called it 'Fuck You Money' as did many people in my generation, especially those of us who worked in Silicon Valley. Although many of my wishes remained the same, I renamed it the 'Dosh Point'. And so I considered what I would do if I ever reached my Dosh Point. I must say that for a good majority of my professional life, the Dosh Point has never seemed that far away from me, and I have felt relatively confident that I would attain it. So I adopted such an attitude that I assumed it and so my tastes were never too far away. For me, it would be relatively easy to achieve the few material possessions I wanted and afterward settle into a kind of shabby gentility that always seemed appropriate to me. 

After some time, it became apparent to me that people much younger than I were cashing out of the casino capitalism having studied the game and counted the cards. Whatever it is they have done, I have recently considered that like Shaft, they must have planned for and achieved a Big Score. By my calculations of the thermodynamics of life, this effort must have had some opportunity costs. I've certainly known men who have sacrificed family for the glory of being the top dog. And while I often am thankful for what I have, I sometimes wonder in my solitude if I might have been happier with more money and less sagacity and more assholiness. I wrote about that earlier this year: 

A couple years ago I gave myself a bad haircut and went to see a long awaited popular military hero movie. In the men's room after the show, I met an irascible old man who grumbled that the actors in the movie didn't do shit compared to what he did in 'Nam. I took him out and bought him some drinks at the PF Chang's next door. He had come down the hill from Palos Verdes to condescend to the public. He informed me that when he was young he was a statewide track champion. He went to the war and became a helicopter door gunner. His bullets would spray but he didn't pray. "At least 100 kills" he said with a kind of practiced, gruff sangfroid. One day his chopper crashed and it broke his spine. He was told he'd never walk again. He walked like an old man for the rest of his life. He built a chemical company and lives in a multi-million dollar home with his wife. She let him out of the house, where he rarely goes. He still runs the company from home. He has beat everyone.

As I recall the story it reminds me of how Jordan Peterson says that disagreeable people make for good apex predators in the game of life. This man was certainly a case in point. He reminds me slightly of another man who was the one who loaned the computer that changed my life to the highschool I attended in the 70s. I called him to thank him one day, and he still grumbled about how OSHA set him up. He too ran a chemical company. The most successful men I know, with few exceptions, don't want to be happy. They want to win. They are only happy that they're not losers.  Life's a pile of shit that you must climb and stay rooted on top. These old climbers are kings of the hill and they'll tell you about it. They're not bragging to you, they're warning you.

I have some measure of this assholiness, but owing to the shape of my personality and life experience I have consciously bent myself into the service of others. Sometimes, though I am often disagreeable, I wish that I was more disagreeable in the way I was as a callow youth. But I have grown a social skin and it has become me. The engines of my single-mindedness have a lower redline than they used to. I could fearlessly go out and have that experiment with myself given double my Dosh Point, but I'm truly not motivated to do so. It gives me a sense of pleasure to know that I can and that I would, but I moderate my want for things I know I don't need, like that new Porsche and that house in Pasadena. 

So I think I understand (Sheila's) desire to resist the temptations at all costs. If you've made peace with the life you actually have, with person you have become, then why do that experiment? Perhaps it was in a moment of insight that you promised never to be that experimental asshole. Something like that commitment must be close to the heart of the reluctant heir. Isn't it the reformed alcoholic who knows better than anyone the power of the addition? Isn't it the beaten child who knows the terror of abuse? It's it the truly loved who know the horror of abandonment? I'm guessing there is something decidedly extra in my friend's experience that has made her swear off the fortune, or knowing her, she's just hardheaded enough to will that wall into existence, except for the SUV. Gotta have a good SUV.

I know in my heart that when I first read Fortune magazine and saw the profile of three rich families, I identified with the restaurant owners of Marina Del Rey. They pulled about 300,000 per year (in the 70s) from their businesses. They could have franchised and made way more money, but for them, they knew that would just translate to more expensive Christmas gifts to buy their friends.  That dovetails with the warning I had from a close friend of means who said if I made much more money I would only succeed in spoiling my children - a wreck of a sort I would never forgive myself. So yes, I am pretty much accommodated to my distance from the Dosh Point and consequently my bucket list is very very short. I am comfortable and I don't need much more comfort. It would be nice to have that Porsche and that house and that stereo system before I spend the rest of my life maintaining my health. It would be nice to have a month to waste in Paris with the Spousal Unit. There's not much more debauchery I'm interested in, not that I can think of any at the moment, but I do want to be exhaustive here.

All I can think of, seriously, is funding that business that builds that system that I think the world needs and only I have thought of, and time to write my books. It was that first opportunity that made me feel opportunistic when I heard the news. So it is in this I must face my lazy indifference and the possible disorder of my priorities. It is in this I deal with my own faults, a motivation I would lose if I suddenly had Uncle Bunny's money. 

I think I understand the point. That's why I no longer call it Fuck You Money. I'm not trying to be more of an asshole than I already am. I'm trying to reduce my asshole footprint. Personal riches are not going to help with that, they will get directly in the way. 

When They Reminisce Over You, For Real

I only know the title of this piece sampled from some De La and I can't tell you what the joint was.That's odd for me who generally knows the OG, but not this time. So I listened and it comes sweetly in line with a friendly shout from Mark Anthony Neal, a man I knew back in the days of the blogosphere, the blackosphere and all places yonder, now more than a decade gone. There were others of course from back when I remember, first in line Jimi Izrael who got me on NPR with Michel Martin. There were my cadres from the black right, The Conservative Brotherhood, including the most effervescent and flavorful Avery Tooley and the stalwart crew including Baldilocks and the black conservative woman who set the world on fire, Miss LaShawn Barber. Long before there was Candace Owens, Shay Riley at Booker Rising ran down the facts. Prior to that I came with it on the Talented Tenth Progressive flavor at Vision Circle with the celebrated Good Doctor Lester Spence, my old boys Ed Brown, Craig Nulan and others I haven't spoken to or heard from in quite some time. Pshaw. Not long before that, I was all over various places in the pre-blog world including being the FAQ keeper at SCAA in the wild days of Usenet. That's where I met some of the men I call my existential partners - whose footsteps I could be or they could be me depending on how the wind tossed the butterfly. One of them has recently stepped up to legendary status, running the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. It's good to know good people. It reminds me to try to be good.

But I'm impatient, and I don't even suffer my own foolishness very well. As I have for the last 30 years at least, I've tried to live by the code that no concept you hold is valid unless it can be integrated without contradiction into the sum of your experience. Or as Cornel West would put it, your praxis has to have integrity. The code of your life has to compile with no errors, and you should not disregard the many warnings. You stand the risk of running in infinite circles. Somewhere around the end of 2007 when I was trying to help put Microsoft on the EPM map and a toxic green goo of mortgages started eating a hole in the floor of the American economy, I underwent a series of tough revisions that continued through the election of Barack Obama. I came to the slow realization that identity had tipped the scales away from reason, and I had to quit investing any effort in politics. Around the same time, continuing in my mad scramble for the dosh point, aka 'fuck you money' I assumed a bit too much about that realm called 'upper management' as well as that called the 'upper middle class'. I reset and went Stoic. I was fortunate to get a heads down job that I could work at home and enjoyed the blessings of focused technical work, let my face grow shaggy and began my martial education. I became friends with the local first responders, the local gunsmiths, the local FBI agents, the local dojo masters, the local gyms and the art of making brilliant salads. I had high and low points, and one notably on the same day having completed at the age of 57 a grueling ruck. It might be said that this was all part of becoming a military dad, but it was about my own health and getting away from political thrash and trash.

Nowadays, my Stoic journey is mostly complete but I've learned that an attitude of mockery can only get you so far in politics. I can't say that I am entirely done with writing. Even though there's nothing I want to tell and explain to the world, I still need to be a good example. So I think it is time to walk as a man in full, well in the moment, beholden to my own ethics, remaining anti-bullshit, but as open and social as possible. I don't have much more to do to protect my family, and I still have some great stories and good ideas in me. I've made some pretty excellent friends too.

So when I look at that black life, I'm left with very little but the sweet BBQ crust on the grill of my life. There's a flavor that will never disappear, but these days it's more than just pork ribs I'm grilling. It's bulgogi. It's not only Kingsford for the fire, I'm doing it just fine with propane and propane accessories. It's an odd feeling not to want to do anything particularly blackified, but I'm used to it. What I'm not used to is looking like an old black man and I hardly know what to expect of outward expectations. Still, I think like with every other experience down that disciplined road of non-contradictory integration, what I will continue to do is tell the straight story. They say that the human body replaces all but its brain cells every 7 years. It's curious looking back at what I was into 15 years ago. Well, I wrote what I needed to write.

These days, over in Quora where I spend most of my time online, I answer a good percentage of the questions they throw me. It gets me about 200k hits a month, which is better than I ever got on the blog. That's the preferred format for the moment, because I don't have to put stuff out there from my own imagination. People ask me. I like that, and it's a long format. I was surprised to get 6k karma points over a weekend just posting a picture of my parents wedding at Reddit. I mean we are pretty good looking but it's difficult swallowing that one post being the most popular thing I ever did in 20 years online. I continue to write my mostly serious and expository stuff here at Cobb, if only to keep track of where I'm thinking outside of work. And Facebook is for anyone who wants to be a lightweight friend. I have an odd mix of twitter followers @mdcbowen, and I really do hope to increase that and do some more vlogging on YouTube. I'll try to get some kind of hookup with the IDW which is for me right now the most righteous thing on the interwebz.

I'm a traveler, and some might even call me a pioneer. What I know for sure is that if I have a real curiosity, or something to prove, I'm not afraid to go there. I took the test and I'm very high on openness to experience. I did a tally and I have been to 96 of the 150 largest cities in the US. Sounds like me. Speaking of which, it's about time to hit the road. I'll let you know when I get my Porsche.

From Liberal To Conservative To Neither

Many people with whom I engage online have come to know me because of the work that I did as a black conservative. It is often difficult for them to see me in any other context. A question I answered on Quora may help those with genunie curiosity. 

Q. What turned you from liberal to conservative?

A. Seeds were planted all through my life. I noticed contradictions and lapses in Left politics. Having grown up with both my parents as cultural Marxists and social workers, I was right in the middle of the vanguard.

The first blow to that thinking came in the form of the work by Thomas Sowell whom I read in college. This was about the same time as the second Reagan presidency lead the country out of inflation. So by the mid 80s I was definitely pro-business and while not a supply-sider, definitely mindful of all economic aspects of political thinking. Having worked in a bank in the early 80s, I understood that people could not game the market and had no misgivings that capitalism was rigged against the people.

The second thing that happened was I came to understand the limits of Affirmative Action, having written the algorithms of the Balanced Workforce Model of Xerox Corporation that won awards from the Business Roundtable as the most progessive organization. From that I started to understand the actual supply and demand as well as the impact of political thought on meritocracy. Basically Affirmative Action is little more than a planned economy. In that way, it can never work and never not be controversial.

Thirdly, I came to recognize the ego-driven mendacity of the ‘activist’ world. I did so by participating in that smushy landscape of performance poetry and bohemian self-righteousness. It was fun, but it was not productive. Around that same time I began to sense that which was best described by David Graeber (the man who coined ‘we are the 99%’) as the ‘bullshit economy’. I ran from it and started taking money more seriously. Well because I got married and had kids, quickly. I moved to the South from NYC.

Then in quick succession several things happened to me that pushed me over the edge. Of course there was 9/11. Then I finally read some real history about the Soviet Union and learned (in my 40s!) how evil Stalin was. Enron collapsed and cost thousands of people their jobs, but Stalin murdered that many people every week. I had a fairly large payday and started to personally experience how it felt to be envied and hated for being rich. I found myself shopping at Walmart and immediately recognized the actual diversity of people that low prices and competitive capitalism serves. I completely lost all contempt for the working class. I found out that only about 3,000 people were ever lynched in the entire history of the post-civil war era.

So ultimately I saw where I came from as childish and self-serving and I was determined to grow up. I decided to understand the Right as well as I understood the Left. It was very surprising how much intellectual depth I found. It was right in front of me all the time but I never paid much attention or took it seriously. It took several years for all of this to gel, and ultimately I abandoned political conservatism but I came to respect a way of thinking that I had never participated in. I walked the miles in conservative shoes.

After I tired of political conservatism (it took about 8 years), I began engaging in what I call my ‘martial education’. At the same time as I recognized the divergence between Progressivism and standard Liberalism, I recognized how Identity Politics as well as a fanatic ideological puritanism struck Conservatism in the mainstream. So I see a wide variety of threads in these ideologies, few of which have clarity to their participants and partisans. I gradually adopted Stoicism which ultimately was fairly simple. These days I am fascinated (still) by history, and newly by psychology which as a computer science guy is fairly rare. Also behavioral economics and Taleb’s Incerto is fascinating to me and I really hope to square the circle by understanding the philosophy of religion. I expect big things from Aquinas, Nuemann, Jung, Spinoza and a few others.

I think the biggest matter of political philosophy that faces Western Civilization is that of relativism and shallow atheism. There is an essential lack of discipline of thought that only a certain element of ruin will adjust. Our ruling classes are currently not threatened by the nihilism they tolerate and are easily able to retain power in a lazy way. It seems to me that on certain conservatives perceive this threat, while the rest appear content to Let It Be. It’s not worth it to me to pledge any fidelity to any cadre of political philosophers. My way is to be Stoic and let things fall apart, but with a stubborn streak of public engagement of this sort in Quora. Now I really have to get back to work…

Turning Japanese

My relationship with the Japan in my mind started in college when I read Nathan’s biography of Mishima. I did read ‘Patriotism’ in high school and I understood its beauty. His idea of the ‘unity of pen and sword’ appealed greatly to me.

Like many Americans, I read James Clavell’s Shogun books during the 80s. Also the film Kagemusha was a big hit on the art house circuit. I wasn’t into it - I was kind of young, but I did remember. By the mid to late 80s, Americans like me were totally into Kurosawa films. Coming from Los Angeles as I did, I actually grew up with Japanese Nisei in the Crenshaw area. My friends and I were into Datsun mini trucks when they first came out. And the 510 was awesome.

The more I think about the subject, the more I remember. Part of the admiration came from the fact that in the 80s Japanese companies were buying American property. I seem to recall the Dai Ichi Kangyo was said to be the most powerful bank in the world. And of course everybody loved Nikon cameras more than American cameras.

Eating sushi was a big deal in LA. That too happened in the mid 80s for me. But it wasn’t until the late 80s when I finally realized how much I had been impressed with things Japanese. That is when I started studying Taoism, and also reading the Akira manga. Prior to that, a Japanese friend of mine was very much into the ‘cute’ and she introduced me to Han Gyodon. Ultimately I adopted Badtz Maru as my desk pet. But Otomo’s comic and the Tao kind of did it for me. When I read Shogun, I decided that I would run my house in such a way that my wife would make all of the financial decisions, so that I would be free of such concerns - money would not color my judgement. Unfortunately I turned out to be the one who was smarter with money.

At some for a short time I had a Japanese girlfriend. She came to the US because she liked the freedom and imagination of Americans. On the other hand I was attracted to Japan for its order, formality and traditional ways. I wanted to be able to think both ways, so it was important for me at the time.

I have never been to Japan, but I continued enjoying Kurosawa, with Ran being my favorite film for many years. But as I got older, I was not so fanatical about it. Today I am very comfortable with all things Japanese that make it over to the US.

I think most Americans simply enjoy Japanese food and consumer goods but don’t think very much about Japanese culture. Young people definitely enjoy Japanese videogames and heroic style.

 

How I Failed

Q: What is the hardest problem you ever faced as a student in highschool?

A: Motivation. And I failed.

I went to an exclusive prep school. I didn’t study, I was just smart. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I high passed all my standardized tests, but didn’t really care. Nothing was particularly interesting to me - until I started programming computers. I had no idea, seriously not a half of a shred of an idea how anybody on the planet could make money with computers. You just go work at IBM, right? In those days, most colleges didn’t even have Computer Science degree programs. It was all Electrical Engineering. Saying ‘software’ in those days was like saying ‘chip design’ today. Unless you know somebody who was actually doing that in one of the three or four giant corporations who do it, chances are.. no chance.

What we’re doing right now, was impossible. In fact, computer people absolutely hated programmers who used computers for text. Computer space was way way too expensive to waste on words, much less paragraphs and essays. Computer space was for numbers! And basically I hung around a bunch of Jesus freaks, hippies, stoners and political activists. I wanted to make some money, but I thought money was evil. Yeah. I was that stupid. I literally thought that the most wonderful thing I could do with a computer is put a million accountants out of work so that they could learn to write poetry and enjoy hiking in the woods. I was not alone. It was the 70s.

The inside of my head looked something like this:

Oh. Did I tell you, I had skipped a grade so I was 16 in my senior year. I got accepted to Electrical Engineering at USC on an early decision in January. So you couldn’t tell me shit. I basically daydreamed for my whole second semester (because I finished all my required classes) destroyed my GPA and chances for an academic scholarship. Not that I ever really tried after 10th grade.

So basically I had no motivation, and I didn’t care that I had no motivation. I was immature, arrogant and a little smart ass. I fit nowhere and didn’t really try that hard, and I didn’t really ask for any help, because I thought that I had already thought of everything. Which I probably did, but still wouldn’t listen to what other people told me. Like, “Maybe you should accept that 4 year scholarship, even though it’s not from USC.”

There’s a big long story in all that and maybe I’ll write a book about it. But the bottom line was, I could have had it all, but I didn’t really have faith in people, or the System or anything outside of my own existence. I should have just shutup and listen. The story has a happy ending. I rebuilt my life from scratch and finally made use of my talents. But I could have saved myself a lot of time and heartache if I had a bit more faith in my fellow man instead of so much in myself.

In that regard, I was just young and not as smart as I thought I was, and actually really afraid to fail or be embarrassed. I was fragile, and it made me a jerk. I couldn’t admit that I didn’t have all the answers. I just figured that I’d find out all the answers sooner or later. I did, but not the way I planned. You see by the next January I dropped out of college and ended up working at a store like Costco. So much for the power of genius.

—

So my advice is this:

• Don’t be brittle. Bounce back.
• You cannot cure yourself. Share your pain. Show your scars.
• Have faith in your fellow man.
• Shutup and listen.
• Make yourself useful. People will be grateful.
• Motivation is not about speeches, it’s about determination to grow.
• Let people tell you where you need to grow.
• Be generous with yourself.
• Be the friend that you wish you had.

So that’s the best advice I could give to arrogant little dramatic douches like I used to be. I’m not presuming that it’s your problem, but my biggest enemy was myself. And it wasn’t until I opened up as a person that I was able to overcome my shortcomings. A big part of that involves being open, honest with yourself and trusting others to help you when you are failing. It applies to every aspect of life. The sooner you learn that and experience it for yourself, the more fearless you will actually become.

I’m a much better person for all of that, and that’s really what makes life worthwhile, is being a better person. Success favors the emotionally prepared.

 

In This Moment

For the first time a couple weeks ago, I happened to grab some skin on my thigh and I was able to pinch more than ever. More than I've ever noticed before. It was kind of a shock, because I don't feel frail. But perhaps it's time to admit that I'm looking down one of the last tunnels. I think for the first time I'm beginning to think of looking to lower the river instead of building a mightier bridge. It's a weird notion, and almost foreign to me.

The first time I ever got laid off was in 2001. It was a landmark year for everyone. I was to turn 40 that year and was dealing with tax and custody problems. It was the first time in my life where I considered the possibility that my best days might be behind me. They weren't, but it took about three years of risk to get all the rewards. I began to recognize the kind of desperate ferocity that I saw in others as they pursued their careers. I looked towards my feet and saw the space below like the gaps in the floors of a fire escape to the hard pavement 10 floors down. I was at something of a dizzy height, not in absolute terms, but relative to where I had been before. Of course people say 40 is when you are 'over the hill', and that kind of joke has its currency for a while. But it was a fact that I had achieved technical mastery of the tools I had used to fuel my career, and now people were just building newer ones and calling them next generation. It's a different perspective when the leading edge moves away from you and you're not really impressed.

So many things have happened in the intervening 18 years. I feel greatly expanded. I feel capable of handling so much more bad news and so much more triumph. I have gone from a small balloon to a large one, where before I needed helium to rise, now I only need hot air. Where before, I could be popped by one prick (and I've met my share of pricks) now it takes a determined axe to take me down. Of course I'm a bigger target with large bright colors. Some might even say graceful and majestic. Some might say full of gas with no particular direction.

I think what I recognize this year that makes the most sense is that there is always a great deal more reality to face than we might like. It's always out there, and when you keep your head down with the assumption that your feet are headed in the right direction, there's always the chance that change has overtaken your attention. Yet you can always raise your head and adjust course. There are always landmarks you can identify. There are always distances you can measure. So long as you keep your boots on, you can get on a profitable trail.

I have the advantage of watching men and women who are senior to me, as well as those younger. It is pleasant to watch the young become bold as the old make accommodations for their shrinking ambitions. I have discovered how much I feel that I have lived a gratifying life and how that gratification leaves me disposed to be honest and reassuring. Several years ago I assumed the position of asshole who was not anti-social but anti-bullshit. I know how that can be inspiring. I know how that can be dangerous. The truth serves no one, except perhaps those whose appreciation is done at a distance. So often we end up rewarding courage posthumously. Who wants to take the time to raise their heads and try to be objective when the strategy, money, glory and patience is headed away from the truth? I suppose only the honest man who knows the value of honest work and is so dedicated. That is what I have been doing, with consistency. I am conscientious. But I am also open to new experience.

It is new experience that has added volume to my ballooning skin. Over the past three years I have dealt with chaos and frailty in my job and my family and finally in myself. Right now I am in the middle of a pace that doesn't feel like courage so much as it feels like facing that which I refused to deal with as I might have. A couple years ago I took pictures of myself after dental surgery, and didn't mind so much that I looked ridiculous. I few years ago I realized that 'good genes' were not enough to keep me going - when I found myself panting going up two flights of stairs. It was and remains difficult for me to distinguish between what I do to make myself useful and make myself happy. I realize those are both my responsibility and that I shouldn't abandon either as one reinforces the other even when I cannot prioritize either. That confusion has landed me in bed with anxiety and depression; two sides of the same black dog. Yet purpose remains. So in this moment, I have a kind of joyless purpose. It is joyless partly because of the medications I am taking and partly because I acknowledge that my purpose cannot end. I will die trying something. I will die trying something. And so I feel capacious. I can handle more pain without yelling. I can answer more questions without yelling. I can do a lot more without passion. It is good to be king, but it doesn't feel good. It feels like you must always say we, because you encompass more than just your own life. You must move forward and pull everyone forward with you, or at least shout out the direction. That right now is the meaning of my life.

My youngest is now in Spain, finishing off the last credits of her university education. My children are neither brilliant or impressively ambitious, but they are all good people. They're the kind of people you want to be around. They are the kind of people who appreciate life. Despite my inadvertent spoiling of them all, they get it. They are grateful and they are excellent company. I am impressed by their willpower. They are hardheaded bulldogs. So I have been giving myself credit for having done the father thing well, and it is, such as it is, that accomplishment for which I am completely satisfied to call my greatest. I know now that I am exactly human whereas I thought I might never be ordinary. I finally saw that dramatic presentation that convinced me that I would not abstract any good from denial of my earthly loves. Any terrorist brute could compromise any secret I know if my family were threatened. I'm OK with that, because I might survive to take revenge. I only pledge so much allegiance to any flag.

Today, having studied more psychology than I ever expected, I am accepting of the fact that I don't know myself as accurately as I expected to. That is because I am open to experiences I never expected to be. It has not been sufficient for me to remain true to one course in life. I have turned left and right; I have turned it up and calmed it down. I have gone full force. I have shutdown completely. I've always said that a little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing. I realize it is Buddha's Nothing, it is everything and nothing at once. So now I am almost ambivalently large. I am yet so satisfied to have the integrity of the moment and to string those moments together. That is how I remain myself, as contradictory as it seems. To allow myself to be open to the new and the different. It's not, as David Bowman said, "full of stars". It's full of humans. I'm sure that I know humans better than I know stars. So I'm well disposed to know all the humans I might become, depending upon what circumstances the planet and stars may throw my way.

What's changing about me is my willingness, yet again, to presume I have so much to tell people. I'm not carrying a message. I'm carrying, if anything, a habit of being perceptive and articulate. So I am carrying the context of myself, sloughing off my own skin as I am dragged through life. Perhaps not only should I stop writing 'objectively' but stop reading. After all, what is it that I really want to know? I want to do that which I think needs doing in my own field of endeavor, and I only need to know how. I am not challenged by the rest of life to name the passage in the Bible, or the stanza of Shakespeare, or the canto of Dante. I only have my worrisome curiosity and my expository habits. The arena is not noble or arcane. It is merely the stomping grounds of Fat Tony. I am not Maxiumus enslaved and I don't care if you are entertained. I'm just that pain in the ass who keeps parsing speech, making wry jokes, telling stories and analyzing. I can always stand a change of subject, but for now I don't seem to want to shut up. I'm still in the habit of free and mind-altering speech.

I watch violent fights. I read histories of battle. I immerse myself in the study of tragedy. I think I realize the bell tolls for me. Perhaps the random bomb will fall on my Bleak House, no matter how well I have fluffed the pillows and kindly tucked my charges into bed. I am stoic, perhaps properly Stoic, but I don't have or take every opportunity to show how. I merely live and leave this trail. I'm not sure if words are enough. So there will be video. Things I will be embarrassed to watch at some time in the future, perhaps. See me? That's my picture. Unlike the past two times, I am not in the dark. Life is a challenge at every level at all times for all days. I'm still standing. I suppose I may as well be poetic.

Decolonization Deconstructed

Q: What's all this I hear about 'colonization'?

When I used to employ this jargon, for me it was about a 'decolonized mind'. When you are *outside* of the 'system' as many people from enclaves are, you identify with your neighbors, some old traditions, archetypes, myths, religions, patterns of speech etc. So there is always a sense that *your* America is exceedingly different from 'The' America. And what 'The' America wants from you is to correct your English, get a haircut, stand up straight, wear a tie, learn X, Y and Z and all this is the necessary toll for access to that place where the success is.

So the paradigms of tribal vs cosmopolitan, pidgin vs King's English, civilized vs natives, educated vs ignorant, civil vs criminal, respected vs condemned all map very conveniently to white vs black, gay vs straight, inner city vs upscale suburb, bodega vs bistro. Again this harkens back to 1990 when Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider was blowing a certain subset of American minds.

So all of the things that weren't considered 'corporate' in the 80s, in the days of network television, were placed in this context. What did Gordon Gecko want you to say? 'Greed is good'. The Man was taking as his toll for your inclusion in 'The' America, the colonization of your mind. Anything and everything that made you different from the Kings of the World, was that which made you a native. So what is the American system of education? It is the colonization process of your mind. It turns you filthy, nasty Boyz in the Hood into respectable citizens. It bleaches your soul so that you can walk past the doormen, police, vice-principals and not give off that peasant stink.

For my case, the educational theory of Paolo Friere played into the mix. So if you want to know how it was that the Multiculturalists got up the nerve to bomb the Canon, it was from his cues. Friere essentially posited that all non-technical education is a barf-back method. Or what he called 'banking'. The student is an empty vault. He only gains value when he accepts, without alteration, that which the professor deposits in his mind. Friere wanted to change this and make education non-hierarchical and interactive. That the student should be responsible for changing the professor. This is the only path, sayeth Friere, towards the decolonization of the oppressed - resistance to the aristocracy of the professoriate.

So basically this is part of the theoretical framework of the disunification and tribalization of America. The taught idea, now prominent in post-modern universities, that a fundamental transformation of the soul is what the powers that be demand of anyone seeking a living wage - that you don't belong if you lie along any of the intersectional axes of oppression, and that you must be committed to lifelong struggle because Gordon Gecko and his ilk run this whole country. How do you know them? You know them by the way they swim in America, freely, without any consideration of the water itself, the water of America that drowns all of us outsiders. Decolonize your mind, stay filthy nasty Boyz, that is your only integrity.

Now you understand everything about the Culture Wars.

Now the thing to understand about these pictures is that the above picture with me in the tie was the 'before' and me in the bandanna is the 'after'. I had already spent my college years on track to be that which I wanted to be - a young urban professional. You see I had already been a union employee having dropped out of college after a semester at USC. That entry level job that I got 4 years too late did not captivate me completely. I wasn't giving it up of course, but I needed to understand what all this multiculturalism was about. The writer part of me was intrigued by guerilla poetry, the reader part of me was astonished by Toni Morrison and the yuppy part of me was bored with pool parties. Every part of me could not afford the down payment on a condo in Los Angeles, so I traded to the opposition. (They had better music too.) 

It took about 3 years to put down that rebel in me. But I firmly understood the theoretical ground upon which I stood. Ultimately I realized that I wanted to get married and have children and that fatherhood was totally incompatible with the mindset of a rebel. 

A Note About the Black American Elites

(from the Quora Archives - Feb 2016)

Q: Do they mostly live in DC and ATL?

A: It's more or less true. Among my peers who generally have graduate degrees, there are a handful of cities that are considered when they want to start off their careers. I would say that there is a select subset of folks who, like me, got fairly deeply into black organizations, clubs or fraternal orgs in college. So we had a certain social credibility that we wanted to extend into our professional lives. So for that kind of glory, we would naturally ask, where are the smartest, coolest most well-connected black folks going to be found in America?

The DC area became one of those spots primarily because of the number of political connections that could be had. While the Congressional Black Caucus was in its heyday and one might be within whispering distance of power brokers like Ron Brown or Kweisi Mfume, there was no better place to be than inside the Beltway. So what generally happened was that the reputation and the actual demographics of Prince George's County went through the roof. 'PG' County was still pretty high up the list last time I checked.

It bears repeating that among the black elite, there are hangouts and vacation spots that are popular just as with all elites. Again I can only speak about what was hot back in the late 80s to mid 90s when I was one of those singles trying to maximize. All you have to look for, really, was the National Brotherhood of Skiiers Summits, or perhaps a Sinbad concert in Jamaica. Also the Essence Awards were a very cool place to make such connections. Talking to those folks, you could easily find out where the cool kids were living.

I lived for a short time adjacent to Fort Greene in Brooklyn where Spike Lee hung out. Soon after I got married, I headed down (by mutual agreement) to Atlanta. I still have fond memories of tooling through the suburbs just East of downtown out Cascade Road and admiring that particular set of upscale black residences. Oh. look that's where Evander Holyfield lives. Oh, Gladys Knight lives over in that neighborhood. In the end, I returned to Los Angeles, but for a time I was seriously flirting with that particular suburban lifestyle. It's all about the right neighborhood and the right church in the right city.

What's particularly appealing about these enclaves is that they come automatically with a Cosby-Show prestige. (No matter what Cosby does now, does not erase that glory which was the Huxtables). It's something that matters less these days, but back in the times before people even considered Colin Powell, this was about as prestigious as you could get.

Understand that this primarily applies to black Americans in the upper middle class, folks who can pick and choose more or less where they want to live. But rich black Americans require a little less of this prestige. I mean when you actually are Evander Holyfield or Prince, you can build your house where ever and *you* make the neighborhood, rather than the neighborhood making you.

Los Angeles still has some prestige. There are established neighborhoods like View Park, Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills that still have drawing power. Also certain parts of Altadena and Pasadena have that old school appeal. But as I talk you young folks now coming out of grad programs with minds for money, they are not so concerned with such associations. They are buying real estate for market value in unfashionable neighborhoods, improving them and then selling them or renting them out. Similarly, my kids now in their 20s pay little attention to the old school prestige of these traditionally upscale black neighborhoods.

I think that there is nothing particularly unusual about this. Black America is simply a much larger ethnic group and every part of it does not mainstream or rise in society at once. I've known folks with five generations of college whose fortunes have risen and fallen and risen again, all with different relationships with these neighborhoods and their equivalents in foreign countries. But I think there will always be some upscale black folks around DC, ATL, NYC and LA. That's an American tradition. (Chicago, I don't know.)

 

A Manly Dump

This isn't about them being a trashman, it's about me being a trashman. You see I didn't call Republic Services to come pick up my icky unwanteds, I called them to find out where I could dump them myself. I got an address in Compton, I took a UHaul truck full of trash, garbage, old furniture and a 12 year old flat screen that I paid 1400 for.

There's nothing weirder than sitting in line between two garbage trucks. That's what I did for about 15 minutes at the West gate of the facility in Compton. When it was my turn, I pulled up my truck onto the scale (whoo a little bouncy there) got out and talked to the man in the booth. He told me that it costs 115 per ton to dump my stuff, asked me what I had to get rid of and directed me to a lane in the yard.

I have never been to a landfill or a dump, but I have fed pigs. This dump does not smell as bad as a pig sty, which isn't saying much. Basically it smells like old garbage, and of course there are gulls crawling all over the place. There is a giant concrete structure with 6 lanes. Garbage trucks are in the noisy process of dumping their contents and somewhere in the huge pit below, a bulldozer roars and scrapes. Finally the boss directs me over to lane six and says dump it here. I'm a little hesitant because all I can see is a huge pile of old mattresses. Dude, I have wood and steel.

I put on my gloves and my son and I start tossing junk out of the back of the 17 foot UHaul truck into a growing mess behind it. I gotta tell you it's a manly feeling to watch an old bookcase split into pieces when you give it the heave ho onto the concrete. It's all noise and destruction. And stink. Yeah lots of stink too. We had gloves but not masks. Despite the smell, and perhaps because of it, I experienced a kind of bourgeois cleansing watching that old Samsung get dashed to bits.

It took about 10 minutes to send about 1000 pounds of junk to wherever it goes from here. I tell you it's quite an invigorating bit of exercise. We weighed out and got our receipt. Man that was fun.

I Remember Cult of the Dead Cow

I can remember back in 92 or so when I discovered the Cult. They were definitely cool, and surely punk. I was just around that time getting more interested in the lo-fi of UNIX, but not deeply. (Damn you Xerox!)

 

Here's the odd thing. I was working in Cambridge and starting to do that kind of hacking thing, but I chose to go Mac and multimedia instead of building a minix box. I was already at panix.com and was also at the Well, so even though I appreciated the lo-fi, I never expected anything from the punks. Still, cDc had cool stuff.

 

So one night I'm surfing and some dude wants to talk to me. I give him my work phone number. He's asking me all kinds of questions about this underworld. Especially 'zines', but he pronounces it with a long i, like it rhymes with 'pines'. His story is that his son has started getting into punk zines and ran away from home and now he's desperately trying to figure out this BBS underworld. I generally assumed that he was FBI and trolling me to reveal something. I wasn't so into the scene that I could be of any help, but he could have been legit.

 

The coolest domain in the world at the time, next to panix.com and well.com was world.std.com. Software Tool and Die. cDc was right up there. Oh shit I almost forgot L0pht. L0pht Heavy Industries. I definitely wanted to join L0pht. It sparks joy as I think about it now. I can't tell you how close I got to moving over to that dark side. Wow.

 

--

As much time as I spent in virtual worlds, for me it was always about the premises of augmentation as defined by the PARC dudes. I never really bought into the soul of the new machine, and I guess I was in the game far too soon, but that's a long story. I liked being in the streets as an arcade gamer. So yeah finding cheats online for Virtua Fighter was a coup, but doing stuff online - well I already had the Internet Hunt and the goings on at Well. The internet as a playground for punks wasn't appealing. See I can remember the UNIX wars and I wanted, more than anything else, to reap the whirlwind of the Xerox promise that Apple was maybe sorta just kind of approaching. Except of course that Apple didn't understand data at all. I was still thinking that I might get to be a rocket scientist on Wall Street.  I might have also, now that I think about it, ended up at Peoplesoft which was also over Cambridgeside, but meh. It felt a little granola crunchy for my tastes. So yeah, it was my material ambition that prevented me from doing the punk thing. Well, more my curation of self, and how I expected to live.

A Brief History of Cobb on the Black Hand Side

Steve Fair, semi-nemesis observes the following:

Cobb since I've known him has always tried to make the case that black people are these emotional sheep who have been indoctrinated to believe that conservatives were primarily greedy selfish racists when they really are saintly paragons of freedom, liberty and free market capitalism. No matter how many times we see conservatives serve the interests of the top 1% at the expense of the average American, or increase the size of government, or engage in nation building on the other side of the world, admit to voter suppression, or demonize people of color, that's his story and he's sticking to it.

 

If I ever did that, I regret it fully. I have absolutely no interest in saying black people are anything at all. If I ever did, it may be some artifact of my upbringing in the Talented Tenth and my history of 'black leadership'. In 1986, I made it fully clear that I believed that black unity was a myth and that I would no longer support that idea. As such I acknowledged black diversity in every dimension. It was my reading of Drylongso finally in 1993 that compelled me to give up the idea of 'black leadership' itself, at which point I vowed never to second-guess black people or say 'black people should'. I do not. Nobody should ever assume that I have a plan for black people - or consequently that I really truly care who black people are or what they choose to do. My standard byline and bottom line is "Some people find it very difficult to accept that they don't own black people, that includes black people."

 

So then from that point on, all I had was my own black past, which was (and remains) very ideosyncratic. I'm from a small town called Black, and I moved out a long time ago. Nevertheless, I had retained some interest, in black anti-racist politics. So somewhere around 1997, I made that the focus of my writing, very much in league with the Race Traitor movement. So between 1993 and roughly 2001, I made it a project to develop a singular anti-racist praxis which worked along multicultural lines. Adam Serwer is at that place now. It was during that time that I played Boohab and built Boohab's Factotum and The Race Man's Home Companion.

 

The last time I paid attention to Reparations, I did so following the Harvard Law professor whose name I do not remember right now. But then I asked the question in economic terms. What happens if Reparations don't happen? I called it 'The Cost of Not'. Then 9/11 happened and everybody everywhere completely stopped talking about Reparations.

 

Somewhere around 2003, having lived comfortable in the upper middle class nearly a decade, my class prerogatives took over. While I was still interested in anti-racism, it was clear to me that the random racism of American life was a footnote in mine. All of my anti-racism was academic. So I started to think about real political power and question why more black Americans did not seek political leverage on both sides of the aisle, like ordinary rich people do year in and year out. So I became intrigued about the fate of rich and powerful black people and the possibilities of integrating the Republican Party. I started my new blog Cobb. But before that, I got together with some of the sharpest black thinkers online and put together Vision Circle. All of these remain, unedited and in my control. So there's that.

 

With Cobb, I went on a simple journey into the American Right that turned out to be quite complex. It was deeply enlightening. But blogging as a 'black Republican' grew tiresome after about 3 years. So I quit blogging altogether, and then came back with a new angle. Since I had formed The Conservative Brotherhood, and did some media stuff on NPR and TV One, Cobb the blog became famous. But it was still a persona I created for a specific purpose. That purpose was over pretty much around -- I don't know 2006?. I changed Cobb's subtitle to "curious, skeptical and analytical". And then finally to its present form "stoic observations". The end of my actual political agitation was in 2007 owing to my disgust with identity politics but I had won black blogger of the year that year.

 

I'm still most famous as Cobb, and that is what it is. What persists from the conservative conversion is an organic defense of Western Civilization from its first principles, something I started around 2005 or 06 when I got into Dan Carlin and Larry Arnn as introduced by Hugh Hewitt. At that moment in my life, history became more interesting than the present. Still I sought to understand what was happening to the liberal left I grew up in and why it seemed so wacky. I finally came to understand the difference between liberals and progressives as well as the travesty of multiculturalism's dysfunctional fueling of identity politics. So I read Orwell to understand why the Left considers itself more moral than the Right.

 

These days, especially after the crash of 2008 and the re-election of Obama I can't say what my interest in blackness is. I'm agnostic. It isn't a compelling subject for me. I think everything that group identity could possibly be with political implications, I have a good understanding of and am immune to its charm and dysfunction. So it's just something I talk about from time to time with no agenda. I don't have dogs in those fights. So I guess you could write the end of my blackness was the beginning of the Obama era, because finally America had a bigger Negro it could use for its purposes. I still retain all I ever knew, and I don't have a problem recounting it or explaining anything I ever meant by what I wrote. But my interests and agenda lie elsewhere outside of identity and outside of politics. Around that time, my interest turned back to science fiction, The Long Now and ultimately my Peasant Theory and Martial Education. But it's probably best to read all that here at Cobb and see what you get out of it, if anything. I can't say what my interest in conservatism is either. I know both blackness and conservatism have very large problems in establishing their respective orthodoxies, but there are rabid folks desperately trying to establish some. Ahh those poor, damaged children.

 

I could go on and talk about my current interest in writing, but there's not much to easily explain. I'm interested in the universality of psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology and I'm interested in how computers might assist people in reconciling their personal philosophies with the history of philosophy and religion. I'm further interested in how religion became philosophy and how politics is not philosophy. Again this is about placing the zeitgeist into a developmental historical context. I'm also interested in Taleb's Incerto and the entire business of risk management, security and decision-making under imperfect conditions. So it likely shocks people that I mock or ignore their passions, for whatever reason it is that they do. Mostly I engage in public fora as a wry stoic and epistemological combatant. I think most people don't know why they think the way they do, and as someone who has 'trangsgressed' a bunch of religions, industries, and political philosophies I'm just the kind of stubborn intransigent to get on their nerves. I mock and defy. I'm an asshole and I know it. But I am polite enough to make people understand that I am challenging their premises. Most people get that. Enough don't that they think they've got me nailed. I doubt it.

Aikido Dancing

I was just thinking about Aikido in my long journey to my martial education. I always loved it, but it was always too soft to be practical.

I started studying Aikido when LA got its first important dojo in what is now the LA Arts District. As I was fairly broke I would only come to talk to the master there. I was entranced by the idea of using your opponent’s force against them. Prior to that I had done a stupid little bit of judo as a kid, but quite a bit of street fighting. I have never in my adult life (maybe foolishly) felt the need to defend myself with martial arts. So it was always entirely the aesthetic that appealed to me.

Somewhere around 1993 I joined the dojo in Cambridge MA. I attended a few classes and got bored to death. Although there were wooden swords on the wall, the instructor made it clear nobody touches these for at least two years. Honest to god it felt like a dance class. So I decided to take capoeira instead. That instructor was all about showing off but at least it was honest dance. But he flaked showing up to his own class. In the end I bought a Body by Jake, got ripped and played basketball. Nevertheless there was a soft spot in my heart for Aikido.

Fast forward 17 years, 25 pounds, a wife and three kids later. I’m back in LA and ask myself what I have never learned all these years. I never had a true martial education. Why don’t I know what paramedics, cops and soldiers know? So I go to night classes and learn a bunch. One of the things I also study is firearms. I learn to shoot and all of this new knowledge changes my life. In addition I’m getting back into shape. I lose the 25 pounds doing circuit training and diet. During this time, I look for and find a couple Aikido studios, and I audit. Once again, I am less than impressed. But what could it hurt since I just want to learn the art? Well, I cannot forget the lesson I’ve learned in pistol training. You fight like you train and you train like you fight . I could clearly see these instructors would be wasting my time. It’s not fighting, it’s dancing.

One day as I’m attending a class for a ham radio license I see this dude warming up in the park. He’s doing moves like I’ve never seen. Instantly I know he’s a warrior. I speak to him and he says its Hapkido. But he doesn’t teach adults because most are fools. OK. Fair enough. So I start looking for schools that teach Hapkido. Very few. But do find one that is primarily TKD with some Hapkido thrown in.

Since I’ve lost most of the weight I wanted to and my circuit training is ridiculously expensive, I switch to TKD at the new studio. I love the instructors. But I had spent a lot of time thinking about BJJ and Krav Maga. I really wanted Hapkido. Long story short, TKD to me was more dancing. I could not remember the choreography, but whenever we grappled with the Hapkido moves, I was all over it. My natural fighting instincts go back to my judo as a kid, wrestling and street fighting.

Most recently I have done some training in ‘Kali Tudo’ under one of the instructors of the Dog Brothers . This is the most realistic martial thinking I have ever studied. It makes sense in the context of the street fighting I know, the pistol training I know, the combative tactics of police, and my desire, ultimately to train for an unfair fight as a man approaching 60 years old.

I never felt any need to be a badass, but then neither would I want to fight half-ass. I understand, because I felt for half of my life, the appeal of Aikido, but I’ve never met an instructor or practitioner who, like a cop, needs to submit violent people with prejudice and talked about his skills in those terms.

Quite honestly, I hope that the Supreme Court overrules the crap law in California so I can CCW. All this martial arts dancing is good for your ego and your posture, but I want more literal bang for my buck. In the meantime I can run fast and far enough to get clear of 99% of trouble, but if you follow me to my car…

Bottom line, let Aikido be Aikido. It’s appeal is not to badassery or unhinged fighting. It doesn’t need to be re-invented. It is what it is.

Talking My Way Forward

This year I'm going to try to do some ridiculously ambitious things. I'm not ready to sit down and shutup. It's going to cause trouble, and I reckon it's about time.

What I'm going to do is start talking about what I want to happen with the expectation that talking enough about it will gather people towards whatever center of gravity I can generate. In the plan I thought I perfected in my mind about 8 years ago, I figured I would be wealthy enough by now. But I've been riding somebody else's camel and it's time for me to start getting my own feet used to the burning sands. So let me put it out there.

Firstly, some hotshot at Google found my profile and we talked. We didn't talk long enough for me to impress him the way he wanted to be impressed, but with all of the crap going on in my life dealing X, Y and Z, I found this a reminder of what I could be doing. Specifically, what I'm not doing, which is getting paid to think and getting paid to lead. I'm getting paid to work, which is a great privilege at any time in history. I'm getting generously paid for honest work for which I am grateful. But to the extent that I can be ungrateful for all I have, it does mean that I think I could be doing better at something else. It's up to me to prove it. So I'll take the risk. It's a kind of sorry charade, according to Epictetus, to feel liberated by exchanging one master for another. On the one hand you can say - Hey I'm doing X for Google, how cool is that? On the other hand, it's still Google's vision, not mine. At least considering that I was not hired for presenting my vision of Google, that's the case.

So what is it that I want to do? I want to revolutionize social media. In fact, I actually want to create something that I would call academic media, or scientific media, or probably best yet, philosophical media. I want all of the stuff that I write and that people write online to be subject to a different set of criteria than popularity. I want people who prefer to not express themselves in emoticons to know that what they write and say and portray online is absorbed in its long form with all of its implications. I want something that immediately connotes that 140 characters was never going to be enough. Maybe I can call it Heavy Media. Something that makes us want to append artifacts to statements like a giant Katamari Damacy of truth.

Everything I've done in my entire life can be considered in this unity going forward. I'm ready to leap. I'm ready to leave everything else behind. So I'm talking myself into it. Maybe I'll have a collaborator. Maybe I'm just a crazy wallfacer.

So I have decided that I'll start here. Cobb gets more traffic than Cubegeek and it doesn't make sense to start a new domain from scratch until that's paid for by collaborators. People who bother to read me here will be who they are, and speak up if they must.

The first thing I need to talk about is Privacy Perfection or Security Perfection through Identity Brokerage. I'm following some of the ideas of Vinay Gupta. I had a bit of this conversation the other day and I'm convinced that we have enough to be dangerous and that we will be perfecting it for the rest of time. So there's no point in waiting, and after all people will waste money on the imperfection everywhere until there is actual perfection somewhere. Somehow I'll figure out how to make a working document work - that will probably be at Github. Hmm. Sounds like a plan.

The next thing I'll want to talk about is the Circle Protocol. We'll give it a fancy name later. I've already started to describe it here. Time to make it work.

The Cars

My first car was a 68 VW Karmann Ghia. I drove it until it died. Had the engine rebuilt for 700 bucks. Drove it until it died a second time, gave it to my little sister. Probably the most unsafe vehicle ever. I know what it's like to grind disk brakes until they're almost useless.

 

After that I was a BMW dude. First a 1976 2002 which was great until the fuel system went kaput, then sat in my front yard for a year. Then I finally bought a 1984 325i. Perfect. I moved to the east coast and needed no cars for several years. But during the 80s, the perfect car for me would have been a Celica Supra. I hated American cars during the 80s; the one exception was the 1988 Ford Escort GT. When I moved to Atlanta in 1995, I needed a small family car. I got an Alitma. It was surprisingly fast and reliable. I wanted a Camry but they were selling for more than sticker and took over as the most popular car in America.

 

For a while I delayed the inevitable minivan and entertained all of the large American four doors, including the Impala SS, Chrysler Concord and Buick New Yorker. In the end I sold the Altima and got the minivan. Loaded it up and moved back to LA as a family of 5. After some time, I saved up enough to get back into BMW territory. I bought a 535i. It too was a freaking lemon. I had to replace the head gasket and it cost somewhere around 1500 bucks. Then I could always smell gasoline. I finally gave up on it and for the first time leased a brand new car. It was a 2000 VW Beetle Turbo. Most fun car I ever had, cooler than anything. People would stop and talk to me about it all the time. It ate up brakes though. I drove it from LA to Georgia and back twice. It never gave me any problems.

 

Then for a time I was broke, I ended up driving a $750 car -  a super old Mercury Sable Wagon. The kids liked it. Right about that time, I really wanted a new BMW 540. It was my ultimate dream. I test drove one and it blew me away. Unfortunately, my wife talked me into getting the larger 750iL. It turned out to be super nice. It served its purpose for about 5 years with no problems until the rear windows seized up. (Except it was rolled down.). It would have cost me $900 to fix it. Then the second one went bad. Finally, it threw a timing belt. It was just after 2008 and I found that I didn't want to be driving a luxury auto any longer. So I had been thinking about a Hummer H3, a GMC Denali or a Toyota FJ Cruiser. I went for the FJ, fully loaded. Best decision ever.

 

Meanwhile the family car was a new Chevy Impala, and later after the FJ, I bought my wife a Mazda 3 with all the gadgets. I have 115,000 miles on the FJ and it's pretty much exactly the same as when I bought it with 24,000. I've never been impressed with purchasing new vehicles or leasing. The one exception was the Beetle. Right now I'm looking to get a Porsche while keeping the FJ. I've pretty much decided on a 2014-16 Cayman GTS if I can get a good price, but I'm in no hurry right now. Depending upon how much cash I can save up, I might even go with an older model and have it custom built. The only other thing that appeals to me is to build a track car, but a convertible Carerra or Targa has its appeal too. Still, I just want a Porsche.

 

 

The Limits of Funk

About ten years ago I purchased a bass guitar. Like the millions of my generation, I was in rapture to the funk. Something about the music got into my pants and I had to get up and get down on the dance floor. The basslines of my youth are in my limbic brain like a gator in the swamps, a primitive, ancient, irresistible, a beast of prey. In a matter of months I was able to replicate its fundamental simplicity and the staid confines of my suburban bedroom. I never got to master the instrument or any of its greatest triumphs, like the bassline of Glide, but it was remarkable how easy and satisfying some Cameo and Slave were.

It has been quite a while since I've changed the nine volt battery, or even tuned my blue bass. I started with the cello as a youth and my left hand will always be too clumsy for six strings even though I think about my future around campfires plucking the acoustic. Still the basslines call out to me, and I hum internally all the right chords. Some days I think I will never learn anything new, but when I feel confident, I think about making music in my retirement. It's possible I tell myself - the music was always in me. So I think back to the basslines of youth. 1979.

I've always looked up in my life. I had never been satisfied with what is around me. I hate the very idea of feeling limited, claustrophobic amid the mediocrity of everyday life. It grinds me down to short declarative sentences. Somehow I never managed any facility with establishing elaborate friendships. I couldn't perceive my own fellow travelers. I lived for the future, for in the present I was dead, rolling my own boulders uphill, struggling against the brown leather fetters on my feet but still looking forward. I believed in my promise and I never doubted that I deserved better. But I was always conservative. I didn't run and charge and push people aside. I listened to their reasons. I considered the options. I learned the alternatives. I could quote angels and demons alike. I was even-handed and broad minded. I thought that all the winners in the world were so deliberate. I was wrong.

So while I looked forward to the ultrawave, the fusion of new wave and funk, while I listed for the next beat and melody to inspire me, I had to DJ as well. A DJ must spin the music people want to dance to. As I write this today, it never occurred to me to just listen to the radio and write down all of the hits that were playing and buy those records first. I had to look forward. With my passion for the best funk, I couldn't compromise. One Way didn't cut it. I got sick of Skyy.

There was a party in the Mid Wilshire district. Up in the neighborhood of Shatto, north and east of my highschool was an area fraught with libidinous danger in my imagination. The latin girls behind the Shatto Bowl, danced in my fantasies. Inside that bowling alley, many bus transfers from my own neighborhood, there were the eight pound balls I could swing. I bowled a rare 145. I popped on the pinballs in my senior year. And so two years after that in somebody's apartment on Commonwealth Ave, I found myself dancing while somebody else spun the records. The right kind of girls were there, articulate with permed hair in clingy dresses and heels, like the album covers of Chic. I asked and she danced. We spoke and she asked where I was at school. I worked a union job, and I didn't lie about it. She turned her back and left. I was stunned back into my brittle, peasant reality.

If you asked me in the days when I used to care, I would have told you that the next great funk band was going to be Breakwater. They had all of the elements of funk, of space, of dance. Best yet, their album cover was perfect. They made me want to wear yellow boots. They were thematically perfect and their first track was 'Splashdown Time'. Nothing could prepare me for the third track of their debut album. 'Release the Beast'. It was energetic, raw, complex and from my perspective, perfect. I spun it at every party where I was a DJ. I played in the Radio Department at Fedco when demonstrating the most expensive JVC ghetto blasters we sold. It was on all of my mixtapes. But nobody liked it better than 'Ready or Not' from Herbie Hancock. Nobody liked it better than Sister Sledge or Ray Parker. I had to admit that 'For Those Who Like to Groove' was all that, but even Parker's All-American band Raydio got shot down when I played another favorite, "Rock On'. It was as great a frustration as I could possibly imagine.

I studied the grooves. I bought the electronics. I lugged the record crates. I used Discwasher. I cranked my Advents as loud as they could handle and I delivered the all funk I had to offer. I moved the slider and the crowd moved only minimally. They got up but they didn't blow their disco whistles. I was a disabled enabler, a servant to the collective, wanting to dance, willing them to dance, like all the producers in Hollywood, guessing and second guessing the public mind. I was a 19 year old, trapped beneath my fro learning the limits of funk. It was painful. It was the end of the 70s. I was on the last legs of the first journey into the dark matter between the star souls of the billions, in my corner of the galaxy, trying to communicate through somebody else's music.

I'm listening to Boogie Oogie Oogie right now through Amazon Music. I know Taste of Honey made the hit. This version is by GQ. I never knew they recorded it. GQ was a better band but they didn't make it pop. Their disappointment must be like mine, like yours. Like every voice spoken into the space between humans and not quite heard right. Get on up on the floor. Shake it. It's alright. Boogie. Ugh! Sooner or later, we just can't boogie no more.

The Daily

On the daily it gets tiresome. I have strong fingers and I'm hanging in there, baby.

A couple years ago I gave myself a bad haircut and went to see a long awaited popular military hero movie. In the men's room after the show, I met an irascible old man who grumbled that the actors in the movie didn't do shit compared to what he did in 'Nam. I took him out and bought him some drinks at the PF Chang's next door. He had come down the hill from Palos Verdes to condescend to the public. He informed me that when he was young he was a statewide track champion. He went to the war and became a helicopter door gunner. His bullets would spray but he didn't pray. "At least 100 kills" he said with a kind of practiced, gruff sangfroid. One day his chopper crashed and it broke his spine. He was told he'd never walk again. He walked like an old man for the rest of his life. He built a chemical company and lives in a multi-million dollar home with his wife. She let him out of the house, where he rarely goes. He still runs the company from home. He has beat everyone.

As I recall the story it reminds me of how Jordan Peterson says that disagreeable people make for good apex predators in the game of life. This man was certainly a case in point. He reminds me slightly of another man who was the one who loaned the computer that changed my life to the highschool I attended in the 70s. I called him to thank him one day, and he still grumbled about how OSHA set him up. He too ran a chemical company. The most successful men I know, with few exceptions, don't want to be happy. They want to win. They are only happy that they're not losers.  Life's a pile of shit that you must climb and stay rooted on top. These old climbers are kings of the hill and they'll tell you about it. They're not bragging to you, they're warning you.

Right about now is the 50th anniversary of the success of the Saturn V. Apollo 8 was the big deal, so says the YouTube documentaries I've been watching. The old cats who ran this subsystem and that for 4-6 years had precise stories to tell, in vivid memories. They had pride of accomplishment none of the Irascibles had. The Irascibles were dominators. The engineers of the Space Program were collaborators under the gun. They sacrificed for the inspirational ends announced by President Kennedy. For the Irascibles winning was the goal - it didn't matter what the ends were, just beat the guy in front of you and call next. Need I say it today we have an irascible President?

I am wavering between Stoicism and Epicureanism. I want to be on the porch, but I want my porch to be garden-like. I don't want to live in court with the inevitable jesters, catty queens and perverse, jowly plotters. Nor do I want to be forever trying to make the world incrementally less shitty than it always remains. I don't want to retell horror stories or about that one touchdown pass I caught for the Peewee Cowboys. Is this no country for old men? Should I be thinking of Canada?

I don't want to be busy without collaborators, but nobody wants to work the work I want to work. I'm faced with the problem of what to do when you're satisfied to let the world be the pile of shit that it is, and no I'm not interested in playing King of the Hill. I'm not trying to burn it down either. I'm allowing the random steps of pigeons lull me into short trances as I occasionally flick a bit of Wonder Bread their way, causing a Merovingian cause. I'm cursing in French. No, I'm interpreting the excitement of the shitkickers like Madden. But it's the same field. I know the dimensions. What to care about? What to care about? When everything disappoints you, you put on a new shirt and see how it makes you feel. You celebrate the moments you feel capable of celebration and party for your right to party. I think I am becoming decadent. I'm not interested in being a rescue ranger. Nobody wants to go to the moon and I cannot go there alone. Nothing is so interesting as the moon - its sheer impossibility is its appeal.

So is the sheer impossibility of cleaning up the shitpile, and yet I am drawn to it. My history is pointing out directions and watching people whine that's hard. Do they realize it's a shitpile? In fact the air does get fresher on the way up, when you are surrounded by people who can climb as mightily as you and the view up is more enticing than the view down. My references are only contemporary, not so classic as might interest the cool kids with the work discipline. I understand that, as the Isleys said, "My patience comes and goes, but my living has got to go on. And if you think it's easy that's only 'cause you ain't me, and I ain't you. There's a hell of a difference between the two." Everybody's pain hurts the same. But there are some burdens not worth bearing, so you succeed in order to shuffle them off to someone else. To do so with grace is the essence of nobility, although that's not something I often talk about these days. These days people pray for civility, but they shout to get their way. They have no idea about any power of nobility. Maybe that is my attraction. Yes, I still want to be noble, but I am satisfied being no-bull. I am not anti-social, I am anti-bullshit. Horseshit I can deal with. I plop a few turds myself from time to time. But I work, as this essay is work, not to have my whole life being bullshit. Am I a knight? I always wanted to be when I was a boy. I was a loved boy so why would I not? I was a boy watching rocketships go to orbit and beyond.

Did I want to escape the shitpile? No. Just my own backyard. It was only 7 miles to Beverly Hills. The stoic builds rocketships because it is a logical thing to do, and there is virtuous inspirational work to do with brilliant engineers who are similarly motivated. On the off chance you get to escape the surly bonds, there is glory. Moreover there is purpose and the satisfaction of doing good work. But the epicurean knows the name of the Maitre D at Spago. They will be around to entertain the astronauts and give them the unexpected party. Already I know which I prefer. I prefer the Porsche with the roll cage over the Porsche with the convertible soft top. Sometimes painting flowers, or playing Debussy on the piano is all I wished I need ever do.

I wonder if my studied indifference and avoidance of mankind's folly will corrupt my bearing. If I think myself no fool, am I a fool for saying so? Will the wise see right through my attempts to be wise? Was the Rabbi joking when he intimated that there was a secret handshake? Ahh. Pity me, I still seek the noble arena after all these years. Well, I suppose that's slightly better than the Fountain of Youth. But perhaps not better than the Holy Grail. I still seek a unity of pen and sword. I haven't yet worn down to walking like an old man. Nothing has broken my spine. I'm still working on the daily. I don't even really have time to be writing this, but I needed to take a pause.

I have ten computers in my house that belong to me. I threw out two last week.  Three and a half of mine are dead. There are three others. I have 23 more terabytes than I ever dreamed, not counting the dozen more or so I am leasing in somebody else's cloud. Maybe I can make them do something. I'm becoming more all about me. I've been Daddy and Hubby for 25 years. I will never not be what people have known me best for being whether or not I still care about that thing. My computers are full of the memories I have consigned to them and I do fear losing them all, but I don't sit here and look back into my time machines. I engage the enemy. I walk among the walking dead. I bring a small knife and offers of drinks at the bar. I don't want to tell the world anything. I want to listen to the sounds of them trundling up the hill and I want to harmonize with their weary work songs in that minor key. I am at peace with the world and at war with myself. When I cast myself out of my own house to watch the rocket launch or the Porsche race or the redwood forest or the morning chapel or the jazz kissa, I am engaging sacraments and proving myself worthy. This is a hope, but not a dream. The dreamer knows nothing of his dreams, but he who has hope knows what realization of hope entails. My dreams are energetically explosive. I wouldn't want to see them happen.

Once upon a time I wanted to be the KFSC, the Kung Fu Santa Claus delivering unexpected boons and kicks to the groin. Walking the streets and supplying one man's justice. Today I don't want to tell the world anything. I'm happy to listen and feed its pigeons. I'm know what I'm going to do. I'm going to love life and reflect that. I know how to be virtuous and that was my young man's drive. I'm going to remain the wry stoic and combat epistemologist because I'm as verbal as Verbal and I don't back down from a debate. I'm not bragging to you, I'm warning you. I don't start fights and I never let you know if my yield is permanent. So maybe I'm not such a noble knight after all. I am an asshole; I should introduce myself like 007. Asshole, polite erudite Asshole. Stoli rocks. I haven't decided how many rocks I need on my midsection. I'm going to drive the big yellow obnoxious offroad vehicle, and the ridiculously sexy sports car, and maybe a motorcycle again. I'm going to measure my scotch. I'm going to retain all the pride that is possible in my blood relatives and make them deserve it.

At the ass end of this life of mind of mine, I will enjoy the Earl Grey when it's the last bloody thing I can possibly do. Until the porcelain drops from my palsied hand.

The Metaphysics of Liturgy

I woke up this morning wanting to smell incense, hear organs and listen to the word of God. So I went to an Episcopal Church nearby. I do not attend church on any regular basis. It is something I occasionally feel compelled to do. And on each occasion this year it has been to a different one.

Thinking of myself as a pilgrim has put a completely different angle on these compulsions, because in fact I do seek a non-partisan approach to life's most serious questions. Having completed Peterson's Maps of Meaning, Huxley's Perennial Philosophy and Pollan's How to Change Your Mind this year I am coming to think of Myth and Mysticism more. I have also been reading more recently Gene Wolfe and turning more to the truth of myth and magic. Yesterday as I sat with a small group led by Rabbi Mordecai Finely again the idea of being a Mystic appealed to me.

What compels me at present is recognizing the limits of human perception. I think perhaps that when we don't know, there is a pattern to our guessing whenever we attempt to be logical. However when we attempt to be nihilistic or perverse little of that is sustainable. The truly lunatic end themselves. Society retains, in our material good fortune, greater proportions of those who deviate from the Logos, but this is just a cycle. When stressed, we will return to old ways. Or as a writer said, we will start naming our children with old names hoping they avoid today's madness.

In other words, love and reason are natural. Our sociability based on such is an evolutionary trait we ignore at our peril. We have the capability of self-understanding although it is exceedingly difficult. The path is through study, virtue and discipline with a good respect for chance.

But why is one liturgy different than another? Why is history taught one way in one place and another way elsewhere? What are the principled reasons why monotheisms develop particular disciplines? I think of social energies as thermodynamic. The efforts required to develop a framework of knowledge and to sustain that framework and push creations through it with fidelity are great. The mystic, perhaps, is the most efficient metaphysics. As CS Lewis says, any child can understand magic. Yet the physicist or technologist who makes his craft appear to be sufficiently like magic takes years to explain it even to his peers and apprentices. So whatever survives in our collective consciousness and conventional wisdom is the effort of tremendous parallel, independent processes. These great energies cannot be denied. Great as they are, they only evolve at the pace of social evolution. Exceedingly slowly this is done. The future is unevenly distributed, as is knowledge of ourselves, and our history. And yet human metaphysics remain because we are still yet human. There is always that constraint.



So I take liturgies as containing the essence of metaphysics. I seek to compare them. They are embodiment of a way of knowing, of moral instruction, of ethical discipline. I want to experience their differences and commonalities.



Religion is important in secular societies because they are given for free. And as that which grows more and more expensive and out of the reach of the common man, he will revert. That’s what I see happening to higher education. It is far too expensive to be practical, and its practitioners can barely afford it themselves. Yet all kinds of foolish money goes into it. To what practical end? There is much in the breach between the academy and the education of the common man. I think America will revert, but not to civil religion.



So what will work? I think a large number of things can and will work. We are transitioning to the next common medium that will sustain moral instruction and ethical discipline. I want to understand its metaphysics.

The Tale of the Counterparts

Q: As a minority, what is life like in the United States compared to your white counterparts?

A: It is fortunate that you speak of counterparts because that is a rather useful term.

I have never been, since my highschool days, one to consider white Americans to be a block, and it has always been my experience even as a black nationalist, to understand the difficult work involved in creating an ideological racial unity. Let us take religion for example. My mother grew up Catholic and my father grew up Episcopalian. Neighbors in our all black neighborhood went to different churches, and of course there were heathens as well. Neither of my parents had any religious devotion until the end of their radical politics somewhere around 1968 for my mother and 1972 for my father.. Much as people desired to create and sustain black unity all manner of simple differences among black Americans kept that from happening on a consistent basis.

Nevertheless, you could always find counterparts. When I went to church with my father, I had one set of friends. When I went with my mother, a different set. When I went to Catholic school, I had another set of friends different from those in the neighborhood’s public school. I did not attend school with any white kids until I was 12, for summer school. That was one set. The following fall, I attended a different school with white students. The following summer, I went to a day camp with another set of white kids. Within a year of my 12th birthday I found three different counterparts of white kids my age. I cannot say how common such an experience is, but it was out of the ordinary at the time, and yet I found a great deal in common with other black students with similar experiences. Over my highschool days I was somewhat uncomfortable with my own lack of general popularity like any teen, and yet I got on well enough with the various cliques, swim team, soccer team, computer club, monogram club, national merit kids.

As a big brain but a lousy student, I was well rounded but didn’t understand much at all about American society or what was expected of prep students in any deep way. I had no extended contacts of any sort into the upper middle class or upper class other than the shallow associations of alma mater. I could wear boat shoes but didn’t know anyone with a boat. Soon enough, I was sidelined from college because no money, and I found myself with a union job. New counterparts altogether. Eventually I worked my way through college and got a serious good job and moved into the upscale community that is where I live now, but then I moved at the age of 30 to New York City from LA where I grew up.

By the time I was 30 I perfectly comfortable and used to dealing with people from pretty much all walks of life, but I did so as a particular stripe of black American and spent a lot of time perfecting that image. In doing so, I didn’t really expect any parallels. The best way I could explain it was this: if all Americans were surprised and shocked at the very existence of Denzel Washington and The Cosby Show, and eventually and ultimately Barack Obama, I was the smug one who was living that life all along. To the extent I took any pride in that you could call me a Black American Prince. I don’t think I was such a douchebag, but there are I’m sure plenty folks who might disagree. Like most people with relatively good looks, relatively high IQ and relatively affluent employment, I played the role. This is something akin to what is now called ‘white privilege’, which basically means you act like gangsta rappers and diss everyone else as a sucka, except you do it with precise diction while wearing a tie and boat shoes. In this attitude as well, I had counterparts.

As I matured in my career, got married, had babies and moved to the suburbs, I found various counterparts as well, but finding them became less and less important over time. During my 30s, my ambitions had to do with finding the proper teams and markets to advance my wealth - this outside of pretty much every world generally associated with ‘minorities’.

But I should say something about being black in America which any successful black person will tell you. It’s very much like being Rocky Balboa. Sylvester Stallone is 5′ 9″. It would be ridiculous to try to deal with him as if he were short and every kind of lack in confidence you would think short men have. It’s like trying to punk Henry Kissinger because he wears glasses, or Jay Leno because he has a big chin. You’re just an idiot to assume people think of it as a handicap the way you assume. And that is precisely the idiot position that prejudiced people put themselves into. Do you actually think you’re doing me a favor by not calling me nigger? Do you actually believe I’m psychologically handicapped by something so brain dead obvious? I would literally be shocked if something like that would get to me, not by the racism itself, but the the fact that I’m facing someone so stupid and provincial that they think it would work.

At any rate, I don’t see how anyone who is reasonably successful in America doesn’t figure out a way to identify with their peers and counterparts in all different areas of their lives. It is why I think ‘race relations’ is stupid, rather like I think collective bargaining is stupid. But, having been a union employee back when I was still a teenager, I understand and recognize that there are some people who cannot negotiate with the boss on their own behalf. There are people who would seriously screw themselves over trying to get a raise or air complaints about their job, and they need some agency to work things out for them. Understood and respected, but not for me at all. So I understand that millions of Americans need to feel some confidence that they are being properly represented to The Man. I wish them the best of luck, honestly, but I know that can only get them so far.

These days I endeavor to make deeper connections to my tribes. I belong to many. As well, I make connections to history - to people who are no longer alive, to ideas and traditions deep in Western and non-Western cultures. I have lived long enough to get bored drinking KoolAid, so I’m down with scotch, (and soju and cachaça.)

About a decade ago, a lot of Americans liked to think they were living at the beginning of a ‘post-racial’ era, which makes about as much sense as saying that once you’ve been accepted to Stanford you are living in ‘post-stupid’ era or once you make six figures you are living in a ‘post-poverty’ era. No. You’re just working with a different set of counterparts, for the time being.

I suppose I should add as a final note that as the Jedi said, “There’s always a bigger fish.” I don’t waste time or energy worrying myself about the existence of people who are not actually my counterparts but are clearly my superiors, wherever they may be in life or in history. My own ambition is quite enough work for me, thanks.

--

There was a young man whose name I cannot remember, a colleague of mine. We were out drinking in the late 90s somewhere in Federal Way, WA. We were working together trying to land a deal with Boeing. He was talking about his background and a particular difficulty he had. As the conversation went on, I suddenly realized as he described his family background that I was very much like his father. Perhaps that was the reason we got along. Economically speaking, he had certain advantages that I never had being the son of social workers. He understood money and business in a way that seemed natural to me, whereas I would have to consciously discipline myself to be as financially scrupulous as he. He had good money habits and I did not.

Some years after that, I began to think about generational capabilities of economic development. It wasn't the first time, but this time (around 2003?) I did so outside of the context of demand but in supply. People often say that minorities do not succeed in various areas because of prejudices against them on the demand side. "Nobody wants to watch movies with black stars outside of America" or "There's a glass ceiling and nobody wants black CEOs". But starting after the LA Riots, I thought, nobody black I know studying business wants to run a grocery store like Koreans do. Nobody black wants to be a craft brewer. What is the shape of black ambition to begin with, and what legacies do they create to make that easy? Well that's an interesting economic study, but it is often ignored when people like to make broad comparisons between 'black' and 'white' income and wealth. Next time you hear such a discussion, ask a black person if they would like to be a cotton farmer. If you manage not to be rudely accosted, the honest answer will likely be that the thought never occurred. Black Americans may have had at one point in time, every skill but no opportunity to master the cotton industry. When the color bar was lifted, ambitions pointed in another direction. The Great Migration depleted the South of its sharecroppers.

The Famous Picture

The other day I posted this picture to a thread in Reddit called r/oldschoolcool. Prior to that moment, I had not paid much attention to Reddit. I didn't like the interface. Now at Facebook I don't much like the content, so I'm diversifying my ridiculous hunger to read what people are thinking. Well, it turns out that within 12 hours, over 17k people voted up this item. That makes it the most popular thing, by a wide margin, I have ever posted on the internet. It may not be the most popular thing about me or that I'm included in, but as a standalone artifact, this is the big one.

I wasn't around when this picture was taken so I don't know much about several of the individuals. Edie Robinson on the far left is Bruce Robinson's mother. Bruce was my aunt Sylvia's husband, brother in law to the bride. Next is the father of the bride, my grandfather Edmund Foucher, jazz musician and New Orleans trumpet royalty. Next is Deedah, aka David Cobb, after whom I'm named. My wonderful auntie Kit is my father's sister beautifying the scene next to my mother. Mom, all splayfooted is tickled pink.  Pops in dress blues is holding his mother's hand, grandmother Lucille aka Miss Madam. And of course Chico on the right is his old jolly self.

Eventually, my cousin Rod and I will probably be the ones who write the most about these folks and those closest to them not in the picture. I'll be coming back to this spot and adding on interesting stories and facts as I recall them and dig them up.

My Three Favorite Americans

This is a hard question for me. That’s because one of my rules is “Only be a fan of the dead.” That way you’re never disappointed by their possible future behavior. Also, there are things that I care about that few people do, and it wouldn’t be helpful if I talked about the T50 . The T50 are wise writers who are alive and I want to read every book they write. The last person I added is not American.

So what is it about an American that would make them a favorite keeping in mind that I need to feel that they are uniquely American? Well there’s too much to list. Still, I know it when I see it.

So my three favorite Americans are:

• Joe Rogan
• Mike Rowe
• Neal Stephenson

Why:
Joe Rogan is the kind of person you might want to dismiss as a knucklehead. He is the direct opposite. Like all great standup comedians, he entertains the bizarre and he has an excellent grasp of what makes people tick of ‘ordinary psychology’. He has a tangible ethos about what he listens to, an excellent bullshit detector and a winning way with communications. His life journey has gone in weird unexpected directions and he has emerged sane, admirable and curious. I’m sure this dude has some of the greatest stories to tell, ever.

 

Mike Rowe is just a winner. I love everything about his wit, his self-deprecation, his attitude and his grace. He’s a good guy, personified. He knows how to lay the smackdown on nonsense and hypocrisy without being a nag or an asshole. Kind of directly opposite of Joe Rogan who would be the first to admit he’s an asshole (but my kind of asshole), Mike tries and succeeds at being a gentleman. Not prissy, but a real honest stand up guy who also doesn’t go for false modesty. Plus his name is Mike. That’s American as it gets.

 

Neal Stephenson is the right kind of intellectual. He has discipline and imagination, and dammit he’s just really smart. He’s an outstanding writer and he loves the big, the huge and the ginormous. He is one of the few rationally grounded writers who can do excellent historical fiction and excellent real-world reporting. He’s brainy and intellectually adventurous, but he’s not a revolutionary. He, like Rowe, appreciates the skills that ordinary people develop and understands what happens when that body of knowledge clashes with the knowledge of experts and geniuses. He paints worlds. He loves swords.

These are my three favorite Americans. I’d love to see them in the same room.

The Mystic's Glance

The biggest difficulty of my life is knowing when, where and how I'm going to retire. Like most Americans, I've inherited the idea that the privilege is something I should expect. But like most of the haggard detectives in police dramas, there are days when I'm willing to risk it all for a last desperate act of brave integrity, knowing it will doom my security. Of course the decisions placed upon my head are not so dramatic. Nevertheless, the ducks and fish are calling out to me and I don't know how to hunt or fish. 

I began reading Maps of Meaning last night, and already I am tiring of Jordan Peterson's voice. He's not dispassionate enough for me to disambiguate his knowledge from his speculation from his personal experience, but I understand why he would read the book himself. Simultaneously, I am reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, and I'm beginning to think of him as a skinny man, and not a fat man, but certainly not an athletic man. He's Baldwin's white boy up in Harlem. How long has it been since thoughtful people gave up on ESP? Was Huxley duped by the Amazing Kreskin of his times? I want to understand what it is that thoughtful people do at the end of their cranial abilities. How quickly do they admit to the existence of magic? Or do they simply admit the mystery and tentatively accept a supernatural explanation? That's what C S Lewis did. I think he did so within reason, and so did Tolkein. The question is how readily do the masses accept their dramatic analogies teleologically? I think about it in response to my daughter's admiration for last night's theatre excursion to Jurassic World, that childish moral tale of human hubris and greed. Another movie with 1 and two halves men, in a cast of hundreds, among which are the beasts who always know which bad guy to chomp while letting good little children escape. The world of melioration is but philosophical cosplay. 

All this is to say that as I grow weary and age, at some point I face the probability that I will go all mystical and foggy. I will feign incapacity in the realm of the practical, because I will have begun to bathe in the soft salted baths of indifference instead of the bracing ice water of ambition. I don't have a reason why, and even the loss of my own soul doesn't seem worth the effort. I have lived for others too long. As much as I desire my distance from the incompetents and slothful, their plight still brings me to tears, and I don't feel sorry enough for myself. I don't hate the poor because of their poverty. I'm just not sure I can get used to the smell, nor can I encourage them through direct speech. Who am I? The tangent of my ambition is metaphysical. Worse than Hamlet is the student of Hamlet. Maybe that's what Huxley and Nietzsche discovered, and so packed up and went East. 

I'm going to go downstairs and fix up a batch of tea and microwave some frozen sausage. And I'll take a vitamin. This is all the profundity I'm worth today at 210 pounds. 

1982

'1982' is a barcade in DTLA.

I just assume that it's all about 1982, so I put on a white shirt, skinny black tie and my clubmans Falling Down style and headed to the bar EightyTwo in DTLA.

I got the high score on PacMan and three replays on Centaur. I had an Oban. I puffed a little vapor and I sorta dug the music which was and was not retro, but it was certainly loud. I met my brothers and Pops and for the time we weren't somewhat peeved that nobody in the joint cared a whit about putting the UConn game on, we had a ball at EightyTwo, the new 'barcade'.

What's strange at this moment is that although I feel like I could talk for hours about pinball and arcade videogames, I really don't feel like it. I mean basically the chick who owns the pinball machines kinda put me right in my place. I know I'm never going to step up and buy a pinball machine, even my favorite of all time, Bow & Arrow. And I know I'm never going to know more than 80% of what's worth knowing about what I kinda know. Like I eyeballed a machine that was built circa 1977 and I nailed that, but as she said, I was mostly right but wrong on the details. When I was 20 years old, I could have written a disertation of electromechanical pinball and arcade video games. I'm sure that I have spent something on the order of $2500 a year in quarters when I was in my Virtua Fighter championship form. But..

I'm out of joint and feeling somewhat weird about my relationships to the machines now that it has come around to this upscale hip joint that looks like it could have fallen off the back porch of the Standard Hotel. I popped at a million points on Centaur and turned to say, "At least machines have paid me more than I've paid them", which is true. Computers have been very very good to me. But I had several of those unbelievably low scoring balls and my typical movement of disgust was all there in muscle memory - never striking the glass, spinning around in place with my arms flailing in agony, but not wide enough to strike the next pinballer over, and never tilting in anger. It was the familiar frustration made unfamiliar by the whiskey. I never used to drink and game.

I'm all ready to drink and game if I can find the right friend to come with me. But I never have. I've always been, with very few exceptions, the lone gamer, the pickup gamer. It was never me and my crew, it was always me meeting the regulars at the arcade. Young men like myself known only by first name, if that, and their reputations as foosballers, or fighters. Whether it was Holiday Bowl on Crenshaw or Mr. Motos right across the street, or Sega Center at the Fox Hills Mall. Maybe it was Shatto Bowl or the legendary on Woody's on Figueroa. Midtown Bowl had a pretty good lineup but there was a great arcade across the street from LACC. Down on Broadway, I dropped a lot of quads, especially on Defender, yike.

My love affair with the arcades of the city is bittersweet of course. The social rules and rewards of arcade fighting games like Mortal Combat was a later phenomenon. I already was bathed in the solitude of pinball and of the digital cabinet games. It matters to get a high score on PacMan and there is that retro cinematic moment when you could stand back and have a few admirers, but as sad and lonely as it seemed in the movie Tron it was more desolate in life. We are the Tron generation and it is not entirely a happy thing to see the popularity of our old obsessions brought to life. It's a little bit shameful, at least for someone my age. There's no such baggage for the XBox generation, and I hope they enjoy and discover what joy we knew from those moments of finding treasure in Gauntlet, dodging sprites in Robotron or jumping that bridge correctly in Dragon's Lair. The social experience of an arcade has changed with the advent of Dave & Busters and now these new upscale hip joints. It's a lot less depressing than it used to be when arcades were on the outskirts of society.

Driving Fast

A couple years ago, I rented a new Corvette and took it up the Angeles Crest. I wanted to find out if I just liked fast cars or rather if I just liked driving fast. It turned out and it remains the case that I like driving fast. But like most other things, I'm a formalist and I do my extremes with a modicum of restraint. I like being competent at extreme things, I am not particularly interested at being extremely competent at anything. There is the shadow of my father's most prescient and wise words that hangs over me. "A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing."

That is why, in the end, I am much more likely to spend my hard earned money on a moderate Porsche rather than any other fast car. I am attracted to its formality, its capability of achieving without straining, its ability to draw one out of mediocrity without a sharp learning curve. Yeah. That's me. The moderate Porsche guy.

In this, I make the distinction between moderation and mediocrity. After all, I'm still talking about some appreciable measure of extremity. How's about 120 MPH in a 55 zone? This is actually something I'm fairly comfortable doing, and have done several times. The thrill, after all, comes from leaving the mediocre behind. Half the time I hate being boxed in by laggard traffic, but the other half is from the possession of the power and skill to make things happen as quickly as I can think of them. To see across four lanes of traffic through which you can thread a half mile ahead of your current cruising position is a siren call. On a motorcycle it's almost trivial. In a fast car, there is a different kind of risk. In an expensive Porsche, another dimension of risk is added. All that risk aside it's the thrill of moving from a casual 80 to a manic 135, of making the other traffic stand still, to boldly go. That's a kick in the pants, but it's also barrel fishing.

The real test is to measure oneself against oneself. That requires a track and practice, and that is an expensive proposition for the kind of Porsche owner I'm most likely to become in the next couple of years. That's the sad trombone. That said, there is a strong element of wish fulfillment going on here. I've always wanted to own the Porsche and the Rolex. It's a kind of California thing. It's personal. It's what I would hate not achieving, even though I go back and forth about the Rolex and have for the past 15 years. If I never own my own Porsche, and I never drive fast on that mountain road, it will be an experience I would greatly miss. If I never impress a Maitre D with my Explorer GMT, I can live with that.

Deep in my soul there are a couple interesting characters with whom I'm entirely comfortable. One of them is the guy who drives west on Sunset to the sea, but with that jungle music turned up. I already have composed the tune I want playing when the valet returns my hooptie and I prepare to burnout. So all of my cars had to be cool. The Porsche will be cool.

I think it is true that one cannot enjoy multiple cars. It isn't natural. It is an acquired taste, and one that I'm not sure that I want to acquire. Of course I don't know what it means to be retired with disposable capital. But after all of the car shows and auctions I have witnessed - well they're kind of like strip clubs. You're real happy for the guy who just scored but you're really not all that jealous. I can't tell you how much fun it is for me to sit behind my LG flat screen and enjoy the screeching cars at Goodwood, but do I really want to fly out to England to be a guest of a club they would never let me join?

What I can do is join the club I don't have to join, which is the gang of motorheads native of SoCal car culture, the Cult of Mulholland the Tribe of the Angeles Crest, the Crenshaw Cruisers and the Hoonigan Squids of Griffith Park. I was more than just knee deep, then again, not totally deep, but deep enough to be deep. I wonder if, as I look upon these tepid loves, I have ever wanted anything so much as to break all laws. No. I've only wanted to satisfy my self, and I've never been so greedy as to expect it all at once. I've always wanted to live a long and fruitful life. Perhaps I'll become more reckless once my daughters are married.

This weekend, I took myself through a sheepdip of the Porsche Experience and tested my limits on the little track over in Carson. I can say without qualification that it was a breathless experience, and it was very pleasant to learn that I have a solid grasp of the basics. Unlike when I started shooting several years ago, I was not handicapped too badly by my videogame experience. I could tell what driving on virtual tracks had done to mess me up, but I straightened a lot of that out in a hurry. My motorcycle experience served me well in that. But that was all the first step. Now I'm knocking on new doors.

My strengths are in braking. That's the one thing that I got consistent good marks on. I could take the car reasonably up to 80-90% of its ability with good control. My weakness was a lack of understanding of how hard I could corner, ie how much speed I could take into a corner. I was in too much of a hurry to accelerate hard out of a corner rather than to brake less coming in and ride the speed through then power out later and smoother. That's probably a typical videogame error. At times, I was also not looking far enough down the track because I didn't have a good idea how fast I could actually go given the traffic. My biggest error was slow hand speed on the skid pad. Until I figured I could waggle a lot more on the pedal and steering wheel, I was trying to smooth my way into a perfect drift. So I was trying exactly not to be jerky and I think jerky was called for. All in all, I got a good taste of driving fast. God have mercy on my soul.

The next day I did some American muscle in a Mustang. That was quite the different experience as it was mostly done on the legendary Pasadena Freeway and on the 10 West. It mostly consisted of blowing through traffic as described up in the top paragraphs. Satisfying, but silly. I have to say that kind of driving is much more fun if your car is both loud and obnoxious in sound and color. The yellow vette from two years ago was perfect.  The black Mustang, not so much, but since it was a convertible and we wore Ray Bans, it was doucheriffic. I think the only thing that can outdo that kind of badassery would be doing wheelies on bikes.

So there's that.

Two and a Half Self-Hating Asians

Alright we are really getting down to it aren’t we? I’m going to tell two (and a half) stories that I recall from personal experience. But I need to qualify it in the following way, seriously.

1. There’s a very big difference between generations where English is ESL and where it’s naturally spoken at home.
2. In my experience, Asians in LA more than other places are more comfortable, BUT none feel properly represented in any media.

So pretty much everything you’re going to hear about ‘Asians’ is some form of a stereotype. Asians simply cannot control their own image in America. They control their own image much less so than black Americans or Latinos. I understand very much how it is to be someone completely other than what people expect you to be and how much contempt that can cause. The basic compensating attitude is, “You are so wrong that it’s not even worth it to correct you or even let you know how wrong you are.”

OK all that aside.

The first story is the one about the 3rd best project manager I ever worked with. He was a sergeant in the army on Taiwan. And I’ll tell you that one of the fiercest woman I have ever met was a Taiwanese whose family lost everything in the Revolution. Meaning literally rich and well educated to refugee in forced marches. She came to the US and she was super smart, super disciplined and good looking too. But she had no time to play. I asked her why and she told me that story about her family. She came to the US to start from scratch and claw her way up to the wealth and dignity her family had. Anyway, it’s not the kind of story you often hear, but DAMN!

So this project manager who served in Taiwan surely had parents of that sort as well, who lost everything. And one day he’s on the phone with his son. Now imagine you come to the US, this guy is spending all of his money to send his son to an expensive private school, and the kid is fat and getting pushed around, and is generally a loser. Well, we’re all in an open floor plan cubicle farm and he is just letting his son have it. He’s cursing him out in two languages. And it just goes on for 20 minutes. Can you imagine? The guy is completely humiliated by his son and practically disowns him in front of everyone at work. That’s just sad.

Second story is a girl named M. She is from Tokyo, her friend is from Okinawa. I meet them in a fancy beach cafe in SoCal. Her family has money and so she had saved enough to just leave Japan. Her family disagrees and sends, basically, a chaperone. So she’s living with this dude in West Hollywood. (Oh, did I mention we started seeing each other?, Yeah we both had a little bit of jungle fever.) So she doesn’t speak much English, and my Nihongo is pathetic. I’m reading her manga backwards.

But basically she confesses that she hates her culture. She needed to leave Japan to be free. She tells me in the way that I guess some rich girls must feel, that her family and traditions are all stifling. She hates Japanese men. And I ask her to describe it. We’re sitting on the beach watching the sunset, and she says Japanese men just don’t appreciate the natural beauty of a sunset. They have no joyful spirit. They just drink and work themselves to death and take their frustrations out on women. They all try to conform. She found them super-icky.

Her chaperone was her age too and he was also traditional, and when the three of us were together it was, uncomfortably tense and weird. She had to prepare the meal, and they got into a little fight about whether I should eat at the same time, who ate first and all kinds of the equivalent of Japanese Downton Abbey shit. All the while being super polite and not breaking protocol.

She was very unhappy about breaking tradition — her self-esteem was in conflict with her desire. She needed and wanted respect but for being someone she was not allowed to be, and didn’t quite know how to be. Plus she had to try to communicate these feelings in a foreign language. So then sometimes she just wanted to get drunk and dance, like a college freshman trying to be cool and enjoy a strange party.

—

I can’t say these are simple ‘self-hating’ people. I sensed them in very troubling conflicts with what they grew up to be and what they wanted to be and it not happening for them they way they wanted. I witnessed them stressed to the breaking point. I say this with a lot more wisdom than I had at the time, but I remember these two people well. One Taiwanese middle aged man (1998), one Japanese young woman (1987). Both here in Los Angeles.

—

Here’s the half story. This was a young Korean woman who was very hipster, and very forward about the difficulty she had with FOBs. She would wear shirts like ‘Got Rice?’, just to be ironic and snarky. But most of the time she would just start sharing too much information about what it’s like to be called a ‘banana’. All the freaking time. I can’t even remember how I knew her. I just remember she kept talking about her white boyfriend and exactly what kind of white boyfriend she liked. Nobody asked her. And then she would self-edit herself and then try to test if you looked at her funny when she started these rants. I mean she was smart, but anybody would say she was confused and it got to the point where it was really annoying. I think was on some kind of road trip with her carpooling someplace and I just couldn’t wait to get away from her. Jeez.

—

I tell these stories because I’m a good listener and I also want to remember. I’m not trying to validate ‘self-hating’ because everybody wants to be different and better than they are. Most keep it to themselves. Sometimes we get to see. I think when we get to see, we should find a way to let people be validated in what they aim to be, especially when they’re trying to escape. It’s not easy to do.

 

Memorial Day 2018

It didn't begin well.

Alexa awoke me from a deep sleep that began somewhere around 1:30 AM. It was only 5 1/2 hours later, and I sweated through my blankets. That feels ok underneath them, but when you pull them off you, the chill is annoying and gross. I didn't have on either watch or fitbit. My voice was too croaked and dry for Alexa to reckocgnize me ask for the time. By the time I managed to keep warm and dry off and get out of bed, 27 minutes had elapsed. The shower water was still cold 5 minutes later and Doc was due by at 8. Or maybe he meant to meet me in Westwood at that time.

The 405 Northbound was mostly empty. A few speeding convertible Mustangs zoomed past on my right. Doing 70 mph right at LAX made me think more about my novel that I have begun again in earnest. That 405, 50 years in the future will be this empty for the reasons of collapse. I'm thinking about whether or not I should have the bridges across them crushed to the pavement, or still standing, walled off to through traffic. I'll figure it out. Doc is waiting in Westwood at Gayley and Kinross. Or at least that was his text 15 minutes ago. I had to get gas and Red Bull.

There is only one entrance to the Los Angeles National Cemetery. I had driven by it hundreds of times, and now it was time for me to go in. I didn't realize there was only one so if it looked like I was getting out of the long line of cars on the right only to merge ahead of them from the opposite direction, I didn't mind them thinking so. After all, my brother Doc was waiting and I felt late. I made some negotiations with the man waving traffic. As I drove into the 117 acre facility with its 88,000 plots I think of how easy it would have been for all of my brothers and I to have joined up. Pops was USMC. We lived that life of discipline and purpose at home. We were drilled. We all have that deep within us. I say 'we all' as if my other two dead brothers were here today. What are the chances that four boys make it alive? I parked the truck in the second queue of parked cars, behind the Challengers of the Challengers club. I step out of the door and collapsed sobbing.

It took about 100 yards of a slow walk to finish crying. I'm still not finished, but at least now I am breathing normally and these are only somber tears. These are the tears of recognition, the tears of pity for the sadness of humanity. I want to finish my weekend with a clean bedroom, but I remain melancholy, and only the need to share a personal reflections takes me away from the bitter muse of my dystopian future. I need a stinger to start, and the book I'm now reading reminded me of 9/11. So the paragraph came, finally thinking of the end of all things.

Collapse comes quickly and slowly at the same time. Nobody is prepared for it because they’ve survived all the near misses, but everybody sees it coming. Everybody gets used to being frightened for a time, bleating all of their emotions out to everyone for two or three weeks and being sensitive for a year. Finally, nobody in your family gets H1N1. Nobody in your town suffers a school shooting. You move on ready to be outraged at the next outrage, sure you know which political partisans, ethnic minorities or religious fundamentalists were behind the conspiracy. All near misses are like two semi trucks speeding in opposite directions on a dark desert highway in the middle of the night. They allow you to survive and curse the idiot on the other side. You tell the story of rage in the next roadside rest. People give you comfort. Disaster is just matter of inches this way or that. Nobody survives the head on collision and nobody knows to look until the next day. Collapse is when everybody dies on the highway between towns, and then the towns go dark. Sometimes a stranger happens to cross an intersection full of bones, blood and twisted metal. He picks through the wreckage to find out what happened. Sometimes the stranger just escaped another wreck and keeps on stumbling forward without a second glance. After the plague and collapse of 2037 it took years to sift through the carnage of humanity. People who lost everyone and everything tried to keep walking forward, but they always looked backward over their shoulder.

That ought to hold your monkey ass, you bitter muse.

Doc and I bore up during the 200 minute procession of speeches and gratitude and heartfelt applause. It was the most strange incongruity to see a crowd of hundreds in a city of millions to pay tribute to several thousands. We were all a tiny minority trying desperately not to cry and get choked up. Trying not to sound too pretentious or obsequious. There was only one standing ovation given, to the two dozen diplomats from Argentina to Korea to Turkey who showed up today with wreathes to this, the second largest military cemetery in America, the third largest in the world.

We looked for our uncle Phil Thomas who we were pretty sure went to Korea. We found a Phillip Thomas who was in spot 319, but couldn't find the plaque. There is a kind of self-serving conceit to these kinds of tributes. It ought to be common sense and common practice, and when you discover yourself outnumbered by indifference and BBQ ribs, you feel so very out of place. Yeah I was there. So what? The dead were really there. But it could have been me. It could have been you, forgotten and taken for granted like so many lives are. When the trucks don't collide, it's just another headache for beer. And yet there they were, that special contingent from Korea, and the 100 year old veteran who translated for the American diplomats for the signing on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1946. There may or may not be a Korea Summit, but the Koreans were here in force today, more than any other foreign contingent. We may just miss. We may just hang on. We might look over a crowd of a few hundred Americans when we are 100 years old, when everybody we know is dead, and these are the remembering remnants.

So those in charge of reminding us to remember pulled very gently at our better angels. One surgeon talked about being the youngest doctor around when the Scud missile landed. One veteran talked about what it's like to deliver the folded flag. So we all bore up under the sun and the clear blue empty sky with our silent tears, remembering what nobody wants to remember even though we often ought to, compelled by those who testified that they can never forget, even if they wanted to. It's never graceful to stumble forward. It's never comforting to look backward over our shoulders, even when we see nothing. And when it came time for the man in the denim shirt and white beard to sing Lee Greenwood's song, the PA system broke down and he belted it out a capella. Sometimes you don't get accompanied. You just hope somebody stands up next to you.

The horn from taps sounded far away. The flyover was nowhere in sight. The cannon fired off the salute and it felt almost like closure. We walked past a hundred graves to our cars and the grass was thick, impeding us from speeding on our way. The small flags stood and the carnations lay flat parallel to the bottom edges of each marker. An army private from Oklahoma. A man named Alvarez who died in 1973. Nothing about the order and symmetry of the marble straightens out the road of memory. It goes from history to a personal thought to an assessment of a nation's sins and sorrows. They say war destroys the things it is fought to preserve. Peace also destroys the memory of what it costs to achieve. So we stand between a clumsy earnest desire for order and the fact that chaos inevitably leads us back into the tragic circle. And we'll always be prepared, and we'll never be ready.

I returned to my truck and the planes flew by. An ancient roar.

Kicking Rocks

This is going to be an update on what it feels like, these days, to be me. Trust me, it's still weird. 

I'm running at about 75% mojo, partially cloudy with a chance of showers. My natural disposition to say that I'm good is still in place, but I am inclined to just mumble instead. I think I'm dealing with things at a suboptimal pace, but with the right prescriptions in mind. I'm trying not to push the water that is already headed downstream and wondering why I'm in the middle of this particular river.

I'm a survivor, that is never in doubt. What I wonder is if I should be packing heavy or packing light. Zombies are just around the corner and some of them are related to me. Part of my honor and glory are owed to my responsibility and responsiveness to them. After all I've done, they went and got bit. Now I'm feeling like Abraham. God, must I make this sacrifice? I know that I must swing a hammer at the zombies that were once my charges. Maybe I chose to be too much. Maybe I should pack light and only bring enough provisions for me to survive the catastrophes ahead. Put on my own oxygen mask. I have been putting on the mask and sucking up the gas. It makes you silly and reduces your problem solving ability to one. Self.

Chris has been diagnosed as both bipolar and schitzotypal depending upon whom you ask. I have spent the past six months figuring out exactly what all that means, and the answer is that it's just an ordinary dysfunction. He's is abnormal in a way the reduces what ought to be easy to something that's a chore both for him and for those around him. He is cut loose in a loose fitting society with no place for compassion for the marginally, ordinarily dysfunctional. Well, not only dispassion but incompetence. It's awfully expensive to understand that which requires more than common sense, and I sense those plugging up the dikes against the flood of zombies have better things to do. Alas, he has no street gang, but soft shouldered rebels with nebulous causes. He has joined a rock band, which is a step up from the videogame couch, to a more respectable kind of dissolution. To me, he is Simba in the brambles, trying to live Hakuna Matata, but he has a sty in his eye and refuses to see a doctor. Because he refuses to see? Because he cannot see? Because he sees but does not care? In the end he'll blame all of us, maybe. All I have to decide is exactly how and when to kick him out of my house. What could possibly go wrong?

I am adjusting to the possibility that everything can collapse. So it's fun to have credit cards with low balances, and just enough job security to continue subscriptions to foolishness like Netflix. What I spend more money on is the disciplined self-torture that is circuit training, on those days I feel bouncy enough to get the hell out of bed. It's less often than it should be. I have learned recently to ask myself nicely. When I hover around 202 pounds, I respond with more apathy than I should. Today at 210 dressed, I'm angry at my bad knee but I still want a cheeseburger. Well, I'm going to ruck 10 miles this weekend. Maybe I'll destroy my knee entirely and give over more of my future to the orthopedist. At least it will be me. I have experienced the momentary bit of nirvana when my dental technician actually said 'not bad', and people think my new haircut befits me. I love my new $527 prescription glasses, and have found a new cheap kind of shoe to wear, Chucks.

Within the next four months I expect to empty my house of two guests, attend a Porsche clinic, drive up to Monterey and enjoy some vintage auto racing, and attend my 40th high school reunion. I have come to the realization that although I am always down to buy drinks and conversate, I'm living in my own private Idaho. Me and Dostoevsky. And Taleb. And Pinker and Peterson and Ferguson. And RC Bray. And Destiny 2. And the Hoonigans and an old bloke at South Bay Porsche. And my shrink Chuck E. and my fitness coach M. And my wife every other Tuesday if our schedules overlap and we're not too bloody tired. She loves me. My mother loves me. I love me. Well, lots of people love me. But what if I'm not me? What if I just want to be me, but elsewhere? Am I getting too old for this shit?

See? My mind is spinning at high revs. I'm still rapidly aware and consciously evaluating. My mind is running circles around my self. My self is wanting to be left alone. I'm not resentful. My superego is indefatigable, or something like that. I'm sure Churchill had the right word. I think I am trying to get into the head of a drunk Russian intellectual. Crass rules everything around me, but I refuse to be haggard. This is not work, it is not play, it's distraction from the role I've signed up to play. It's sideboob. What is the point of looking, then again what is the cost of looking? The opportunity to be all that you can be costs attention. I haven't decided how much attention I want. I'm not quite ready to jump into the bucket of single-minded commitment to the greatest idea I ever had. I had no idea the world would make me want to be a rich as I want to be, just to get away from all the douchebaggery. I used to be the enemy of 'whatever'. These days 'whatever' is a friend, certainly a better friend than 'fuck off'. I don't need certainty. I think.

Everybody disappoints me.

My best conversations are with myself because I know exactly how seriously to take myself. I confuse other people. I would like to trade places with the man who has half a billion in his pocket and teaches people how to make on half of one percent of what he has, knowing they'll line up to pay. Of course he's disgusted, but what are you gonna do? Philanthropy is self-aggrandizing, I don't care who you are or how many diseases you cure. But yeah I accept the premise. I don't know why I became a writer. It doesn't reward me as I think I need to be rewarded, and still I keep doing it. I've opened up this wound in my neck that keeps bleeding truth. It's going to kill me one day. Today I'm woozy on the edge of a blackout, and who would be bothered to drink my blood anyway? Is this as good for you as it is for me? Alas. Alas.

OK that's enough pity. I have to load the QRL0069 table so that we can figure out what's going wrong with the APUs on A380s. The lives of flight operation ground crews depend on it, not to mention my salary. I have a lot of rocks to kick. Welcome to May. Summer is coming.

Easy Fantasy

We had a really good meeting yesterday at work. It gave me a lot of confidence that I should have a big addition to my small pile of money within 5 years. So I indulged in a scenario in which I pull down a fortune. My cut is 7 million.

I haven't actually done the math but it occurs to me that a lot of things wouldn't change much. I could only see a half dozen things to worry about that I don't have answers for. And it helps that my analyst was telling me that I'm handling things. I am. So I went shopping for $2MM homes here in LA County. I was surprisingly picky. When you get over 1.5MM and stay below 3MM there's not as much choice as you might think. And beyond the choice of marble or wood floors and the fabulousity of your kitchen, landscaping and yard amenities make a hell of a difference. As I shopped, it was immediately apparent who had professional interior design help and who didn't. Suddenly, the whole raft of half million dollar houses I've been eyeballing for the past five years came into focus, as well as the importance of friends.

I'm reading 'A Gentleman in Moscow' and it's painfully beautiful. But it reminds me of what I'm thinking when I look at these houses. For me, it's really about the conversations I would be having in its social spaces and the parties the Spousal Unit would be able to throw. Can I or can I not have a jazz quartet in the backyard? What does it mean to live exactly that large? It also occurs to me that this kind of stuff is accomplished in short order, and that people are very unlikely to undergo any personal changes in order to accomplish this level of affluence. I assess that for most people, it's done by age 40 and the rest is shabby gentility without much of the gentility. The sewers carry the same smells, no matter what the address. The interwebz carry the same traffic. If you were X before, you're going to be X after.

And then it was very obvious that getting the Porsche would be trivial.

Farewell to A Dream of Baldwin

In the summer of 1989, at a buppie pool party in Southern California I discovered in the writing of Toni Morrisson's Beloved something I had been searching all my life to find. In retrospect, it was inevitable. It wasn't a discovery but rather the culmination of what I had been raised to believe and understand. It was that black mountain my generation had been born to climb and I was experiencing its revelations and horrors as my peers were eating canapes. I had surpassed the base camp of what I was expected to know as a black man of the 20th Century and was now officially on the crest toward the summit. Over the next four years I enjoined 'The Struggle' at a new level. It ended with marriage and James Baldwin.

I knew, ever since reading the tender mercies of Beale Street's Fonnie, that there was in black literature a loving sensitivity. I had almost no one to appreciate with me what courage and grace I found in Jean Toomer's Kabnis, a character whose mind I inhabited innumerable years ago and have probably only written of this one time since. I found in the diet of the Talented Tenth, a great deal to satisfy and sustain galaxies more than what has ever been widely appreciated as black. I have never questioned that I have pierced through the skin game and found that which we call the soul of humanity. It was an expectation of literature I never questioned, and once I heard it said by Albert Murray "Literature is my religion", I understood, with given words, what I had always expected from the given word. But I also knew I had to give back. I knew this from the moment I began being confused by LeRoi Jones as a teenager. His book had footnotes. It was difficult, harder than any book I had ever been assigned. I would enter this world and represent with my writing skills what has become of my generation. I would become the next James Baldwin.

It wasn't until almost twenty years later that I gave up that dream. I came to see what everyone came to desire in the presidency of Barack Obama. Payback. I thought James Brown sung it better, a generation ago. The unity of pen and sword, of writing and power politics fell apart in speeches nobody remembers, and in contradictions unworthy of anyone considered to be the new King of black America. Yet there he sat on the throne, grinning sincerely and then dropping the mic like Chris Rock. I never expected Obama, then again I never wanted a black political apotheosis of black manhood. Or perhaps I simply say that in retrospect because he was so clearly a peer, someone who merely picked the right elevator. My inspirations have been subdued by the ham-fisted calumny of American politics. It ain't beanbag. So my Fonnie and my Kabnis cannot be sustained in such an arena, only sacrificed. I knew even Colin Powell could only do so much, and although I occasionally still wish he had, by late 2007, in the year I won black blogger of the year, I had come to the end of my politics. I was inalterably disappointed. I desired nothing so much as to leave the tasks to others who needed it more than I.

The needy one who emerged was Ta-Nehisi Coates, a man I never met and never much enjoyed reading. Like Obama, I felt that I knew him. We shared a secret language, an intonation and emphasis for all those from that small town called black. Obama went off to Harvard Law, and I went off to Silicon Valley. Young Coates went off to The Atlantic where Newyoricans writ large and the reverse-poetry slams of literature, rather like rhyme-bites of Mr. Barack Smith gone to Washington could generate distinctions for audiences hungry for racial representation. I finally had to admit I lost the taste. Like the jazz that becomes too clever for all but jazz musicians themselves. Like insider jokes between Colson Whitehead, Lani Guineir and Cornel West. Like the war between Bernal and Lefkowitz, the platform was both arcane, elevated, remunerative and all but irrelevant to me. In a snippet of an interview Steven Van Zandt said of the 1960s that greatness was popular. I felt in 2007 that greatness would never be popular again, and thus greatness had no obligation to be. Greatness was expended on mendicancy, or was greatness simply not around? What became popular wasn't great enough for me. I'm sure I said so.

This morning I have reasons to be disappointed in any number of things. This is something I have yet to work out in my personal life. I don't know where it will lead, but I read enough Baldwin to be have been perfectly rewarded. With his new book "We Were Eight Years In Power", none other than Toni Morrison has declared Coates to be the next Baldwin. I am relieved at long last of failing to win that battle royale. The title couldn't have fallen to a more appropriate champion.

The book I am reading at the moment, like many other science fictions, is dealing with questions of the fate of all of humanity. I have become stoic and find most interest in assessing how well greatness fares without power. The fate of the scientist among populists is a meditation on the tragic. Yorick's benediction is all we may merit. The book finds the very last humans discovering that the Universe is a simulation. They had to go to the very center of the galaxy to find out the great projector upon whose screen mankind had strutted and fretted. This journey required a combination of impossibles, immortality and faster than light travel, to make that discovery. And yet it was a non-discovery anyone in possession of those two impossibles would inevitably encounter. It was the nature of reality made manifest by stepping outside of two seemingly omnipotent constraints. I have yet to finish this book, yet I find in my disappointments many synergies with its narrative. Of all the things Coates or Baldwin might write, of all the directions Obama's heft of the sword of politics might take, the imposition of the impossibility of evading race constrained them from finding the nature of the American universe as a simulation.

In literature all meditations on reality require imagination, and the true test of the greatness of literature is how that imagination can create immortality and faster than light travel. The imagination of humanity requires God, without which all of our sciences torture us to death merely explaining innumerable hows without an inkling of the first why. To seek and discover noble purpose, transcendent purpose, is all that humans can achieve wrestling as we must with our earthly constraints.

I don't know why Toni Morrison would dub Coates with the scepter of Baldwin. After all, his book is in the non-fiction section. But it is true that the religion of Obama's popularity is the stuff of narrative and that wishful thinking could be called imagination. The fiction that is race in America does in fact compel us all to defy the innumerable questions of science and find purpose in skin color alone. Race is a powerful god, and I am one of its apostates. As such I have given up the genre in search of inspiration. There is in me no expectation of insight. I cannot accept the constraint that I am black and so the rules of race are not to me laws of physics. My imagination resides a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, not one you are likely to be considering, even with those given words as clues. And so I am sentimental for Baldwin in what he gave over the years and at last in 1992 when I last read "Another Country". I never read "The Fire Next Time". I joked even when Los Angeles burned for Rodney King that the fire would be out by next Wednesday. I knew then, as I know now that the god of race is an angry Old Testament god who offers no salvation or redemption. So Baldwin's threats were empty as eventually were Obama's promises and as I finally presume Coates' testimony to be. The god of race suffers as do all American gods. If Baldwin was his final prophet, then perhaps enough has been said already.

As an apostate I am trapped to a certain degree by my prior ambition to be an explainer. To aim to inherent the mantle of Baldwin is to meet the challenge of coming up with new flavors of lollipops to seduce children into accepting inoculations against racial reasoning. I might die with nothing of my non-race work gaining fame, but I do eat well. This probably cannot be an epitaph of this sort of writing. It is my enduring compulsion to work against wishful thinking and my fate to have learned to swing the hammer. I was born in a quarry. Rocks ruled everything around me. Hulk smash.

The Barclay Prime Factor

Thrillist has gotten my email and has seduced me into clicking. It's not my worst habit, but I shouldn't give them so much of my attention. They make me forget that there is poetry in the world. Nevertheless they can be instructive on finding new foodie spots I have not yet discovered, overpopulated as they may be with younger, more energetic humans than me. (grumble).

This morning's seduction began with the thirty one best steakhouses in America. Interestingly enough, I've been to two of the first three. I haven't thought of Barclay Prime in a long time. It has been at least seven years since I was there. I remember that it was when paddle shifting dual clutch supercars were a new thing, and so I particularly noticed the new convertible Lambo out front. Come to think of it, there is nothing quite as sad as a three or four year old Lamborghini. They have to be sparkling as well as loud to maintain their appeal.  But I'll spare you these and other stoic observations to make my short and sweet point, aside from the seduction of the adjective 'best'.

The kobe beef wasn't worth it. 

I'm pretty sure that I saw on the menu, a listing for a kobe beef hotdog or hamburger for $100. I thought about it a long time, but I decided against it. I had an ordinary ribeye steak and found it to be unremarkable as ribeye steaks go. In fact, I have had three coming to Jesus level steak experiences in my life. One at Jockos, one at The Double Eagle and one at The Hitching Post. Aside from that, I think I have reached the age where the subtleties of everything non-intellectual generally fail to impress me. The difference between a first class steak and a world class steak is marginal after your 500th steak. And yet this distinction without a difference must be said with some deep appreciation for the privilege it is to eat so many steaks in one's life. I have such a deep appreciation for a good hunk of beef, but I can also spot a bargain, and there's something ever appealing about a bargain.

An old boss of mine used to tell me that we should go eat a cow, and in some high rise building in Bellevue, I had one of the largest steaks I ever ate in one sitting. I was physically in pain getting out of my chair afterwards. But what I remember was the elevator ride up. We were in the same car with game developers, one of whom looked to be in his mid 50s wearing a braided grey beard as long as your arm. They were totally casual in this hot shit restaurant, and I was like... trying to ignore that reality. It wasn't about the steak. It was about the Dosh Point, aka 'fuck you money'. I was wedded to my monkey suit. The steak wasn't quite as satisfying as it should have been. We overdid it. I really didn't need 24 ounces. But it was on my old boss. I was being seduced, or something. In the end, that business failed. 

What I have learned in the intervening years is the extent to which we must work with consistency and within the aegis of our ambition. I have always expected to be first rate but not world class. I cut myself out of that arena when I recognized that my French had lapsed and I didn't attain my Master's degree. I thought I was out of it, and I still haven't bought the Rolex, although I could afford one if I made a point of it. But that $100 kobe beef hamburger and that Lambo. I have come to realize that they are on a logarithmic scale. The quality is on the X axis but the price is on the Y. It seems way above my head because it costs so much, but it is not far from the quality I have already experienced. If I'm the poorest guy in Barclay Prime, it's OK. There's a McCormick & Schmick up the street that is not in the location location location, but its steaks are first rate. 

It turns out, of course, that no American restaurant ever really had authentic, official Kobe beef. The Japanese never exported it. It was all fake. And yes it's true now that you can buy a Camaro that outruns Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis. What's important is your attention to the difference. When I sold stereo, I used to tell my customers that if you can't hear the difference, don't pay for the difference. But like wine snobs, we generally associate quality with price, even when we can't tell the difference ourselves. It's about the signaling, of course; it's about drawing other people's attention to the distinctions. 

I enjoy my life. I need to remember not to show off. I need to remember that my indulgences in those things for which I pay particular attention to the distinctions are for myself. I need to simply be happy and not brag about what stuff makes me happy. My enjoyment of that which makes me happy is its own reward. I'll share it with some modesty. 

At the same time I need to be aware of the extent to which people are enslaved to their own Dosh Points as I have been, which we may never reach. We need to pursue our barbell strategy. Prepare for both extremes, enrichment and impoverishment. Live without regret, as a warrior all your days. Dig for treasure but love the shovel. Only be a fanboy of the dead. 

The Day the Bandwidth Died

I do know how to camp, and even backpack. But I have never had to work out my survival skills. I bought my first SERE book when I was 22 in college. I grew up with the habit of shopping at Army Surplus stores for my gear, but I never read anything before that. It seemed impossibly difficult. I was living in the San Fernando Valley.

Two days ago my cable modem slipped in and out of consciousness. Since I work at home, it made a lot of my work very difficult, if not impossible. I had a series of frustrations beginning Thursday afternoon with my ability to do certain things on the network. So I spent a lot of time with the limited networking skills I have to try and isolate the problem. I finally nailed it to my cable modem, not the wiring, not the machine, not the hub. 

So I get on the phone with Frontier, who has inherited FIOS from Verizon in California much to my dismay. They have an automatic message that says they have 'detected a problem with your equipment' and puts me on a special hold. I sense this is bullshit, and I expect to hear it the next time I call. I go through a routine with the tech I get, she tells me the problem is fixed, but it is not. I can't VPN to my customer, with whom I've made a promise that now lies broken, over some simple stuff I could fix in literally 10 minutes. They of course are on the other side of the world, as is my boss with whom I could troubleshoot under ordinary circumstances. 

I get frustrated and try to get them to send me a new cable modem. That will take 3-5 business days. Meanwhile, my Apple TV doesn't work. My XBox doesn't work. Alexa doesn't work. The day is over, and my relaxation cannot take place. My daughter misses her daily yoga session from YouTube. Bossman tells me that I should just order a new cable modem from Amazon. That's done. It only costs $50 bucks. Really? I could have done this a long time ago. Amazon guarantees Friday delivery. Yeah what time Friday?

My Thursday becomes Friday with no solution in hand. My Friday is their Saturday so they can expect no resolution until next week. I try tethering. I don't have enough bars on my phone. It's Friday. I'm getting pissed. I head to Starbucks. I sit at the end of the long table amongst the chatter and noise. There are at least 20 people in here working on laptops. I get on the wifi. This confirms that it's not my machine. I can tether here too. But it's too loud for me to concentrate. I need space, more space than this. My company has a WeWork membership. I head to WeWork.

I figure I should reserve a room. I park close to the WeWork office. It's afternoon. I can't remember what I had for lunch. I have no bars. I try to download the app. It takes 10 minutes. I try to login, my password doesn't work. I reset my password. My new password doesn't work. I walk into the office towers in Manhattan Beach. There is no listing except 'Virtual Offices'. I jab the elevator button. It doesn't light. I jab it again. It's a talking elevator; I go to the third floor. "No this is not WeWork, they are in the other building". I go back down the elevator and across the plaza. I come to the security reception. Where is WeWork? "Right here, sir". I'm an idiot. It's right in front of me on the first floor. I come into the place and "Who are you visting?" No, my company has a membership, I'd like to reserve a desk. She cannot find my company or me in the system. "What is your home office?'" No, we just use the facility periodically. Their whole membership regime has changed. Damned startup companies. $50 to rent a desk for the day. No thank you. I leave and go back home.

I've got a cable modem coming sometime today. I'm supposed to meet my wife in the Valley for a weekend celebration at a vacation rental house. It's for my sister's 50th birthday. I ask if it has wifi. Yes, and a full sized office. I can maybe do some work there. But first I have to finish packing and maybe get my cable modem delivered. At home I pack. The cable modem arrives at 3, just as I was on my way out the door to avoid rush hour. I unpack it and try to install it. it doesn't work. I've had it. I grab my gear and go. I have to stop in Westwood to pick up something from the Amazon store. I ordered a laptop stand. It will show up tomorrow, Saturday. Today, Friday, there are two boxes of unknown goodies I have to ferry to the Valley.This day is over. I got no work done. I am tired. I have no bandwidth. It is 5pm and I am on the 405 northbound going 12 mph. 

I arrive in Westwood at 6:25, 20 minutes later than I expected. It's only 12 miles from my house and it took 90 minutes. Friday rush hour traffic. Every time I turn on the radio, they're talking about an Italian actress who was raped by Hollywood's douchebag of the hour. Some fathead named Weinstein. She's going to get a million dollars. Like I should care. I find a parking space 4 blocks from the store. There is semi-dried mud behind the tailgate of my truck which is filled with catering equipment for the party. I switch to walking instructions. Siri doesn't want to tell me where the Amazon store is. How convenient. Google doesn't care. I find the store. There are four sets of lockers. My wife doesn't know which locker the code applies to. It's locker #1, the first one I try. It is only the second thing I've done all day that worked the first time. I did have a good bowl of cereal this morning. I give thanks for the small things, but my teeth are still gritted. I enter the code, the locker pops open. I take out the first box, the second one won't be removed without help from the staffers behind the wall. I run with the boxes back to my truck thinking about a center of gravity problem for high school students. 

I ask my wife to send me her location. I don't have the address to the house. She sends me a pin through iMessage. It's 40 minutes away. I get back onto the 405. It's getting dark. The location she sent was someplace she was at when I called, not the address of the actual house. I'm in the Valley, it's dark. I've pulled over to a side street at a stop sign, making an aggravated phone call. Where am I supposed to go? A cop whoops up behind me. I move along. These are not the droids you are looking for.  25 minutes later, I still have no text in return with the proper address. It's 7:30 and I have to pee, and eat but most of all drink. I have officially told the world to fuck off. I find a bar on Ventura Boulevard.

It took a bowl of mussels and a shot of Angel's Envy to set my situation in perspective. This is my first world problem, combined with two other personal problems that are none of your business that made a dogs breakfast of my Friday. It is 9pm, I leave the parking structure. There is a brand new grey Porsche 911 Turbo parked next to my truck. I'm in Sherman Oaks. Another section of America doing way better than me. I could have been an entertainment lawyer. I drive northeast to the place. I am behind a Bentley in traffic. Traffic that never relents. I finally arrive and as I unpack, I realize that I have left my glasses and contact lenses back home. I have one extra contact lens in my dopp kit. I will have to wake up and drive home early in the morning with one good eye. 

My world. That small world under my control and discipline, failed to operate on Friday. I'm still angry about it. I'm still frustrated that such a combination of stupid small things stopped what I call progress. I want to take a hard left turn and run off road. I want to Survive, Evade, Resist and Escape. I want simplicity. I want the alternative. I know I am not held hostage by this, but it is what I have arranged my life around. The zombies are not going to rescue me from it. I'll have to change it all myself. Lord help me, I'll probably try.

Two Cop Stories

So this week was fairly eventful. I got a mess of comments on Facebook after I tweeted the following:

"If minorities know racism when they see it, then patriots know disrespect when they see it. Own your speech."

That went on for several days and of course got acrimonious, but that's Facebook. Same bourgeois mix that loves this kind of drama. If Facebook cares to preserve it, you'll find that whole thread here. What's interesting of course is the extent to which most people talk about subjects that are presented to them via the slovenly media, and in particular this week's edutainment came from a sitting, standing, kneeling or absent NFL. If you're not already saturated in that fat, consider yourself lucky. Meanwhile, however, I've had my own interesting experiences with various police departments. You want to hear? Of course you do.

The first story was that I went out to North Hollywood this Sunday to the Gathering of the Pack. It was extraordinary. Some of the most thrilling combat I've watched in a long time. If you're not up to speed on how I think about combat, you can get a good introduction by checking out MindSmash. Anyway, so I take the long way home and I don't get back until about 9pm. As I pull into the driveway, I notice that my front door is wide open. I had an armful of groceries at the time. Without thinking too much about it, I drop the groceries into my living room. Then I come back to my car thinking that if there's somebody in my house, I'm going to have to kick their ass. Since I brought my sticks with me to the Gathering (although I wasn't registered to fight) I figured I'd go back in the house and be a badass. But suddenly I realized that I was tired and I had such a good day. As I'm walking back to the driveway a car is driving past quite slowly. People in the car are gesturing to my house, it gives me a hinky feeling. I watch them drive slowly up the street as I'm getting my sticks out. The possibility enters my mind that either they are casing the joint, or their expecting their buddy to come out with a TV. Crap. 

So I call the cops. The 911 operator takes my information and tells me to wait in my car until the officers arrive. And so I sit for about the longest 10 minutes ever. The first few officers arrive and ask me all the reasonable questions. What time did I leave home? Should anybody else be there?  The lead officer asks if I mind that they take the K9 into my place. No, of course not. I draw a map of the bottom floor on the palm of my hand, like a quarterback drawing a pattern for his receivers. A couple more officers show up. They call into the house and announce that anyone inside should come out with their hands up. Twice. Flashlights and pistols are drawn, they stack up around the front door and head in. Four officers and a dog.  I hang outside on the sidewalk, arms folded. Now there are 4 squad cars and an SUV, a couple more officers show up. It has been a while since they've gone in, about 20 minutes, and suddenly I remember that I didn't tell them about my pistols upstairs. Now I'm worried for them and pissed that I forgot to mention it. After all, my keys are right there. A bad guy could figure out how to unlock them, and then use my pistols on any of the officers. No gunshots. They come out looking something odd. Not bored. Not disappointed. I can't quite identify the expressions. I think it's how you look when you have to slow down your breathing and swallow your adrenaline. 

The lead officer wants to check the garage. Of course. It checks out. The supervisor has the lead officer go with me on a walkthrough through the house. Everything is how I left it. Relief all around. I think it was a good exercise for all involved. I say thanks. They say thanks. All comfortable and wrapped up. It's nice to live where it's nice. Redondo Beach cops are great. I text Doc. He doesn't get the message until the next day.  I'm glad my daughter hadn't come back home yet and ran out. It wasn't her. I call my wife and tell her it's all good, but that she probably left the door open. 

---

Today I'm working and trying to get some security stuff working on my machine again. Then Doc texts me and his daughter and my sister. He injured himself on the job. It turns out that while he was on duty, some woman tried to hang herself on an overpass. He rescued her, action hero style, but unlike the action heroes, it wrenched his arm. He's going to be on injured reserve for a week or so. Her life was spared, so that's the important thing. I'll probably head over to his place tomorrow and we'll talk about it in detail. I'll bring him a bottle of something nice. He called Pops who was kind of nerve-wracked because when he tried to call back, Doc was already motoring home. I think he left a message about needed a ride, but Pops didn't get the message until it was too late. Well, Doc made it home alright. Another day.

--

People have been griping about white privilege and cops and the NFL. I'm not even going to write an 'obligatory seriousness' essay on that one. This is my life. Yours may vary. 

 

 

The Black Whisperer

I entertained a daydream this morning based upon my killer Saturday workout. I brought my wife and daughter with me to my circuit training. Each Saturday we get a different coach. You can always tell what a coach is going to make you do by looking at their build. This morning we had GI Jane. She had man arms and man shoulders. Naturally she did handstand pushups against the wall. Did I say the workout was brutal? There were about 25 of us total in the class, many of whom I had not met before one or two others were black Americans. Some of these were newbs. Newbs always think they can hang throughout the whole hour. Newbs just don't know, but they find out quick. 

About halfway through the workout, Coach decides we should do something extra. Wait. Let me explain. At the beginning of the workout she demonstrates each of the eight stations and shows us the two exercises we will do for one minute each. All of those are written up on the whiteboard for all to see. But she also says that between each set, we'll do something extra and before we move to the next station. That extra thing is not written up on the whiteboard. It's a surprise after each set. GI Jane is different. So we're bulling our way through and about halfway through the workout, Coach decides we should do something extra. First time it was a few situps. Next time a few jumping jacks. This time, it's burpees. It's at that moment when one of the black women, whom I'd never seen before give the coach a look, that just screams, but does not say "This is BULLSHIT". Coach takes it in stride saying "I love your face". My wife caught the moment. I saw the newb face a few minutes later. 

I generally don't pay attention to the women in the class, but that's a discussion for another day. This morning I caught sight of another black woman whose face was new to me as I passed her while doing the jogging lap we often must perform. She may or may not have been the same woman. I don't know. But I daydreamed that she whispered to me, This is Bullshit.

People who know me, know that I am bursty. I am like war. Long periods of boredom followed by mind-numbing feats of extraordinary something or other. I don't perform constantly, but when I do, I don't leave anything undone. I'm a sleeper. At the end of the day I will have done a hell of a lot more than the average bear, but I don't look like it. We'll, I do look like it. Outside of circus acrobats, and professional atheletes most guys my age.. meh. What am I trying to prove? Bottom line is that I don't quit. I expect to leave it all in the ring, as they say. I give 120% 80% of the time. The other 20% I'm gasping and sweating and demonstrating clearly that I'm at my absolute limit. That's how I work out. And I never complain. The harder it gets, the harder I work. And I encourage everyone. That's how I work. That's how I play. And I have just about zero patience for people who say things like 'This is boooolshit". My immediate response is, then shut the fuck up and go home. Why are you even here? 

And so in my daydream, I am a Negro in the 1940s and I am in bootcamp being shouted at in the segregated Army working my way to go the Europe to fight the Hun. The Negro next to me is panting and jogging next to me. He's gassed. He asks if we are going to actually get a chance to fight. I say, I think so, keep running. Then I'm in Korea and the Negro next to me is shivering cold and he whispers in my ear, I think we're going to lose this war. I say, maybe but we're here to fight. Stay warm. Then I'm in Vietnam and the black soldier next to me is saying 'This is bullshit" and I ignore him. Then I'm in on my way to Iraq and a black protester is saying "No blood for oil". Right about this time, I am finishing my lap and I come back to reality thinking that there are no black folks in my circuit training class this morning because there are black history professors saying that circuit training is racist bullshit and African Americans shouldn't exercise because we're not farm animals. What a horrible stereotype I daydreamed. 

But the players in this drama are only black for the sake of this particular example. The weakness and fear and fight against brutal physical exertion is nothing specific to any so-called race. It's a character thing in all human beings. And so my attitude remains. On social media I hear the echoes all the time. This is bullshit they say. They don't like the coach, the challenge is too hard. And I listen. I don't tell them to STFU and go home, and why are you even here. I think it. But I don't say it. I just put my head down and do the work I came to do. I try to keep those 20% gaps to a minimum. I wonder how old I'm going to be when I just can't do it any longer. I focus on my own performance. I'm a 1940s Negro in that way, a Tuskeegee Airman. I've got something to prove, but not with my mouth.  I don't mind being a small cog in a big machine. I'm certainly not a monkey wrench in the gears. I'm doing my part. It's not about me. It's about us. 

--

I think in black American life, we all knew the somebody who took the extra time to whisper in our ear. There is a shared confidence we are presumed to have, and often enough somebody will call us 'brother' in an effort to engage in some heartfelt honesty. Sometimes the honesty is more than you wanted to know. Too much information. Sometimes the honesty is right on time, a confidence you needed to experience for once.  Sometimes it's completely wack out of left field. But it's always a reaching out for belonging, it's consequently a challenge to respond in kind, because as much as people like to pretend that black Americans are all the same, (even black Americans pretend), the reality of black diversity can be daunting. 

That moment. That whisper. It makes you hold your breath. 

 

Reaching Higher Ground

As I'm getting in shape, losing weight and flattening the old gut, interesting things are happening.

 

First. I can do five pull-ups. Basically any time. I know for a fact that for the past five years I could only do two, and then I'd be hurt for the rest of the day.

 

Second. And this is really weird. I can sense that my center of gravity is moving up. When I walk I feel it. There's more of me in my arms and chest and shoulders and less of me in my belly.

 

Third. I'm starting to notice a big difference when I'm warmed up vs just getting started. There's a kind of ramp of performance I can feel. It used to be (and to a certain extent it still is) that I try to workout and I just get more and more tired and it takes a day to recover. Now I get warmed up in about 20 minutes (which used to be all I could go) and then the blood and adrenaline is pumping and I can really push myself. 

 

There's a weird new sense of self taking over which is a combination of many things. There's something very different about getting in shape in your mid fifties than at any other age. I have (half) a lifetime of athletic experience to judge what my body is doing and how well. I'm pushing myself to do what I remember I could do, and I accept that I'm slower and get more winded quickly, but I approach it from a very different set of reasons. What I think about now is how meaningless feats of strength are to me. Form is so much more important. Balance is so much more important. Fluidity of motion and the ability to withstand pain. These are things that matter.  Being able to do a double somersault seemed to be a pinnacle of achievement when I was a teen. I don't even think it's impressive to chicks any more, if it ever was. 

1970s SoCal Street Culture - DogTown, Crenshaw, Palisades & Hollywood

Thinking of my recent purchase of DogTown & Z-Boys I recall my participation in sports at the very beginnings of extreme sports in the mid 70s Los Angeles. I'm doing a lot more recording of myself these days following what I've read by Kevin Kelly. I do think this new global augmentation of human intelligence is inevitable. So I'm prepared to share more. Recently, as I mentioned on Facebook, I'm thinking a lot about that period in my life as a young teen with the LA County Junior Lifeguard (JG) program in the summer of 75.  I start there and go all over the map. I used first names of people I suspect will still be alive. Be patient. This starts off slow then gets good.

I would like to correct a couple things in this, as I recall that I may have got a timeline a bit mixed up. The Hollywood Roller Rink was opened and in its heyday years before urethane wheels came along for roller skates. So first was Hollywood before I finished high school (in 78) I must have been 13 or even 12 when I used to go there. Reseda, Flippers then Starlight then World on Wheels at Midtown were all after 1979.

• Related:
• Skateboard Christmas
• The Return of Dogtown
• Famous Kids from the GDZs

Joots

"So come. Take me by the hand. We'll leave this troubled land. I know we can."
-- Maurice White, 1976

Somewhere around 1982 I encountered this geek word. I think it was coined by D.R. Hofstadter. It rhymes with puts. It's a verb used like "joots the system".  It basically is the action taken when one begins to 'think outside of the box'. Now looking towards Google, which I tend to do less in order to be close to my own thoughts on any matter, I see that it actually was Hofstadter and it is an acronym for 'jumping out of the system'. 

From those days it became second nature for me to investigate the inconsistencies at the border conditions of all systems. I have since then been automatically drawn to what I called 'the social implications of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorum'. No organization or system of organization of human beings can be complete and consistent. That means all organizational policy will either use lies to accomplish all of their goals or will be truthful but be unable to meet all of their goals, or they will be truthful and meet all of their goals but only by using external resources not bound by the policy of the organization (which would have to be deniable). In retrospect, perhaps it was inevitable that I became a consultant, that unbounded external resource. 

These days I am a bit restless to have more power, and on some days I think about why I wasn't more persistent in being an asshole in my 30s pursuing BMW perfection and riches. The answer is simple. As soon as I became a father, I knew I had to be a father. I am not sure, having not entertained these thoughts very often, if I am more desirous of autonomy or power. In some ways they seem to be one in the same, given that there are not many things I am so insistent my orders provide for society. I might get power and take its benefits for the freedom it gives me not to be bound by work rules. Or I might take autonomy for the same reason. Karma chameleon. I come and go. I guess that's the point. I want freedom to come and go as I please. I think of liberation geographically because my mind is already free.

Yesterday I drove around in circles looking for a parking space for Venice Beach. I'm sure I found the most convenient and expensive in anticipation of an upcoming meeting of the Obscura Society. I bought a t-shrt and CD from the rollerblading guitarist Harry Perry. He has been there since the 70s. We talked for a minute and than he sang me a song. He's not as good as he used to be. I walked out past the ruins of the Venice Pavillion to the Breakwater Station where I was Junior Guard in the summer of 1975. I talked to the lifeguards about the good old days. They tell me that hazing has been banned from all of the JG programs. Venice' chaos is orderly these days. It's not dangerous, it's market driven. The skaters have a skate park. The henna tattoo artists are all licensed. But the junk food is still as bad. I stayed away from it. Somebody left their iPhone on the benches near the paddle tennis courts. I gave it to the man who ran the t-shirt shop next door. In 150 minutes I saw maybe two women whom I might consider actually attractive. This was my place when I was a confused teen, when I used to perform in public as a tumbler - not for the coins like the shirtless athletes now at the boardwalk with their barker's megaphone and script, but like a skateboard kid. I get it. I understand the dynamic of going to Venice Beach to make a spectacle of yourself. I used to wonder why nobody who actually knew how the world worked didn't set up a booth with encyclopedias next to the fortune tellers and other cranks. This place would be far too lonely for truth and reason. You don't teach at a circus.

Every day I watch videos about fast cars. I am currently in the middle of overthinking my immanent purchase of a Porsche. I still haven't decided between a 911 with its classic lines and pedigree, or the Cayman with its mid-engine and sleek profile. What's not in question is my desire to be apart from the crowd, to be moving even while standing still. To imply my impermanence here in this moment in this position in this stance is to show my belonging to a higher echelon. In this material world there are complexities that deliver without question. Mash on the gas and the Porsche goes, not just straight but around the curves and dips in life. Then again, so does my truck. It doesn't need pavement. It doesn't need smoothness. It doesn't need pampering. I am very hesitant to trade one for the other. I want both. Some days I want the speed more. Other days I want the tough more. I always want to drive. The very first record I bought as a teen was a 45 by Earth Wind and Fire. Getaway. 

Everyone has their promised land. In urban dreams, they try to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This is fantasy. People have forgotten how to dream about freedom. They don't see economies. They don't understand the powers they seek. They wish to trade places, every pauper has his imagined prince. The man on Virginia Avenue wants to be on Park Place, completely ignoring the third dimension where god like hands grab green houses and orange bills from the bank. Put on your hoodie, turn up the bass, walk in step to the beat on the sidewalk mean mug but are your shoes made for hiking?

All systems fail. All systems are incomplete or inconsistent. Freedom = (adaptability + vision at the edge cases)^mobility. 

Beginning Lordship

On my way to becoming what I want to be, something of a kickass man in full, I have discovered that it's more difficult for me to actually reign in my ambition. I have been telling people for the past five years that I am not anti-social, that I am anti-bullshit. But perhaps in fact I am anti-social in the way that is a necessity for people of substance who must actually walk the walk on a daily basis. For example, when I learned how to shoot pistols a few years ago, suddenly a huge portion of television and movie drama became unwatchable. I realized that I had been engaged in fanciful thinking about guns for the entire time that I never took the opportunity to stop being so ignorant and get some hands on experience. The more things one does of this nature, the more anti-social one is tempted to become as our society requires a certain discretion in the treatment of naifs. I approach all this with some caution, of course. As excited as I get to be the man on that wall, I can't always be so sure deep down in people's hearts that they want me on that wall. Naifs will deny that they need me on that wall. They think they can avoid the Morlocks simply by not driving through certain neighborhoods. Meh. Enough with the preface.

The last time I spent the winter in Philadelphia I was at the end of a particular career and I wrote the Way of the Servant. It detailed what i thought and still think should be the model of work done in my industry, that of business intelligence, and for that matter most of end-user computing and all programming that serves domain-specific human decision making. What you program into AIs is up to you, but is also for another discussion. To recap: 

Ambition

• Newbie
• Apprentice
• Journeyman
• Hotshot

Mastery

• Guru
• Goto

Power

• Lord
• Demiurge
• Primary

Now if all of this sounds a bit feudal to you, you would be correct. I could go into it but here's the basic premise. Work is not democratic, and if it is to be meritocratic on a human scale (as opposed to a global scale) then hierarchies are inevitable. As much as I like decentralized power, I do not concede for a moment that children are equals to their parents or that wisdom does not accumulate with age. At some point Americans may choose to do away with the SAT and grade points and let everyone go to college for free, but for the time being be aware that very strict hierarchies are in place in our society that nobody finds particularly controversial.

Moreover there are certain tasks in human affairs that require command and control, because there are certain situations that arise that almost nobody wants to initiate. We must be persuaded, the majority of us, to engage in distasteful or dangerous work. For areas where we are unsure or ignorant or otherwise unmotivated we need the confidence that command gives. For such matters, stating the obvious, leadership is necessary.

Having become the Goto, and having fooled around being Guru once upon a time, I decided to become a Lord. That was in 2007. It didn't work out. There wasn't quite a cultural fit. I was a perfectionist, they were hustlers. I required clarity, they could wing it. I made promises my boss couldn't cash, and he expected me to figure out a way to get away with it. Uncomfortable, and ultimately unprofitable for the both of us. That seems so long ago I can't even remember, without the aid of an old resume, to tell you what happened next. But what I have been doing for the past 6 years has been another adventure altogether.

In that time, I went through an entirely new cycle of Apprenticeship and Journeyman's work in open source, cloud and devops work. Same trajectory, completely new toolset, and under the kind of direction I had never had in my entire career, a truly brilliant technical mind. But that cycle has come to a close and now I am ascending once again to work on a more Lordly level. Plus I've done a bit of Demiurgery. Now people hew to my rules. It's a new rhythm I'm beginning to get used to. I expect to wean myself, in due time, from all roles of ambition and mastery. I do have enough domain knowledge even though the world keeps spinning.

On the horizon are yet another set of interesting technologies associated with distributed non-trusted databases. Yes that old blockchain. I have decided that my angle will be simply that there are centralized fiat trusted databases and decentralized databases. The literature says that they can handle a righteously fast transaction volume. Nobody fully understands what the applications of all that will be. I hope to be able to swoop down from a 10,000 foot level and perch on a reasonably high position of command and control when all this matures. In the meantime, I will continue to be a data architect's best manager. Stay tuned.

Victor

Victor lived on 30th Street a block and a half from my house. He was, for a short time, my best friend. He was a smart, good looking kid and he was proprietary. He was self-possesed. I learned rather early that when he said no, he meant no. Like most of the children in my life as a child, he possessed something I wanted but did not have. In this case it was a small electric keyboard made by a company called Emenee. He also had bongos which I was not so interested in. I insisted that he had more bongo skills and even if I had very few piano skills, it would be better for the music if he played the bongos. So we practiced together and came up with a funky song, perfected it and played it for his father. We were cool. Now that I think about it, freaky as it may sound, I think the name of our song was 'Egyptian Strut'. That was around 1972. After we tired of that song, Victor decided he should play the Emenee from then on, and no meant no. I wasn't interested in bongos. So I said no, too.   

The early 1970s was a very interesting time for our neighborhood. We got a McDonalds. We lost a go cart track. We got a Dodge Daytona Charger at the dealership on Crenshaw and 29th Street which spun on an elevated circular stage in the showroom. We got a Datsun dealer. We got what had to be the first Taco Bell on the planet, complete with firepit and something called a 'Bellbeefer'. It took the place of the Lonnie's Go Karts where the local narcs told us to beware of teenagers selling amphetamines and 'bennies'. Victor's dad got a 260Z. Faster than the 240Z. Victor bet me that it could do 60MPH in second gear. I didn't believe him. I lost the bet. 

Victor and I drifted apart for reasons I cannot remember but may have something to do with a girl named Anita. More likely it was that I shipped off to Jesuit school. By the time I was 17 and had dropped out of college, I was surprised to see Victor working at the local Boys Market. Or perhaps it was a bit earlier because he was proud of a job I couldn't imagine anyone being proud of. I ended up doing similar work for a lot less money at Fedco in 1979. Teamsters made less money than Retail Clerks when it came to bagging groceries. I didn't spend enough time at Fedco to work the warehouse. In 1980 my life changed again. It would be a long time before I ever thought of, or found Victor again.

A few weeks ago, he showed up on Facebook. 

Victor is a bike nut, and that doesn't surprise me. I could sense early on his capacity for hard work. I knew his father. It's kind of interesting that we have cycling in common although I never got as serious as Victor evidently is. He's clearly a successful businessman and has what look to be awesome kids. I'm happy for him. And I wonder who he is and where he has been. 

--

The rest of this is about me as I have been doing some introspection and much more writing lately. I remember discovering about two or three years ago that my IQ puts me in the 98th percentile or thereabouts. The idea floated into my head yesterday as I consider how difficult it has been over my lifetime to find and keep friends. Not because I am anti-social but because I have become accustomed to being the only one I know who thinks about what I think about to the lengths I think about them.  This very essay will be about the 9300th thing I've composed for this blog, much of which is dedicated to thinking about why people think the way they do. I think too much, I take my thoughts too seriously. That's what people tell me, so I let them be right and I try not to tell them they are boring to their faces. It doesn't make me anti-social, I keep saying, but I do deal with the distance, dissonance and dislocation. 

The smartest man in the world told me that there's something about bloggers that he's known that make them roll down the hill to hell and suicide a bit faster than the average bear. That's not good. I have more than enough ego to survive in splendid isolation. But I've done so, I think as Victor has done so, because we understood that we had to work ourselves out of a hole and become whole. And that's about all I have to say about that, other that Victor is named well.