Cobb

Fads of Stoicisms

I will and perhaps you will read some of Cobb in retrospective mode. This post is to disambiguate my own journey to Stoicism from that which I just discovered today is the calling card of various hacks and hawkers, namely Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss. Before this morning, I had never heard of either of them. My own path was lit partially through Philosophy Meetups several years ago, and the influence of Taleb.

The other thing is that I note that I have changed the subtitle of Cobb to 'stoic observations' several years from 'curious, skeptical, analytical'. I will now try to identify that date. So I'm guessing right about now that I first mentioned it in July of 2013 in my post Bastards of Westeros:

What I find most appealing about Game of Thrones aside from its own technical excellence is that it exemplifies something of what we humans face in the lack of a perfected civilization. I have, since the economic collapse of '07 and the election of Obama in '08, begun thinking about how to survive the downside. It has lead me from neoconservatism to Stoicism, and it may ultimately lead me back to the Catholic Church. My basic assumption is this. Man's nature is feudal, and we have only recently in our history invented such institutions capable of approximating Lordship. When these institutions fail, demos will fail, and hierarchies demanding fealty will rise. I think many people will be caught in the cold who don't recognize the failure of those institutions through which now they secure the blessings of liberty. Those who take their liberty for granted will lose it most swiftly and what is important today is understanding of who creates and who destroys liberty. Game of Thrones reminds us that freedom is given by both good-hearted and by evil men. It should remind us to look closer. We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. What breaks? Can you feel it breaking? Is Winter coming? Is our courage at the ready, are our skills up to par, is our loyalty properly aligned? Everything breaks. Only the alert will see ahead. Winter always comes.

But I would think that I probably first got some steam under that general direction from reading fiction of the sort with Lovecraftian heros, starting with Harry Dresden and then Bob Howard. That kicked off in September of 2012.

OK That's all for now. I'll finish reading this, which promises to be a good read.

On Intellectual Courage

And if you think it's easy that's only 'cause
You ain't me. And I ain't you.
-- Earnie Isley

I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm learning things that I should have learned a while ago. Surely it would have taken more faith and courage for me to have taken another road. So I hope that I am wise enough at this point to admit my failure of ambition. And still I'm a bit confused.

This weekend I have been thinking about how difficult it has been for me to be myself. It has gotten easier over the years, but when I was young it was very difficult. Something reminded me about how I used to look for friends when I was a child and find that all of the children I was introduced to had none of my intellectual interests. I've always had a problem because of my own natural curiosity and my intellectual powers, such as they were. I never quite believed that I was a nerd or a geek or anything anti-social but I was made to suffer because of those terms. I understand that people simply didn't understand me, but I didn't understand myself. I didn't feel like a weirdo. I simply felt like there were a lot of social things I didn't understand the value of. 

I often recall a summer vacation after my sophomore year in high school. I was bored at home and turned on daytime television. Regis Philbin was on his own talk show talking about a thousand things I had never heard of here in my own hometown of Los Angeles. I recognized that there were certain things I might not experience because of my not being rich, but I was shocked to find that I wasn't even aware of such things. So I endeavored to find out. 

So when I think about how I might be different from other 'nerds' in my profession, I know that I made a conscious decision to discover and understand the world of fashionable Los Angeles beginning in the mid 1970s. Several years later, when the term 'yuppie' was coming into fashion (I read it in the LA Weekly, while sitting on a bus stop at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Purdue Avenue after paying for a traffic ticket), I knew that's what I wanted to be. A young urban professional. 

Much of the life of the world was a mystery to me, and I did have a certain amount of arrogant ambition. I believed then, as now, that anything I wanted to know, I could learn. But I also understood, then as now, that I had no particular sponsors who were invested in my success. While I was at my private prep school, I was informed about every standardized test I should take that would help the school look good but I had no particular confidence in the advice of my guidance counselor. This is a very typical story I've heard from others and from things I've read and I don't mean to suggest my predicament was highly unusual. However I am particularly drawn to the subject of intellectual courage and courage in general.

What are we supposed to know, and how should we broker that knowledge? What kind of time should we give ourselves to pursue ultimate aims, and what confidence can we have in the edification of the journey? It is an especially difficult dilemma to consider for those like myself who were not only unsponsored, but who felt they had nothing to lose from falling short. And yet we must socialize. We have to sing the songs that everybody knows along the way, so we take time away from the pursuit to consume and understand the common understandings that get us through a day.

I always preferred to have my appearance, specifically my clothing, speak for me. I always felt and still do feel flummoxed in estimating what it is someone who might care to know me, might care to know about me. Self-introductions are very difficult. I probably overshare. I've heard one intimate friend tell me that I seemed insecure by telling so much. Perhaps she was right. But how else can one do it, especially if one is actually unafraid? What sort of personal information should one be proprietary about? One eventually learns, but in one's fragile youth it is very hard to say.  I like this band. I go to this church. I believe this about politics. If one seeks to think one's way into the future, many conversations are wagers. For me, it took a long time to break through. That was because, as I suspect it is for most young people, I was looking for someone to complete me. I ended up painting myself into a corner and that forced me to dismiss so many individuals for whom I made rash presumptions. Moving to NYC made it clear that my Los Angeles shoes were not communicating properly. 

It wasn't until my last grandmother died that I abandoned my race, class, political and religious conversations that, along with my career credentials and marital status, communicated what I thought were the proper clues which bore up my identity. I had been on my way to allow identity to flow like the loose robes of the desert through which ones nakedness might be shared. This was a difficult journey, especially as I moved and worked across the country. So I always had a contingent part of me, and now it was more evident. I was not that Ivy League graduate, or that Wall Street hustler. I was nowhere near the apex of the most reasonable peaks of ambition that I could imagine for myself, and nobody cared. 

It is now a great deal easier for me to say that I am an asshole. That is because I have found enough people to tell me that I am their kind of asshole. The inner beast that has been my ego, suffering under the clothing and skin and conversations that I have had to learn to be sociable is now able to express itself. What I find unusual is that it often expresses itself as a kind of resigned indifference. I have learned that the world of human beings stumbles along without ever clearly knowing how much weight to give to the wit and humor of Regis Philbin, the testimony of Robert Conquest or the intricacies of analytic geometry. We don't know what we are supposed to know, we just hope that we can manage our way through the gates for which we have no passports of confidence. 

Resigned indifference is not a comfortable position, and I am not particularly proud of this attitude. But I honestly have no idea how I should fit into a society that has failed to uphold, for me and others I presume to be like me, a reasonable set of values and expectations. What are they? Let us merely say that although Truth may not serve man, it should be prosperous for enough men to serve Truth.  The pursuit is not its own reward, and we must fight off the competition in any case. I don't actually pursue Truth but I believe the employment of reason and moral ethics to be enough. These too, are likely only to provide a sort of smug self-satisfaction of our own estimation of our energies. And then one gets old.

I suspect that there's someone who has already read the book or found the friend who let him in on this secret when he was 23 years old sitting on a bus stop in West Los Angeles. Instead, I was figuring out how to comport myself as a young urban professional. I've been there and done that to my own satisfaction, and that may be the only satisfaction there is to have. But I also have also taken very seriously those race, class, political and religious ethics I have grown in and out of. Some of that work has helped me to this point, which while not particularly high, does feel elevated. 

--

A friend posted a list of late 19th century occupations taken during the London census. One of them struck me as both poignant and hilarious. "Fatuous Pauper". It would be quite presumptuous to rename this blog or split it from now going forward, but that is how I feel. I feel on the one hand I might have dealt with my social dissonance in a more cold-hearted manner and isolated myself further into the narrow set of social constraints of a more disciplined and demanding profession. On the other hand, I actually do like myself, even if I should descend into penury. I think I'd be a very good wanderer, although I'd need to work on my harmonica skills. 

I'm going to beat myself up a little more about this for a week or so. I'll let you know how it turns out. 

The Race Man's Library

Somebody asked me which books I should read if I wanted to know how to think about race. It almost never occurred to me to put together that list. I think I know what books to list, but I cannot tell if that list would make sense to anyone but me. That's because I have read so many books on race and I have learned so much from practical experience, and in fact from Christianity, that I'm not sure it could be much more than autobiographical. Then again this is my blog, the proper place to do it.

The first that comes to mind is Cornel West's Race Matters, which I can hardly think of apart from its tandem book Breaking Bread co-authored by bell hooks. These two were the last theoretical works that I could bother to take seriously. So it has to be said that there are in this compendium books that appeal to the practical, and books that appeal to the theoretical. I think the theoretical might be most useful to get one prepared to deal with the practical, but one might get carried away. I understand all too well how much reading about race becomes something of an experiment in self-discovery. IE, I have an idea about what I think about what I believe people believe about me because of my race, but how can that be adjusted? So a theoretical book and make an enormous dent on a younger mind. That's the dangerous part, of getting one's identity clues from scholars, one could put oneself in a paranoid step, one that requires the conversion of millions of minds to be at peace. It is for this reason that the practical books are critical. 

Here's the thing. Everybody knows how to be nice. So if you become convinced that your world needs more than just nice, then you've stuck your finger in the dike. You will be standing there, yelling at everyone to lend a hand, and you can't move yourself. 

Race Matters kept one particular thing in my mind, as did Breaking Bread. They both emphasized the need of black Americans to have a special identity cookie that would help them to get to the point of acknowledging the Enlightenment framework of 'enlightened self-interest', because most black Americans according to West, have trouble accepting that this is what animates white people in America. In other words, most black Americans have a racial/mercantilist view of capitalist markets. They do not accept the idea of win-win in business and they use the examples of their own relative group poverty as proof. Therefore black Americans who believe this always need an alternative way of success to break through. I could go on about what I see correct and incorrect about this view, but it is an important and useful observation. Breaking Bread, about the Gramscian, emergent, organic black intellectual, is the perfect companion to the view of Race Matters as it establishes the special role of properly educated folks like Cornel West and bell hook is creating and maintaining disciplined thought along this alternative way of success. Is that a tautology? Hmm. I can't remember the last time bell hooks gave me a raise or a tax break, but that's just me.

On the practical side, the one book that meant the most to me was Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America. Years before I gave West any bit of my attention (or even knew who he was) I tied my fortunes to the wisdom of Thomas Sowell. Ethnic America was excellent for me because it gave a picture of practical ethnic identity in the context of economic life. If there was a road to be slowly trod, no matter how bitter the chastening rod, and led to the top of the mountain, it was on me to find it and follow it. Ethnic America thus, was a roadmap as well as a guide to how other ethnics and immigrants did so in America. Having read this one, it became perfectly clear to me that I would get married after the age of 30. That simple formula worked. 

Running over to the theoretical side, there was no book that quite so effectively blew my mind as Derrick Bell's Faces at the Bottom of the Well. In it were thought pieces that were so far above and beyond the everyday yammering about race that I truly felt that I had finally heard clear thinking on the matter. The two and a half essays that remain with me are Afrolantica Rising, the Rules of Racial Standing, and one about the White Militia. In that last one, Bell proposes a survivalist militia made up of hardcore gun totin' rednecks who yeehaw with all their might against racism. They are willing, any day of the week, to fight and die for the equality of blacks. So would you as a black American, join and trust such a militia?  People's reaction is to suggest no such thing could ever exist, which then only goes to show how thoughtless they are and how resistant they might be to positive radical change. I used the second essay, the Rules of Racial Standing, a great deal in my early race man writings. Now I think of it as an epistemological trap, so now it only gets half credit. That doesn't change how useful it is as an observation on how racial thinking operates. Afrolantica Rising, was a story about a magical island, the legendary Atlantis, that rose from the sea. It fulfilled all of the myths about Afrocentric Africa, and only blacks could go there. Even though most blacks did not, the very existence of that place, for one shining moment, gave  hope to a people who felt they never had a homeland. It again underscored the need for black Americans to get some identity cookies. 

An astounding book that will probably be pretty hard to find is Theodore Cross' Black Power Imperative. I found it to be fairly compelling back in the mid 80s when I read it. The difficulty is that all of the statistics it used are now long out of date. Still, the premise was one generally around proportional and direct racial representation which is a considerable matter. I can't say that I'm particularly passionate about this, as I de-emphasize the weight of politics in one's quality of life. So how do we disentangle all this? Well, from my perspective, the segregated ghettos have their own special problems as legacies (property values, police protection, school qualities, business density, healthcare delivery). So the logical priorities of voters in these ghettos will be around fixing that which is uniquely dysfunctional in their communities. So what is the better avenue for achievement? Well when it comes to college education and jobs, we think it's obvious. Go to the better place. But when it comes to residence, we tend to favor the ideas of racially segregated communities. For better or worse, one has to ask if it fundamentally more fair for people to vote with their feet or with their politics. My idea is that one shouldn't have to wait for an election to improve your station in life. So that privileges the move out of the ghetto to the better neighborhood. So with this in mind, I do not see the primacy of block racial voting, or the necessity on such a grand scale ever again of creating majority minority districts. All of this will make it more difficult to define  the 'permanent interests' or a black voting bloc, but then again these were racial creations of the post-60s. They shouldn't be permanent. To the extent that hypersegregation out of the mainstream is prevalent, one should depend upon enterprise zones and discretionary political action from the top down, rather than to expect that over time, members of a race should be require to exhibit and discipline political racial unity en masse.  With all that in mind, the Black Power Imperative illustrates the inequalities by race and makes a cogent and compelling argument for proportional representation. What I'm fairly sure is that the popularity of identical political ideology across racial lines is much more clear today than when it was written. The imperative is not entirely black. (Cobb Vision Video). 

Linn Washington wrote the book Black Judges on Justice; Perspectives from the Bench. It must be said that when I was a college freshman, the second time, I went to the library and picked up a book. "Who's Who Among Black Americans" which had some 50,000 doctors, lawyers, engineers, military officers and others prominent. So I said to myself, all I will ever need is to make friends with a couple hundred of those folks and my life will be happy. So I had always looked, in that way, toward a black leadership class of Americans to guide me to the promised land. Not to find a shortcut, but to not waste my time around undesirable Negros who thought they were my natural kin. So yeah I've always been a snob if that's what it means to listen to the voice of actual black judges rather than the complaints of actual black criminals, or those who stand as proxies for their 'voice'. What I didn't find in this thick book, was anything that led me to believe that there was something fundamentally twisted about American jurisprudence. In other words, there was a diversity of black opinion, no conspiracy theories, and a status quo that didn't make me feel all squirmy. So there's two books to consider.

Now it must be said that part of any important understanding about race has to do with living. That is to say, you know how you live, how the people in your neighborhood live, how your various friends and relations live, but how representative is that life? Why would you care? Because you want to buck up or debunk what you hear about race and what you know about race. But there was no set of books quite so potent, as a fictional set, than the following three I'm about to mention. The first was White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty. The next was High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney and the last was Jazz by Toni Morrison. Everybody who read White Boy Shuffle said it was a story about me. I know exactly how that character lived. Then with High Cotton, well that was how I thought about myself, the closest any fictional or autobiographical character got to me. Jazz is the book that nobody really wants to read because it so satisfyingly delivers a clear case of how fragile people, afraid of race, destroy each other because they cannot handle the possibility of intimacy, family and equality. When it comes to matters of the heart, Jazz is the most profound book on race I've ever read.

When it comes to matters of history, Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter is the last word. I read it in 1997 years after I rather stopped reading books about race. Cloudsplitter is the closest thing we have to understanding John Brown, who in fact was that man who lead that militia into war precisely because he had no tolerance for racism or any inequality of standing between himself and the African in America. It's one of the most important books I've read, period.

In terms of clarified thinking, I found In My Father's House: Africa  by Africa in the Philosophy of Culture by K.Anthony Appiah, to be profound. I never even finished the book because its thesis was so well written and concise at its very beginning. I had always asked myself the question of whatever happened to the greatest black minds, and their great thinking. If Marcus Garvey was so profound, why hadn't the Garveys prospered? Where was the chain of thought that made it clear how Africans in America should think of themselves? Why was there this perennial need to reconstruct and re-identify with the race a new and different way every generation? Hadn't anybody figured it out yet? And the answer was, as Appiah demonstrated, that the very idea of race, which is false, was indeed still the nugget of falsity that all of these thinkers held too close to their hearts and minds. 

But really I would have to end on this one book. Because in all of my thinking on race, I was attempting to find a personal, social and intellectual connection, with the emphasis on intellectual, with the heirs of the best that African America had produced. It was important to me to have hung out with Wynton Marsalis. It was important to me to have hung out with Cornel West. It was important to me to play some part in the evolution of black cultural production. I wanted to be, for most of my life, a famous black author. I felt that my work, in my generation, could call out to everyone in a political and cultural way that was a smart inheritance. That was my avocation. I wanted to be in the elite. But a book called Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America by John Langston Gwaltney solved all that. It proved to me once and for all, that ordinary black folks, without leadership, without scholarship, without assistance from anything but their own wits, knew exactly what they needed to know about race and their relationship to America. It showed me that everyone was their own solution, and there was never any need beyond the tweaking of the laws that was the Civil Rights Movement, for black Americans to do anything outside of what their spirits, guts and minds told them to do. It seemed that in the end, the more studying you did, the more you felt that there had to be some way to fix this race problem. But the fix was already in place with no need for poets, priests or politicians. There is no need for a revolution. 

As long as I have been writing and thinking about race, I never took responsibility for 'the state of race relations in America'. I knew then as I know now, that people work it out for themselves, or they don't. But they have their own reasons and those reasons and capabilities cannot be abstracted for grand purposes. So in the end, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually or by chance, everyone finds their own equilibrium, and no history will do that justice. All any individual can do is satisfy their hungers and curiosity by comparing what they think and believe to others. But that will not make it, and cannot make it, a racial imperative. It comes down to individuals. The individuals are correct because they speak for themselves. It's when they try to represent a race or a racial movement when they fall foul. 

--

I'm quite sure I have read just about everything considered relevant to the subject matter between 1982 and 1993, and especially from 1989 forward.  I stayed on top of this with some intensity and I kept writing online with what I learned pretty much through to 2006(?). It is rather odd in retrospect to see all this as a half-baked writing career. Call it "The Fire Lost This Time", if you will. I can't make a whole lot of it because I'm very pleased with what I was able to write and communicate, and given the choice between total commitment to that writing career and my day job, I chose my day job.  I could not ever believe that the world would stop rotating, even for me, if I never wrote that book. And even to this day I find it very hard to see my writing or fame owing to giving my own understanding of race to the world. There is only a limited amount of pride I could take from that. If that's an irony, I suppose I can appreciate it from a critical distance, but it's not about me. I just did what I did when it was compelling for me to do so. 

Chasing Pebbles

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

First off, it is my natural disposition to say that I'm good. And I am. But then if you know me, then you know that good is not quite enough. So I'm dealing with it. I'm just not sure that I'm dealing with it in the best way possible. I've been through some of this before, back in 2001, but I'm in a much better yet more profoundly consequential position. I think. 

Right now I feel like a survivor of a sort. The past 18 months threw some challenges my way, and in some ways I've been put off my game. I know that I'm going to get it back, but I'm just not sure that I should be playing the same exact game for the exact same prizes. So I'm a little undecided on that. 

So let's deal with the facts, shall we. First of all, my son Chris, rode his suburban train of thought right off the rails. He got busted for something similar to a possession charge and a real petty theft charge. All of it circling around him and his dysfunctional cohort, smoking, drinking, cruising and generally being no-count mallrat college dropouts. I went John Wayne and did the right thing immediately and without thinking about how my rescue would leave him weak, not having crawled out of his own hole. But it worked out and he came to his senses in collaboration, but not without me having experienced the nerve-wracking understanding of exactly how hard-headed my son is. Hard headed as I am, which generally includes the Kennedy-esque phrases "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival" of my way. The end result was a set of mutually negotiated goals which got him into the Service where he is doing very well, thank you. That doesn't change the fact that Christopher can be messianic and like me, needs to attach himself to a set of high ideals, in order to work. Because, like me, he is on the whole, totally satisfied with where he can get himself in society, and has no particular objections to living low.  

So within a couple weeks of getting him off to bootcamp, my brother drops dead from a cardiac embolism. So for the following n weeks, I back right into John Wayne mode. I have to do what I have to do for everyone who needs doing. I deal. Now during this time, my company's pipeline of projects is drying up and I bring my mother into town. And I deal with a shift in priorities from the long-term focused kind of work I prefer, to the being on call short attention span theatre I do not like at all. If you want to know what my hell is. it's external imperative. It's the place where I'm on stage square dancing with whomever and I don't get to call the steps and still I have to pay the fiddler. I'd rather have a boulder to push up the mountain than chase every pebble falling down it. But I've been chasing pebbles. But of course they're not pebbles, they are the emotional needs of a stressed and mourning family, a set of challenges that I am obligated to attend, sometimes by bearing up to tears and other times by sharing them. 

I prefer to be strongly wrong rather than weakly correct. Ask anyone. I go from one extreme to the other. I am ashamed at all my half-efforts no matter how satisfactory they seem. And right now I just don't know what is good enough. 

A year ago next month I got my gums ripped out and reset in a procedure I might have had five years before if I hadn't gone through a series of healthcare insurance provision flip-flops. When I finally got it, I took pictures of myself in the oral surgeon's chair. I began a series of experiments in sharing my own debasement, embarrassment and humiliation, rather like the proverbial domineering executive who seeks at the end of the day to be bullied. But it didn't provide balance, it was just another excess. 

I found my old friends and they found me. And I was bearing up while they were being comforting and it was good. I was treading water successfully, getting back to the new normal one stroke at a time. And then my mother whose company was greatly refreshing, had a stroke. I was ready. I knew exactly how fast I could drive at midnight and which hospital to go to. I stayed up the critical hours and brought the right things to the attention to the right people. And in time I, helped nurse her back to health supporting the discipline she adhered to like a champ. I watched from the day she couldn't even hold a pencil until she wrote in her old handwriting once again. When we sent her back to my sister on the East Coast, I felt I had truly achieved. 

But now I'm tired. I'm so debilitated and dispirited. I know what I want to do, what I need to do, what I'm obligated to do, but I just don't want to do anything. I don't want to succeed and I don't want to fail. I keep attending to the things right in front of me, when I'm not tired, and I get them done but all the overarching vision has disappeared. I have become a pebble chaser, and instead of the boulders I should be rolling uphill, I simply stare at the mountains themselves. 

My father doesn't eat. He has buried his second child and our family rolls like a fumbled football. Our emotions are eccentric and likely to snap an axel. Like the man falling from the fifth floor at every window on the way down, people hear 'so far so good'. We hope in the end to defy all the gravity of this situation. We expect to triumph despite it all, but we're starting to sound like fanatics. And yet we hold it together. We hold it together. We are not in quiet desperation. We are just struggling to get out of bed and walk, because as much as I want to sit in bed, I don't want to be the man sitting in bed. I don't want to be the man sitting on the couch watching television in my underpants eating potato chips. I just got off the couch to come write more of this essay, and it was a healthy breakfast, and I laughed all the way through the Namibian adventures of The Grand Tour. But yes, I had finished the potato chips the night before. My father doesn't eat. I still eat, I still hunger and I'm overeating on the holidays. 

My uncle had an infection over the weekend. I call him in Baltimore. He's in good spirits. Our Christmas letter has gone out. My paragraph is about my ups and downs; I'm up and down amongst the successes of my extended family. But I'm weary and I'm bright eyed staring at what's about to go wrong. All the joy is being sucked out of knowing. I accept all the tragedies. I'm not surprised. I'm not cynical, I'm skeptical but my emotions are bordering on cynicism. My emotions want to run away to a mountain lake and just fish and deal with the drama of fishing. I can't run away. I need to be needed, I need to do the valuable work, I need to be on top of my career in that old way I always was - just ready for the scenario and walking everyone through the details and braving the risks of the unknown in a system where everybody forgot the recipe. But now those are starting to feel like pebbles and mountains. I'm not rightsized to the problems my ego requires me to solve. I'm overwhelmed or I'm undermatched. Nothing is smooth. Nothing is predictable. I can't get a rhythm. I'm living in twilight. 

I bought a hobby. It's interesting, and impractical. I still can't get used to the idea that it's going to be a waste of money and time. But everything I do seems to be a waste one way or another. Do you see what I'm doing here? I'm confessing. I'm dealing with it. I'm inching forward and trying to purge myself of what I already know to be true and poison. Why? Because it's a sacrament. I'm committing to my future self, to my current extended consciousness, all that I need to do to scrub myself of the barnacles of my life. Because I hate being dysfunctional, and I hate wishful thinking, and I hate denial. Days like this I could use a priest, but I don't deserve a priest, and I expect that I'll never get a priest or a Porsche. But I work the barbell theory just the same, try for the best, expect the worst. 

I believe in survival of the fittest. Most of the time, however, we're all avoiding fitness tests. We've all figured out elaborate ways of sandbagging. I watch everybody do it, and I'm disgusted. I do it. I'm disgusted with myself. I used to sit in church on Sunday worrying about all the atheists who have the extra hours to study for the tests on Monday. But I'm loathing going back to work. I need to play hard before I work hard. Did I play hard enough? Did I sleep long enough? Did I do enough homework? At the end of every weekend I fail to collect myself and settle down with the appropriate answers to those questions. 

The shooting range is closed. I haven't been to TKD in 18 weeks. My martial education is essentially over. I don't want to fight any longer. I still have the feelings of badassery in my genes, but I don't have the patience for physical pain and discipline right now. I need to nurse my spirit. I need to rehabilitate my working state of mind. I need an emetic of the bullshit. I'm going to leave Facebook. I don't want to know what the general public is feeling because it only makes me write snappy answers to stupid questions. I don't have time for that. I need to meditate. I need to meditate. I'm turning on the music. I'm focusing on the Wall Street Journal. I'm making things simple. I can't be hungry for 12 things. I need to cut it down and get all my wheels on one pair of rails and chug forward. 

I don't want to know how crazy the world is. I just need to get back on my game, and it's taking me a long time to heal, and I hate it. I hate walking with a limp. I'm a flame in the clammy wind. Just give me clear day. Just give me a freaking clear day. OK a clear month.

I'm going to go and make myself useful. I'm tired of this weepy shit. Happy God Damned New Year. 

A Brief Retrospective on the Conservative Brotherhood

The Conservative Brotherhood lasted a good 4 or 5 years I guess. I started my blog 'Cobb' in '02 having retired from another project called Vision Circle. Vision Circle was my last attempt at advancing a Progressive anti-racist black partisan discussion on the web. It was good while it lasted and is archived nice and neat. As Lester Spence headed to big time academia, he had to scrub some of his provocations, and we never got the late lamented Prometheus Six to join up. But like I said, Vision Circle was a success.

 

Three nights, which I will meld into one, three things occurred to me.

 

1. Dr. Lou, an old family friend, gave me an updated 'by any means necessary' speech that said that the US respects the Japanese because the Japanese were ready to kill and die by the millions, and Japanese culture has *nothing* to do with that respect. It was Japanese blood and all of Japan's money in war. Black Americans consequently are absolute fools to think cultural nationalism could produce better results. The powers that be in America respect power. Black Americans were not, are not, and never will be ready for war. 

 

2. Black Americans have politically put all of their eggs into one basket of political aims, despite the fact that real class differences (and economic, and cultural) exist among 30 odd million black Americans in 2003. Some fraction of those need to be working the other side of the aisle.

 

3. Black American patriots who wave the American flag were booed at the Sydney Olympics. If black Americans want to be and do become the best in the world, why are they hated, and when they are, who is going to defend them? There was, and is, a fundamental problem black Americans have with patriotism.

 

So my aim was to put a stake in the ground and assert two things.

 

• The Civil Rights Movement is done, and won, and never going back.
• Black Americans are not going to be a race forever and their class distinctions will matter more. They need to be getting baksheesh from the American Right, not just welfare and pity from the American Left.

 

So I took Cobb, the most conservative sounding part of my name, registered Republican and started blogging about what the black Right was, is and should be. In the beginning, I started going to local Republican functions and discovering all of my stereotypes etc. I made efforts to understand the American Right and distinguish its various parts and pieces. I was very surprised at the diversity of black opinion on the Right. I never expected pure Christian social conservatives. I never expected pure Pro-Life advocates. I expected a lot of buppies and people like Vernon Jordan. I was wrong. Since my blog was fairly popular, I was able to meet with and invite all of the major black bloggers on the right. They all signed up. But some left after a short period, notably LaShawn Barber and Ambra Benjamin. 

 

My aim was to identify and name the Old School black politics, culture and values that I had always heard had a 'natural' affiliation with the American Right. So I came up with some words that I figured a broad cross section of black Americans could deal with. My own insight and research kept telling me, some fraction of black Americans were always comfortable voting for local Republican candidates, and basically their biggest problem was the racism of the GOP and the Southern Strategy. So I'm like, OK let's be black and proud conservatives with no racism and see what happens. A lot happened.  Thus the Old School Core Values:

The Conservative Brotherhood is a group of African American writers whose politics are on the right hand side of the political spectrum. Expanding the dialog beyond traditional boundaries, they seek to contribute to a greater understanding of African Americans and America itself through advocacy and commentary.

Old School Core Values:

Pride
We are African Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities. We are proud of our heritage, and respect the lives, triumphs and tribulations of our forebears in this country and beyond. We aim to represent their greatest hopes for us and honor their memory.

Patriotism
The United States of America is our home, not simply by default but by choice. We take our duty to our home seriously and we defend it. We seek to improve it by our work and values and leave it better than we found it.

Family
We are extended families and we put family first. It is the primary organization to which our lives are dedicated. We fight for the proper upbringing of our children. We demand respect and consideration of our elders. We love and support our brothers and sisters.

Industry
We work twice as hard and sometimes get half as far, but we work with dignity and we expect and enjoy our rewards. We are not materialistic but we know the value of a dollar. We seek self-improvement through creativity, dedication and effort in our jobs, businesses and partnerships.

Piety
We have abiding faith in God and the principles of righteousness. We strive to be true to transcendent values and take the long view of our purpose on Earth. We conduct ourselves as vessels of spirit and we guard our own souls and the souls of others from corruption.

Liberty
We believe in the rule of law and rights of people to be free and to determine their own fate. We fight tyranny and oppression of all kinds keeping in mind the battles of those who struggled and died that we might be free.

Pluralism
We believe in a tolerant and open society, and we welcome all people to enjoy its benefits and responsibilities.

 

Even as I look at these values today, they are not far from my heart. But I learned a lot just by the act of putting them together and challenging people to deal with the fact of our creation.
 

In the middle, I made a clear discovery that 'be' seemed to be more important than 'do'. So the very act of saying "I am a black Republican" or "I am a black Conservative" got in the way of doing what those values instructed. Whereas it was very comfortable for us to say what we believed unapologetically, we always had to deal with haters. For a while it was good sport to fight back from this alternative perspective, but after a time my head started ringing from the sound of people's heads exploding. You probably wouldn't be surprised at how deeply ingrained it is in people's heads to associate everything evil in America with the perceived acts and ideas of the Republican Party. 

 

In the end, I found that America became obsessed with 'be' and just assumed 'do' could not, or would not happen. The blog league was a success, I maintained a core site for some time but it ultimately got hacked. I wasn't interested in doing anything for money or getting involved with parceling out funds from the site. It wasn't as if I didn't have a day job. And while I got some notoriety from appearances on TVOne, in various blogging and journalistic venues and as a regular on NPR, I wasn't really hungry to make a media star out of myself, much less deal with the possibility that I could be seen as a shill. Again, I took no money and accepted no ads on my blog with the exception of normal blog syndication. I never made enough money from that to pay the 15 bucks a month it cost me to host Cobb. 

 

In 2006 I killed the blog and took a hiatus. In 07 I went balls to the wall over the Obama nomination and won best black blogger that year. When Obama was elected in '08, people were shocked that I didn't bend over for his platform which I found domestically mendacious and internationally naive. As well, in the broader fight for civil liberties, I recognized that identity politics had won, just as the hardest multiculturalists dreamed, and those values I talked about above meant nothing in the abstract unless I, the Conservative Brotherhood and everybody else could find a way to reconcile our false blackness with the real blackness. It was like I was in a rap battle with DMX about realness.  Despite the fact that it happened while we in the Brotherhood were taking slings and arrows, a real black man became the real head of the real Republican Party, a victory nobody wants to admit happened. 

 

It's funny when I think about it now. For two years, 2009-2011 the Republican Party was run by a black man, and the disrespect from the Left was so profoundly cold that you couldn't cut it with a blowtorch. It was like Krell metal. And now all those years of devolution and confusion has landed us here, where all people know is Trump and have no idea of how complicit they were in his election. 

 

The Conservative Brotherhood faded away like an old soldier and people went their separate ways. I see folks from time to time, especially Joseph C. Phillips and a lot of us remain friends on Facebook, but I have basically lost all interest in domestic politics as any sort of activist. I see how entirely new networks of trust have to be built over the ashes of our currently barely functioning democratic institutions. It will happen, and I know what the content will have to be, but I have absolutely no interest in the daily bitching points.

 

More recently I have been interested in understanding what will happen before that rebirth occurs. That makes me something of a prepper. But I understand how many people are entranced by wishful thinking and magical realism and the unbearable lightness of their narrative playlists. You'd think Russians hacking the DNC would do it, but that's not enough either. I mean not when people don't even talk about Georgia, Ukraine, the Crimea and Syria. It's rather stupendous to watch Baby Boomers still in power acting as if Russia went away like Fukuyama said. 

 

I have always survived and moved forward by being a couple steps ahead, but I'm just lucky that I don't shy away from the ugly and my own life is satisfactory enough for me to invest spare time in learning. But I am always pleased that there are always some people who get it right and don't waste too much time on what is not. So, The Conservative Brotherhood served its purpose and I am very proud of what we did. But I've moved on from political writing. There's not much of a future in that for people as subtle as I am. So I'm digging history instead. And programming languages, of course.  

The Week, Weakly

I have noticed several things about myself, and given that I have not been given a biographer, it is necessary for me to do so. Unfortunately through a series of random events shaping my life in that particular way I variously reconstruct it, I have never quite found myself in thrall to a singular achievement of genius that would justify my fame. So I have spent the extra cycles apart from life, documenting life. As such I call myself a writer and this blog, I imagine, can be considered a gigantic toilet paper roll of textual selfies. But I only self-deprecate out of ego. You know, dear reader, precisely how much genius I am, and of course I know that your assessment is contingent on the particular way you will reconstruct your memory of being assaulted by my verbosity. Then again, you asked for it.

Yesterday I happened to change my Twitter profile picture and tagline. I went from the old hedcut to the black52. And I think I may have removed 'writer' from my traditional four spoked bio of (dad. architect. writer. entrepreneur.) You see I am currently 'wry stoic and tactical epistemologist'. Such a description suggests that I am so much more of a p-zombie than I am. Rather it should suggest exactly what I do online in response to those questions that I am asked. It is a relativistic description of an avocation of someone who is famous in the wrong places for the wrong reasons. In fact, I am that person who like both Bill Clinton and George Washington, pays full attention to what you are saying when in personal company. And yet how many people actually grab my full and direct focus for significant periods of time? If there were more, I certainly wouldn't spend so much time online in social spaces. Then again, I cannot tell you how well I am enjoying Barenboim & Chopin this dark Sunday morning. Nocturnes on 9/11 in the morning twilight watching my analog clock.

The point of all these two previous paragraphs, you mindless monkey, is to remind you that I am so much more in person even though I suspect people reduce me down to the sexual and professional essentials. If I spent more time around people who dress well, it would add that dimension. And for those who eat well, that as well. All well and good when one is in person and in some modicum of pleasant presentability sexually and professionally, because isn't that all anyone talks about? I hardly know. My presence and verbosity tend to twist the subjects of what I presume ordinary people discuss, that is to say ordinary people who call what they are doing 'discussion', as contrasted to fist bumps & emojis, prattle & whining, coy cajoling and (whoops, that's sex again).. and uhm, entertainment and politics. I prefer discussions, peppered with wit that makes one laugh at the turning of a phrase rather than at the expense of a personality, whelps that most of us are. And so in the company of the unwashed masses, I am given to be anonymous unless I am serving a purpose that increases my curiosity or famousity, both of which I have increasingly engaged over the past several years. 

The hats at 2600 serve to remind me that my current calling card is insufficient, and my overworld approach to anonymity requires a more hidden aspect. So going back to the August meeting I recall that the man who wanted my Amazon hoodie (which believe me, he can have) has a rather impenetrably visual website I probably need to curl cleverly to get more out of. There's not enough crypto in my life and I'm paranoid about that. But there also is not enough reference to my life as it occurs in real life in my writing life. Nor are there necessarily appropriate channels for those I come across in the world to access those various parts of my being that are not sexual and professional. In other words, I have been wearing a mask that says not quite enough, and since I have learned recently how exactly to drink socially in bars with strangers, there needs to be a way to extend communications. I will do so, securely.

So we dedicate today's post to Jennifer Barrett who is my latest Twitter follower. (who appears attractive and smart). 

As I have been assigned to Siberia for a six month excursion into the world of Operations, I am beginning to realize how much I have been Development oriented even as I call myself deeply dipped in DevOps. When it comes to networks, I am still wearing boxing gloves. Not all thumbs but not much more in the grasp department. I can push things around with some effort. I am, however, falling into a productive groove and actually look forward to the installations and monitoring agents I will be putting in place over the next few weeks. HashiCorp's Consul is the first of these tools I will deploy professionally.

The commute to work is difficult for me, and I am going to have to switch my sleeping and waking schedule. I now work downtown which is a mixed blessing. There are some wonderful eateries, but I can't keep spending money on them. I'm better off with a quick sandwich eaten at the desk. So I'll moderate that. The biggest problem is the depressing drive up and down Central Avenue to and from work. Ick. 

In my Circle of Trust activities, Consul will be combined with Vault and a Beaglebone Black. What I need is the ability to put a network inside of my network and work that angle. Also I want a portable VPN, and perhaps a gigantic battery in my computer bag. But the immediate task is, as it has been, to demarcate some lines between my several email addresses and services and determine which will be outwardly facing and which will be inwardly facing. 

I haven't made any progress in the Data Science arena. I've basically taken the R book out of my computer bag. 

Anyway this has taken too long. What I'm going to do is find a way to push a daily tweet storm of what I send to Evernote based off my Feedly feed. that Will present a more comprehensive sampling of my interests and perhaps draw me closer to the network of associates I wish to engage, at long last, in person perhaps to be introduced into the Circle of Trust. Essentially a phile as Neal Stephenson imagines, one whose depth and breadth is curated by a group like my T50. 

 

TC Remembered

TC was, in my childhood, one of the best friends I ever had. I found him again this morning, 45 years later. 

He was the first kid and only kid in my neighborhood where I could sleep over. He lived one house from the corner whereas we lived in the middle of the block. I can remember that sleepover when we decided, like boys will do, to count all of our scars and scabs and tell the stories of how we got them. Both of us had over 100. TC was a smart kid, polite and trustworthy. In the old neighborhood, the combination was rare. Darrell was trustworthy, but his family was dodgy so he'd cover for them when they didn't deserve it. Vincent was polite but his mother never let him come outside. The Myers boys were athletic and smart, but full of tricks. Basically they put us smaller boys up to gladiator fights for their own amusement. Lonzo was polite and trustworthy, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. 

There were other kids who made decent enough friends, Teedee aka August Lewis whose dad had a real boxing ring in his backyard and whose fine sisters were also named after months of the year. But he lived a mile away on Blackwelder. Ebon Grant was the Huckleberry Finn to my Tom Sawyer, but was about as two-faced as anyone I ever met. Winky aka Kevin Brooks was a fun kid with big curls in his hair, but we fell out after a big fight. His family fell on hard times. TC and I were closest in age, temperament and spirit. So one day we decided, momentously to form a club.

It was probably TC's idea to form the Travermike. The three of us, he the leader, Verdis the muscle and me the brains, planned to rule the neighborhood with a benevolent triumvirate dictatorship. It formed enough of a bond, short-lived as it was, to keep our neighborhood gang free in the days when Pirus and Crips roamed the blocks and alleys challenging everyone they encountered. The Travermike was dedicated to fair play. In a neighborhood with 50 kids, it was a big deal. Over at Virginia Road School, the local elementary, TC and I stood a chance of becoming kings of the school in the sixth grade. I was already the reticent brainiac, but way too shy amongst kids who cursed up storms and picked fights. I had courage, but not nerve. TC had nerve. 

Then he collapsed. Something went wrong in TC's family and I couldn't understand it. It had something to do with him hating his father or his step-father. Step fathers and half-brothers were nothing I could understand at the age of 9, smart as I supposedly was. I didn't understand how kids could have different last names than their parents. I didn't understand how mothers and fathers didn't live together in the same house. It was a complete mystery. I remember him stifling tears in the front yard of the school as he told me this story, mad at me for not understanding. Before I knew it, he was moving out of the neighborhood far south over near Sportsman's Park. In the days when you had permission to ride bikes with your friends 15 minutes in any direction, Sportsman's Park was a world away. 

I never met his father but his mother was a slim, pretty and disciplined woman. Think Diahanne Carroll or Nichelle Nichols. At some point I got a chance to visit my old friend and have another sleepover. This one wasn't as fun as the other. I remember his mother chastising me for not brushing my teeth before I went to bed, and then telling me I was sleeping improperly, mumbling something about how my parents must be so ignorant. My parents were the strictest of any I knew, but not for TC's mom. I felt sorry for TC, coming up all alone with that woman and no dad, living way down near Sportsman's Park under the buzzing high tension lines. After that night, I never saw him again. 

The effect on me was deep. Not only did the Travermike end, though the idea of fair play survived, but I felt that I would never have a best friend again. It fell to the two-faced Ebon who taught me how to play poker with daily rule changes, who dissed me publicly at school but traded Sizzlers with me after school. He wasn't just a friend, he was a boss, and also Third King of Virginia Road behind Mark Vincent and Mark Bavis, both certainly prisoners or dead now. I heard Ebon's DD-214 wasn't very commendable. I have had occasion to thank the steeliness of the dastardly knuckleheads of my youth for toughening me up, but I have also long regretted not socking at least one of them in the nose as I knew they deserved. Very deep, psychologically deep in me is the knowledge that I will never trust anyone to be my best friend again because TC left the neighborhood. 

I had skipped two grades but had to stay in sixth grade two years because it would have been considered child abuse to send a kid my age and size to the local junior high.  A year later I took the bus across town to attend Holy Name of Jesus school and by then my alienation was complete. I kept my head and took advantage of my second chance to make first impressions. Did well academically but wasn't a real Catholic, survived and went even further afield to summer school in posh Pacific Palisades, and finally on to Loyola High where I met Richard Peete who was polite, smart and trustworthy. Except Richard was nowhere near as scrappy and feral as I could be when pressed. So I doubt that was ever as true a friend as I might have been to him, the man who introduced me to the literature behind Star Trek. I suppose if I were George Orwell or Christopher Hitchens I might go on in this vein of old schoolboy memories for several in-depth chapters, but that is not the point of this material which must suffice until I reorganize it in my retirement (provided the clouds of Typepad remain intact).

When I think about what is required to know what makes me tick, complex monster that I have become, it always seems necessary in my inventory of qualifications, that one must have known what it was like to grow up in my neighborhood. It is something I have felt was never done right, and if there is any hope of it, then that job falls to either myself, Paul Beatty, Wanda Coleman or Jervey Tervalon. I have possessed and cultivated a surplus of disgust for other auteurs who might have done it right but went the Hollywood route which also illuminates the specifics. I lament the failures of that portrayal to materialize although it can certainly be cobbled together by knowing the works of us four, but I more greatly lament those of us who fell silently. Men and women on my Facebook friends list who remain steady reminders of who we were and what we went through, Gerald Brown chiefly among them, but also the late lamented Patrick Reese and the lost but unforgettable Steve Butler. What it is worth to have known such men and such women as the Brown sisters and the Raymond sisters and the Andrews sisters goes beyond any one man's ability to tell, and yet we are all the poorer for not knowing such lives as they were lived in the cauldron my my generations coming of age in America.  I am an alien familiar with my old world, watching its denizens die, all of us too busy living to be bothered to spare a Friday evening drink together. We were a black community once. I'll never quite know if I am a defector or a survivor. Perhaps I don't even care enough to know. It's hard to say. Ernest is dead. Scoobie is dead. We use death as an excuse to make for unbridgeable gulfs between us. Between myself, my actual neighborhood, and the myths of South Central there are thousands of stories that can never be told. Who has time to stop living in order to recreate the past? Who can even answer such questions?

--

Work interrupts memories, as does life. I have to arrange which lunch date to take. The Spousal Unit is putting together some perfect planning for my birthday celebration happy hour thing for this weekend. I had a good cry about all this. And now it's time to close. I'm out of the zone.

There are a few other historical and autobiographical slices here about The Old Hood at Cobb that I hadn't noticed before, or forgot that I wrote. One is called Wayback Machine, and TC found it. Surprising details; glad I remembered when I did. There was the legendary mess over Tookie, founder of the Crips. I should make sure all of these get into the Crenshaw and/or Local Deeds categories to make them easier to find in the future. I have nothing witty left to say. I am actually emotionally exhausted. 

TC is back. Just wow. That's how I remembered him. I wonder who the man is. 

Fifty Five

My grey surprises me. I cut my hair down to the minimum and it changes a few things, but not a lot. I'll be getting a new pair of glasses soon. This is the 55th and it seems like it has been 55 for a while. I feel very much the same way I have since having my breakthrough need for martial education, and yet the purposefulness of the enterprise has been more of a mental revolution than one encompassing my body. At least I can say the vanity part has been satisfied and then abandoned. The death of a brother can do that, but long before that was the admission of my knee. My knee, my right knee, sometimes it fails me. 

I like the company of middle aged men, and I wish that I were more well-endowed with power commensurate with what I feel is my level of wisdom. Yet I consider, perhaps too seriously, the weight of fate in producing that lucky combination of wisdom and fortune. Perhaps I might have gotten more in trying more rather than in expanded contemplation. I am pretty much done contemplating, well, I should say that I'm finished needing directional inspiration. My life is just full of doing things that I can do, which are generally beyond what I intuit most folks think I am capable of doing. It's true I have nothing to prove. I'm happy just doing. These days I don't think writing is doing so much, so I'm doing.

Until I can do no more. 

I've never really wanted to run a marathon or bungie jump or skydive. I've never missed some sunset at Cozumel. There are amusements that leave me flat in the offing. I wonder sometimes these days if I am being too dismissive of that which takes place in my absence. I don't want to prepare for my irrelevance, I merely want to not work myself into the grave too early. So in doing, there is a narrowing subset of choice. 

I must confess that what concerns me more than anything is whether or not I achieve the Porsche. More than the Rolex, although not so much as the now unattainable mansion in Pasadena, the Porsche represents that place I think I should be. And so I'm doing. I've driven the 911 and it seems heavy and luxurious. That is not what I want. I want something I can flaunt but more to drive fast enough to frighten my aunt. I want something that is a joy to drive, light and fast. Something substantially poised for speed whose manual gears I can thrash. And so it is a Cayman and a matter of cash. Next year, it's clear I can get there from here, I can already see myself raising the beer. If I can steer to the track. maybe charcoal or black with black rims and a big fat wing on the back. 

In the meantime, I have cut to the chase of the problem of the knee. I wanted to keep my weight down by cycling in order to skip the circuit training. I cannot get the image out of my head of how foolish exercise looks. Of all the things to teach your body to do what is more ridiculous than Crossfit? Probably riding a bicycle in Los Angeles traffic. And so I have decided to sideline the exercise and vanity and go straight to getting my ass kicked for real. Taekwondo at 55 is a beer bellied novice amongst synchronized children, older than parents in the clapping section, moving his crusty athlete's feet. At least my hammer blow was worth two breaking boards at the grandmaster's suggestion. I've been told I have a powerful kick, but can I raise it above my opponent's midsection? I expect I won't have to when the unthinkable comes, their knee before mine. For now the yellow trophy and the yellow belt suffice. And Hapkido defenses are the beauty of circles I hope to master in time. 

In the work I am stretching around to marketing and I don't suck as much. There are blockchains and message busses and new confidence for building new apps, if not new customers. I remain in a torquey overdrive of low revs. I'm ready to downshift but there's not much traffic to race on this crazy road. I'm sure we're going in the right direction, but this low grade grade in the desert seems never to arrive at Vegas. Sometimes I stare out at the dry lakes and see mirages. Focus. These are the lines. This is the map. 

I have the success of my children I have escorted thus far, and they're beginning to recognize. What a privilege to bask in the glow of an appreciative eye although sometimes the words get brownnosy.  The love of a plump woman whose smile still enervates, the laugh of a mother and spry sparring with father; old man v old man. The tales of cousins and the travels of nieces and the fierce independence of nephews. This is the time I dreamed about when 2001 was as far as anyone could see. We are a family force and numbers matter. We contain much, and much more than love and such. Who needs the legacy of books? 

The world gives me no pain. I ignore bulldozing rhetoric which flattens its complex topography, massively expensive steamrollers engineered only to crush the toes of the enemy. This is not humanity with a capital H but a moment of fear and regression. The froth at the top of the waves is not the sea. I am deep and my boat is already underwater. I've learned to hold my breath and hold my tongue and hold my place. I will end up holding peace and perhaps drowning at once, but the sea is my friend, and I don't mind if it rises. I am not Dory, I am not forgetful and I am not lost. 

There is no plan. There are only men and their ambitions against the winds of chance and the women who motivate. There is love and duty, always attempting at truth and beauty. There are those who fail and stagger back to standing. We, facing recklessly the indifference of mediocrity, push our little pushes and trim our little rose bushes. Dear God, make me hard to kill. Let me tend to this garden of life. Fifteen more, thirty more, ninety-five years. Let me buy everyone whisky. So cheers. 

My daughter calls the call I've called. "Fifteen more minutes" and then it's time for the next thing in store. Alert the house. It's on. 

What It Feels Like Today

It feels like I have a dead brother. 

When you have a dead brother you fear death because your own death now means you leave fewer behind who knew you. It's the anonymous, empty, what was he all about anyway kind of nullity that puts you in the hole in the ground staring at oblivious planets and stars. Life goes on without you and yet you create a personal explosive gas of suffering for your own people to inhale, puke and sniffle. When the weather gets cold the rattle returns to the shocked lungs of the living. Holding on. Just holding on to memories you created in people who perish. And the bad news comes, and the bad news hurts and it hurts until your morals get hard and your face becomes calloused with forced indifference. Your Cheshire Cat smile is for the death and destruction in the world you see but don't experience. Not today. That's what we say to death. Not today, you sneaky bastard. We wear the brave face. It is our mask for the new sustained civility. 

I am losing the buoyancy of fatherhood. 

My children are no longer children but a man and two women needing scuffs and scars to toughen up for a world crazy with lunatic shopping carts bashing their clearcoat youth. Beaters amongst the skin deep but with high horsepower engines of parental design, chug chug chugging along the rails of the old framework. Training. The passive-aggressive of cyber security wagging its fickle finger. I think they know the beauty of themselves but are they gold bricks or can they coin themselves in this realm? It's my business, I think, but I don't even own the bricks of my own house. There is no more room. Everybody must go outside and squint in the light. 

My bed smells like old man.

Grey hair is distinguished on the running man, but weighs down the man in the chair like hoary frost on a tarpaper shack. Running is painful. Sleeping is wasting time. Living for the moment is the foolishness of the fictional city with its ready made cutouts of cheap pleasure and bargain business. There's no place like home, and no place in the home like the chair of sighing. Taxes. Tragedies. Treadmill. More work please, sir? I'm in debt, you know. Oh don't worry, these aches will go away after a few jumping jacks. Pip pip, cheerio. And the skin goes slack, and the muscle tone belies the fragile bone. The morning is an impatient warden tap tap tapping his sunlight's baton on the bars of your indenture. But you flip the pillow for the fifteenth time, and try to ignore the iPhone's chime. 

I can wash dishes and eat soup.

All the grease on my fingers can be washed warm, and the stuck ramen noodle of the narrow pot falls away with the effort of my nails. There are chemicals under the sink, and fresh water in clear recyclable containers and the gas for the stove has never not come. I dream of apocalypse but it only happens on the television. My backyard is quiet, and I can watch birds from my window as I toil lightly in hot suds. I have enough plates to serve four dozen and enough booze to stumble them all. If I am feeling low, then cleaning my home can raise my spirits. The rhythm of simple work, the Godliness of cleanliness, the perfection of order, the banishment of chaos in 2000 square feet of privacy should be more than enough. I remain hungry for luxurious refinements in the belief I have toiled long enough. But I am only vain and greedy. When I recognize these faults I can quiet my mind by making myself useful. Small perfections. 

I can listen.

What do I have to hear but Beethoven and Hiromi Uehara? What do I have to see but the suffering of jigger victims? What do I have to know but the intricacies of cloud computing? What do I have to do but care for my family? I am alive and living is a blessing. 

I can live. 

 

Overpoliced: Remembering the LA Riots

These days I am thinking back through several evolutions of my writing and going back some 20 odd years. As I present materials here, I am doing so in collaboration with an oral history project sponsored by Polytechnic School in Pasadena. I have presented them the following essay as well as some background materials from my old websites. There are three contexts of interest in looking back.

• Firstly is my own evolution as a writer in expressing more directly what I think and feel and my commitment to clarity rather than cleverness. It was my desire to be artistic and clever that obscured the few things I had worth saying back in the day.
• Second is expansion upon the idea that Americans are drawn to the political aspects of social control in much of their politics. I used to speak often of the 'political majority' with the direct implication that they wished to use law and order issues to clumsily exert control through police on political minorities, including and especially me. I still find politics overburdened with social traffic and it is still my number one issue when it comes to politics, but I appreciate more the dissonance inherent and the lack of continuity in governance.
• Third is my satisfaction with my own appreciation for and explanation of black rage in American politics. I wonder if it will remain as front of mind and captivating in these coming post-Obama years. I suspect that as soon as the King is out of office, these will become the 'good old days' of racial amity. But it's certainly not as called for these days as it was when America lived in fear of NWA, Public Enemy, Khalid Muhammad and Spike Lee.

To the essay:

In the days after the beating of Rodney King, I thought a lot about whether or not it was reasonable to distrust police. I myself had never feared police, but I did get a lot of police attention. Having lived all over Los Angeles County, I had a variety of experiences with cops. One day, long from LA I counted the number and it was 17. 16 traffic stops and detentions and one arrest, for a traffic warrant on a car I no longer drove. 2 citations, maybe 3. I was part of a captive population, a population driven to fear gangs and rap. I was caught up in the crosswinds.

There have been many times since that I have tried to make something out of all that because it's something many people want to hear. But the truth of it all is very simple. None of that truly hurt me.

Nevertheless while I still lived in Los Angeles, I couldn't do nothing. And so I did what I thought I should, which was to take my weekends up driving around and searching for police brutality. I had never been struck by an officer, but surely somebody had. I had never been cursed by an officer, but surely somebody had. I have seen officers behaving rudely and in one case my girlfriend and I had our parking space stolen by an off duty cop. She told me that he threatened her after the fact, and although I never saw it myself, I supported her testimony in court. I hear he was severely reprimanded. And yet I have never been a victim. I have never been frightened. I have been unsure. I have been angry. I have even been disgusted. I have never been hurt. But I wanted to find somebody who had, and so I searched. I thought it would be an easy search because I was convinced we were over-policed.

I searched up and down Crenshaw Boulevard. I searched Inglewood. I searched Leimert Park. I followed the sirens in my BMW. I followed them with my videocamera, because surely I had seen the black youth cuffed on the curb. That happened all the time, right? But when I looked I didn't find what I was searching for. I arrived at car accidents minutes after the fact. I arrived at fires. After having given up far too many weekend afternoons looking for trouble and finding none, I found myself in Mar Vista one day. I followed yet another squad car and stumbled onto a bonanza. At least 6 cars were just behind Venice High School. It was a charity basketball game. The cops weren't giving bruises, they were giving prizes. And so I stopped searching.

But everyone was still angry. Everyone could recite the names by heart. Latasha Harlins got no justice. Rodney King got no justice. Michael Zinzun lost an eye. We all still yelled about Ron Settles. We all knew about Don Jackson and the plate glass window. We lived in a time of loud talk and misunderstanding. Ahh when do we not? And we all had plenty to say. But I was a writer, probably not a very good one, as I look back in retrospect, but not a bad one either. I was a guerrilla poet. A YouTuber before the days of YouTube trying to get my footage on community TV. My words from those days still evoke the world of those days. They expressed the searching for meaning in the anger and frustration. They expressed the desire for truth in a sea of uncertainty. They sought the head bobs of recognition and the head shakes of sadness. But what was the end?

My last chance for romance was a date to the Umbrellas installation by Christo. It never happened. I decided not to care. For these and other personal and economic reasons, I decided to leave Los Angeles. When I left it, just after my 30th birthday, LA seemed destined in every way to end up as corrupt and dysfunctional as the film 'Strange Days'. My girlfriend at the time met Angela Bassett on the set and they discussed and debated the ending of the film, a film that was about a desperate, corrupt city heading for self-destruction amidst the doomsaying rap prophets of rage at the end of the millennium. So I got sick and tired of Los Angeles and was glad to be rid of the place. I found in New York, a very different kind of view of what happened in my hometown. It was both refreshing and tiresome to hear a completely new kind of misinformation and distance from the seething on the ground in LA. Still, I hated Los Angeles. I couldn't take it any longer.

I continued my writing, determined to keep my real experiences alive. I was part of that mob of disappointment, but I was articulate in a different dimension. I would be heard wherever. New York, now. I would continue with my poetry and my raps and my novel in the East.

The night of the riots found me in my Brooklyn apartment waking up to the news. It was late Thursday evening when I heard about the verdicts. I'm glad I wasn't in Los Angeles, but I felt as though I had a strange kind of brotherhood with the place. I expected that brotherhood to show up in the streets of Brooklyn where they had their own explosions about Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum, whom I didn't care about. So when I went outdoors to exerpeince that street, the street was silent. I walked alone at midnight in Brooklyn, communing with no one. The silence was absurd. Brooklyn cared about Brooklyn, not Los Angeles.

Yet the following day, all of us professionals in Midtown Manhattan were excused to go home early. People who wanted to riot were getting up their nerve, and so the message went out for us to head for the hills. So I did, and I then immediately returned in my street gear and found myself in Times Square. Here was my chance to make myself known - LA is my hometown I said. I was having a whirlwind of associative thoughts in my own head, and I wanted to say what I wanted to say, but the emotion of the day was to be rage. I was no prophet of rage, but I did what I could to rock the boulevard. To my right, on stage at Times Square was the legendary lawyer William Kunstler. Mine was the last speech, and so we departed southbound to Thompkins Square Park. Whose Streets? Our Streets!

I mocked the people who didn't care and I found it ironically delicious that they were now caught up in our crosswinds. They now had to fear our self-righteous condescension instead of the other way around for once. But it wasn't truly rewarding. I ended up corralled by New York's finest who had determined that we wouldn't reach the symbolic ground zero of Thompkins Square, whose radical history I couldn't get a straight answer about weeks afterwards.

But I got no satisfaction. My dense evocative prose collapsed under its own overburdened symbolism. It was atrocious writing that could only make sense to people who shared all of my insights. But I never had an audience to unpack all that weight, to go through it piece by piece and put the right emphasis on the right parts. I learned at long last to put all that in perspective, and I am grateful for the pain and passion I put into that part of my life. In the final measure I have had meaning and richness not only from family and career, but from the life of a writer making sense of himself and his times.

The LA Riots gave us all an opportunity to find out what goes wrong when people fail to trust their democratic institutions. We fall back to our tribes, tribes who cannot support us in the end, like political writing that tries to tie everything of significance to one or two events in history. Analogies always fail. Nothing can ever be summarized. There is not enough text in the world to contain a single soul, so no words here or anywhere can truthfully say what it fully means to the survivors of the dead. They will just be names, and do we know them? No, we don't.

My father spent hours taking photos of the ruins. I got sick of looking at them and pulled them out of my photo album. All the links on my Los Angeles Riot Research Page have gone dead, and only a few scanned pictures remain. Everything has been hacked and repacked, and all that remain are ghosts and echoes.

I have become the man who understands what I didn't as the young man blowing at his own sails thinking I was powering my own ship forward. I can read the crosswinds now and I am relaxed on a friendly shore. I understand our responsibilities better. I recognize the time it takes to capture an idea for what it is alone without pulling in an entire symbolic universe. So I am happy to stand and talk about what I believed and why, what I learned and how, and what I now know and what that means. We are changed.

Today, I think the most important lesson to be learned is similar to what I thought it was then. We are over-policed. We over police ourselves and we don't let go of old ideas and old bad behaviors. We think that everything and everyone can be corrected and thus must be corrected. We pretend to want every kind of justice at all times, but in fact none of us can stand the scrutiny. And sometimes what we need most of all, when we think we can join a brotherhood of righteous anger and contempt just around the corner, is a perfectly silent night. 

 

The Wolf

I am thinking about shooting. Probably not in the way you think I am thinking about it. I am thinking about shooting as an exercise in discipline over power never before held in my hands. Two weeks ago as I enter my third year as a pistol shooter, I nailed a one foot circle about 25 yards away six or seven times in a row. I hesitate to raise my own assessment from "I don't suck" to "I'm pretty good". I think I'll say that "I'n not bad at all". But it's an entirely new skill, and I'm a sophomore. 

In my approach to becoming a shooter, I was as my readers may know, powerfully affected by Bill Whittle and Eric S. Raymond. Whittle let me know I was a sheepdog, one not afraid of meeting violent offense with violent defense. Raymond let me know I take responsibility for life and death into my own hands. I have yet to be tested in the streets of the town where I live, and because of some regulations I am restrained from an avenue of defense, but I have decided to take the path towards these skills and responsibilities seriously. That was for me. But it's not all about me.

The most important thing about gaining this skill is the appreciation I have for other people who have it and the recognition of us as a force. Essentially, I can recognize other people who see the same foolishness in video portrayals of shooting pistols and rifles. I can separate the fact from the fiction and determine how much plot narrative of our entertainments depends upon entirely magical powers of weapons. I'm not the only one who sees through the curtain. And so I have a new brotherhood. The brotherhood of those who have the obligation to take the shot, and not miss. I don't want to be one obligated to make the shot. So I have not sworn an oath to defend the Constitution against all foes. I have not trained to stand on that wall. But I am in their minds and they are in mine. We are united in purpose, it is only our duties that separate us. 

The night is dark. 

Today I am trying to express something that is both private and should ultimately be shared. It is the encounter within my family on three separate occasions of The Wolf.

• My niece encountered The Wolf in a dark alley in Washington DC. She had no time to be clever although she clearly is. She is a raven, the cleverest of all birds, and although she was in his jaws by random fortune or Providence, managed to escape. I have not yet spoken to her and yet I know her feathers are back in place. 
• My mother has been entertaining The Wolf over the telephone. He calls from Nigeria and keeps her dreams of unimaginable wealth alive. She has beggared neighbors and friends in service to these dreams and has decided that we, her children, are spoiling things. Her bills remain unpaid and we must intervene when the lights get turned off next month lest she freeze to death. 
• My brother wrestled The Wolf to the ground last week and injured his right hand. I saw him last night and he is recovering nicely and has returned to duty as an LAPD officer. 

You have certainly been transfixed by the brazen and deadly actions of The Wolf in Paris as the world's media went on full alert and piped high definition narrated video into your devices. Suddenly people are remembering Boko Haram. Then Mali had its moment yesterday. Some college kids are pissed that murder and mayhem has shouted down their whining. November is a remarkable month you might say.

Is it? I say it is not. The Wolf is always with us and it doesn't matter which guise he takes, what manner of attack he plans or fulfills. What matters is what we are prepared to do when he visits his hungers upon us. My poor mother doesn't even recognize him for what he is, but her blindness is not unique. It is the same blindness that administrators have to the actions of The Wolf on and near college campuses. It is the same blindness that blames America for being such a delicious piece of mutton, hiding as it does behind our massive force of GPS coordinated, nuclear tipped, shock and awe sheepdogs. That blames their discomforts and fears on the very fact that sheepdogs exist, not sheepdogs but fearmongers, warmongers and who uses 'monger' but those upon soapboxes? 

Because of the close call with my niece, I've been thinking of Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks all week. These are stories we know well, but perhaps not so well as we think. Did Little Red's grandmother get eaten? Wasn't Red told not to go through the woods or talk to strangers? Did Goldilocks get eaten, or wasn't there a rescuing woodsman in both stories? I definitely remember a woodsman with an axe. That was the story I told my children, assuring them that I was wearing the red plaid and holding the blade for our family. I can do that for my children, but I don't think there's a woodsman in every nursery rhyme, and The Wolf does manage to eat enough to reproduce.

I am thinking about shooting as an exercise in discipline over power never before held in my hands and in particular in appreciation I have for other people who have this skill and the recognition of us as a force in defense of the Constitution. I wonder if I will ever have to swear that oath. The Wolf has not suddenly appeared but I have only recently, gradually and practically prepared.

So there's the abstract. Here are three branches of a specific tree you can nail me to if you so choose.

Point One: Fluency
It is motivated last night by Doc speaking as he unwrapped his injured hand. He said that the gun is a language he doesn't have to use 99.99% of the time. But he is fluent. I'm not even going to say that we all should be. The Grey Tribe knows who it is. When the saliva drips from the fangs and the breath is hot on their necks, the fluent will speak up. I'm a free man and I love to write and speak and communicate, it is my life force. The overwhelming majority of my life, English and French and Spanish and a half dozen computer languages have sufficed.  But make no mistake, I'm literate and fluent in Gun.  I'll sign up and speak Gun under oath if I am called. I don't think it's likely, and I don't watch The Walking Dead for fun. I simply practice.

Point Two: Survivability
Here's the second point in reiteration of Eric Raymond's point #3: The Universe doesn't care about motives. We recognize The Wolf by his behavior. Not his philosophy, nor his religion, nor his facial features or place of origin. Like Little Red Riding Hood, we walk through the woods with no preconceived notions in our basket of goodies. It is only at the last and final moment, upon the declaration that we are about to be eaten, do we act. I simply refuse to be eaten. I simply am not thinking about naming the enemy. My enemy is The Wolf, he needs no further introduction. I will be the good that survives.

Point Three: Perpetuity
The greatest thing about the poem by Lewis Carroll is that it begins and ends on the same note. 'Twas always brillig. 'Tis brillig today. This is human experience and always has been and always will be. Carroll's is a tale of the men who warns his son to take up his sword against this world's dangers. Yes people need to be reminded, but maybe people decide to be blind and deaf. One can pretend to be confused by the nonsense words,  but they don't obscure, they universalize. What remains is the simple human responsibility. My niece must watch her back. I must take care of my mother. My brother must arrest the bad guy, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. 

Now I have my vorpal sword in hand, not seeking any manxome foe, I rest by my Tumtum tree and stand a while in thought...

 

My Old Digs

I miss Boston sometimes. 

 

Strange Planes

This morning, for some reason, I recalled that I wrote a rap/song that helped me memorize the digits of pi out to 100. I was bored on a plane. 

Also, I have found myself sitting in a middle seat next to an elderly man in a turban who was doing everything in his power to remain calm. He did a pretty good job. It wasn't until final approach that I realized he white knuckled the entire flight. 

One time I caught myself laughing out loud at the reading material on my Kindle. It was the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual. 

On a commuter flight from Vail to Denver, I had a conversation with the leader of a famous Wall Street firm. Coming back from vacation with his daughters, he was reading an history of ancient Rome and gave me his card when I mentioned my company. I never called. 

I rode first class from San Jose to Burbank late one afternoon. I had not eaten all day but had a couple beers and some melatonin. Sleepy, I stood up to go the the lavatory and promptly dead fainted in the aisle. The stewardess said I just missed my slamming my head on an armrest. 

At DFW, we were next to land when the landing gear collapsed on the plane directly in front of us. It was a wind-sheary day, and we pulled up very quickly. 

I have sat on a runway at LaGuardia for 4 hours. They gave us water and peanuts. I listened to Channel 9, but could not fall asleep. 

I've been in airport freezes and evacuations at EWR, IAH and PHX, and I have lost two knives and one cigar lighter to TSA.

When I went to Bermuda on vacation with my new girlfriend. Security at the airport seemed to know her. I didn't understand why I was strip searched, but they showed me small weird things from her purse and asked me to identify them. I had no idea what they were talking about. 

The worst airline in the world is Frontier, followed closely by Spirit. The best I've flown is Virgin, when they first started followed closely by Jet Blue. My favorite airport is Dulles and my least favorite was Stapleton, by a longshot. 

My Last Grandmother

(from the archives - July 1999)

I am sitting in a small hotel room near Columbia, Louisiana just a mile from the Ouachita River bridge on Highway 165. We buried my grandmother today. I have been dreading this weekend for a week.

My wife paged me, just as I was teeing up for the 15th hole on eagles watch at the innisbrook resort last sunday afternoon. And so I watched the final round of the British Open with the rest of my pals at the clubhouse in an extraordinary state. All week, I dodged in an out of clarity and finally crashed on Thursday morning. I couldn't figure out whether or not to compartmentalize. I had responsibilities, I had arrangements.

This was my last grandmother. Technically speaking, she is my wife's maternal grandmother. But I have issues with the term 'in-law'. I have family, that's all. And so I have met dozens of cousins down here among the soy, cotton and corn. I have gravel in my pocket from the Brownsville Baptist Church cemetery. I have weeds in my socks from the growth over house of O.G. Williams, the departed's departed husband. I have advantix pictures of the tumbled down corrugated steel roof. I have to fly home tomorrow and see my own children, and then I have a seminar to present on Tuesday in the Silicon Valley.

One word pops into my haggard head at this moment. It is 'assimilation'. On Thursday I will be building a system in Denver. The following week I will be in class all week, and then it's off to Puerto Rico for sales club - rainforest horse trails and casino nite. Sometime in the middle of august i'm going to assimilate all of this. Right now, i am just rolling around in neutral. I have no more grandmothers left. Time is running out. 

I only met her a few short years ago. It was my job to see if i could find an attorney to get her son fred another trial. It was a job i walked into as the man who married her oldest granddaughter. A dream of rescue i was completely unable to fulfill. But uncle fred, a man whose confusion and determination evoke tons of embarrassing hope, finally spoke today in an idiot savant rant of immense spiritual dimensions. Rocking forward and back wild-eyed and garrulous he stuttered and flew through psalms, corinthians, blessings & promises. His face bore the burdens of two arduous convictions, that of god's salvation and that of first degree murder. His words teetered and rambled, and at every pause we were painfully reminded of both, and yet it was clear that poor uncle fred didn't possess the mind to fully explain and accept the reality of either. Yet there he stood in front of all of us, just behind grandmother's casket, in denim and shackles, raising his voice in agitated song unable to lift his hancuffed hands above his head in praise. A belt of chain with a master padlock in his beltloops kept his leather bible zip case within reach. On his way back to the first pew, ambling like a penguin, arms locked to his sides, he dropped the bible.

God exists somewhere in tortured minds, perhaps everywhere. Grandmother's grave was dug by 7 convicted men in baggy orange pants. According to the green led display in the cadillac deville provided by avis, it was 110 degrees outside. I didn't have any black pants and wore navy chinos. A dirt track leads to parcel #10 behind the church which will be auctioned off by sealed bid in september 1999. Reverend hall said "cast me not off, in my old age". He looked like cab calloway. The tent and supplies for the interment were removed from the cemetary by a sport utility hearse. The guards from the louisiana department of corrections loosened uncle fred's hands and shared barbecue ribs with the family for 90 minutes after the service. I sat in the back of the chruch with paul who told me about the mill, the oil field, the high school, the mandatory sentencing laws, the sonic, the mc donalds, the kfc, the population is 1800. There are 7 old folks remaining. Two months after aunt annie bought her home, they built the housing projects around the corner. I didn't see any white people all day, except for the men fixing the roof on this hotel. They put concrete slabs over the gravesites.

James said that coon tastes great barbecued but only get the freshest roadkill. Make sure the bones aren't too smashed up, or you waste your time - just like taking buckshot out of a squirrel. Erica enters famu business this fall. She has more trophies in the living room than i could count. Adolph left his teeth in a papertowel. Bryan is from flint; he took the road through st. Louis and saved 5 hours on the trip. Nobody can decide who it falls to to take lee, the family thief, back home. He is looking dangerously thin, but nobody wants to talk about it. J.d. Can't believe that george from lagos, nigeria can't take the heat, they don't have air conditioning over there? "i have air conditioning in my car and in my house, i never turn it off". Howard doesn't want any crown royal, thank you. Ed has two horses back from the vet to be wormed. He says the price of goats have gone up to a rediculous $70 a head - almost as much as cattle. Ida says there are 200 some odd acres split between herself and her siblings, she's going to make sure it stays in the family and not cleared. She likes to hunt deer. Uncle floydell pumped my arm once again, he didn't recognize me in the tanktop and ball cap.

The ribs are the bomb. Grape pop. Black eyed peas. Okra. Potato salad. Baked beans. Spaghetti, fried chicken, baked chicken,stuffing, broccolli, dump cake, sock it to me cake, orange pinnaple buntd cake, ham, lite beer from miller, redpop, muffins, biscuits. No corn. No monkey bread. No greens.

I'm here at the hotel on the pretense that I had work to do. Everybody else went to see erica's fashion show.  I'm in no mood to do any work. I'm surprised that i was able to write this. I don't know what to think right now. I just want to get it out. Observe and articulate, observe and articulate.

I only touched her forehead. I wanted to kiss her. I knew she would be cold. I didn't want a cold kiss. I don't think i could have handled a cold kiss. Not from my last grandmother.

If i turn on the television to cnn, they'll still be yapping about kennedy. Thank god for espn. I'm waiting for all these knuckleheads who spam me with jokes to get some kennedy jokes over to my inbox. I need some more ammo. This american prince shit really gets on my last nerve. Even cuomo on charlie rose couldn't resist. Death is just fucking death. It makes everybody feel miserable and frail. Somedays when i want to rage, i remember that i have children and therefore hold back. Nobody can afford death. It's a good thing that it's always a surprise. It's too logical and powerful a force to plan. Back in the memphis airport layover bathroom stall, i composed a eulogy, then realized i had not been asked to speak. It's just as well - there's no way i could match uncle fred. He was really the star today, out of angola for a day with his school-aged grandchildren, taking panorama pictures with a dozen black people dressed in black. The mad sermon was the electrifying moment. And in his manchild's smiles, his awkward 'jesus loves you' hugs, his armed entourage, there was the proper surfeit of madness appropriate for my mourning weekend in northern louisiana.

But i guess i haven't embraced the madness totally. Accepting a cold kiss, that would have put me over the top. There's where my heart is, at last. My last grandmother will have always been warm to me. I can sleep with that.

 

Overthinking Martial Arts

Today I met the Grandmaster. I didn't expect to, and he didn't let me go. Now I have to reconcile what I have heard with what I know and with what I want and with what I expect. It is disturbing and troubling.

I have in my life a series of false starts in my studies of kung fu. I will call it all kung fu because it is the hidden skill which you should be ashamed to brag about. Whether it was aikido or judo or tae kwan do, it has all been incomplete. I have no belt, I have no certificate. And yet I have done enough fighting at an early enough age so that somehow everyone seems to appreciate that I am some kind of warrior. I do not quite understand it, but I can accept it. I am a fractional badass.

I feel very incomplete about this lack of formal mastery. I have nothing in my life that I fear, and yet I have taken on an outlook that expects the worst and I am constantly on guard against it. Yet it is not for myself that I fear. I fear death less and less. I simply passionately do not want to be helpless in the face of tragedy. I want to know what to do when things go wrong. I want to be useful under circumstances that are beyond my control. I want to manage chaos, and I feel that it requires some kind of skill in addition to courage. 

I have a large body of fiction in my head which is unreconciled to reality. It is the fiction of preparedness. I size up men in clubs and bars and streets and venues on the edge of civility and I expect that I should be able to manifest a kind of controlling calm aside from my helpless calm of reason. I want to add to my repertoire an ability to communicate a deterrent threat. I have a desire, while not large, also not insignificant, to express a martial aspect to my moral authority. I feel that I should have that personal power. And yet there has never been a moment in which I have felt the threat in my adult life. Perhaps it is an echo of a powerlessness I felt as a child.

I have injected myself into interpersonal fights to break them up. I did not hesitate, and it has been this lack of hesitation that frightens me. I have not wound up in over my head, but I fear getting in over my head. I need to wrestle with my need to find a fight worth fighting. I am compelled to call my vision correct, to call my judgment justice. I am passive. Can I retain that passivity? Should I? 

I need also to wrestle with my vanity. I feel quite strongly that I should not be led to vanity by this capability with my body. Yet it seems to be the only way to dodge a sworn duty to defend and protect. When I learned to shoot I knew that I wanted to be as comfortable with a gun as a police officer is, but that I never wanted to do police work - never be sworn to duty. And since then I have learned what police work is like and I admire it and I find a kind of brotherhood with police officers. Still, I do not want to do their work. 

 --

The above is the confession I wrote a month ago. I think I've dealt with it. Now I want to move forward. It is clearer to me that I think of kung fu as a sport, and it is a vanity. I have no desire to become a warrior. I disclaim badassery. That's not what I'm trying to accomplish. I want to be able to dance the dance, not for competition, nor for survival, but for the sake of knowing and for the sake of vanity. I'm cool with that. Now I just find an instructor who is cool with that. This is my 80% conclusion. 

The Downside Again

A couple years ago, when I was absorbing the wit and wisdom of Nutnfancy and developing my Peasant Theory (now mostly complete), I started The Downside Blog. The Downside Blog was kind of a prepperish journal of observing things that fail and processes that might fail in order for its readers to be cognizant of such things ahead of time. It turned out that a couple years ago was not a good time to start a new blog, and quite frankly I didn't have the patience for it. This morning I thought about that subject again. This time I'm considering it in the context of psychology.

Psychology is my daughter's major. I'd like her to consider cognitive science and so I gifted her the most recent book by Dan Ariely, Irrationally Yours. When she decided on that major, I found that I had a lot more to say about psychology than I thought.

What has always intrigued me about cognitive science has to do with the practical aspects of the acceptability of facts embedded in compute systems. If you are seeking an answer to a question and the answer is to be found in a computer, do you accept it? If you are seeking a solution to a problem and that solution lives in a process or institution that is unfamiliar to you, do you accept the agency of that process or institution? Generally, what are the factors that keep people from actually doing what they say they want to do, given the opportunity. You may be familiar with this cartoon which was a favorite amongst the software sales teams I used to hang out with in the late 90s. 

As I've mentioned, the reasons for my Peasant Theory were manifold. Chief among them was the idea that when people don't have trust for institutions, democratic and business institutions specifically, they tend towards tribalism. Organizationally, when flat, egalitarian organizations fail, people tend to fall back to hierarchical, authoritarian organizations. While I haven't been very specific about it, I tend to consider global trade and free markets as very flat and egalitarian, given the relative absence of regulatory capture and oligopoly. Also I should say that I have a great deal of confidence that hierarchical organizations don't scale. Towers of Babel fall, while suburbs do not. 

In considering the downside of things as I mused this morning, I thought about my friend whose job it is to run companies that have been criminally mismanaged. There's money in that business. As there is money in police and fire work, in soldiering and in disaster relief. There is an upside to the downside and this has been fascinating to me, but not for any perverse reason. In fact, I am rather wary of that tipping point, wondering if in various parts of our society that tipping point has been past, in which it is more profitable to destroy that which is weak than to reform it. 

Perhaps it is because I have been outside of the corporate loop in my small business that I sympathize with those who say there's something morally bereft in our leadership class. I wonder if the nation is being financialized when I think about AirBnB more capitalized than Marriott. 

I don't have much to recommend for what is becoming of my stoicism this morning. l have plucked my mind from the Matrix and living in truth without wishful thinking has filled me with a kind of sadness in regarding humanity that I cannot describe. I think perhaps that I have turned a melancholy corner that can only be remedied by fun and beauty, both to be found in ritual and discipline. But I think that will only be personal, or intimate at best. I am considering that looking over the horizon that I don't want to remain long in the solutions business. I don't want to profit as Cassandra, no matter how correct I might be. It is only too sad to understand the downside. 

Psychologically, I am curious as to how I will deal with this, precisely whether I will let go of the discipline of avoiding wishful thinking and creative solutions in order to be happy. I do not wish to retreat from society. Perhaps there is a spot of zen in my mind I will find in rituals of the body. 

Consuming Morality

The day that Lewis Hamilton won the world Formula One Driver's Championship last year, something else was brewing in the minds of many Americans that cast them far from that celebration. I must confess as I write this sentence I'm going to have to research exactly what that other maddening event was, because it wasn't so important to me. But before I do, let me remind you that among the many famous people I have admired and met, Mae Jemison was one, a black American astronaut. I confess, that as a young man, I was very attracted to black American overachievers, especially astronauts.

The event that captured many American minds and caused them sorrow was the announcement, somehow made more significant to their eyes by the time of day it was announced, about a legal decision surrounding the mess in Ferguson, MO. The date was, more or less, November 25. So I wrote this blog post which goes on to some length to illustrate the diversity of black America itself, if I am qualified to say so, with regards to the people they take as significant in their worlds. 

Today happens to be another such day, when the significance of tragedy reported by the news has turned smiles upside down in a host of American minds. Meanwhile, today was my daughter's high school graduation. 

If Facebook is to be counted as something, I have been excommunicated today from someone I've known from a long time ago, over something that happened in the news. It's sad. It's personal. It's done. That had to do with misinterpretation, or perhaps direct and proper interpretation of my relative indifference to the political implication and potential of some tragedy. I told a 'teachable moment' to take a hike. Coincidentally, while defending another friend (on Facebook) the combination of circumstances became intolerable. Imagine me having a birthday party and celebrating with a chocolate cake and a story hits the news about 1200 people starving to death or dying in food riots in Egypt. But, while nobody has said so directly (and who has time to write anything to me when defriending says it all?) this has something to do with my celebrating my 2nd Amendment rights and a shooting in Charleston, SC. The two are related because I'm a black man and I'm supposed,  to be making some points about that, and not this. This being my life: my life, my celebrations and my preferences.

I'm trying to determine exactly how problematic this is. I can't say at the moment. But it does raise a point I'd like to write about briefly. 

One of the interesting phenomena I observe in stepping outside of political partisanship and the competition over narratives of progress and devolution is the extent to which partisans feel moral certainty. I may be making a category error in my own personal case, but I'm fairly convinced that partisans on the Left and Right feel quite satisfied that they are locked in a struggle for the moral soul of the nation. There's a joke in there about the materiality of a soul which is something akin to the old joke about Jews and copper wire. The soul of America is being stretched to ridiculous proportions in a tug of war between political partisans. What's altogether sad is that it's a very two dimensional battle fought over very particularly narrow issues, all fueled by a shallow media. 

That's essentially all there is to say about it. Americans try to make their politics moral and the make spectacles out of themselves instead. What could be more illustrative than the backgrounds of Presidential candidates like Trump and Fiorina? 

One of the illuminating consequences of pursuit and capture of autodidactic liberal arts education is that one becomes one of the goal oriented folks illustrated by Pournelle's Iron Law. One wants human enlightenment as a goal without regard to the institutions said to mediate that implementation as contrasted to those sword to defend the bureaucracy and marching orders of institutions themselves. I see the 'morality media' giving the chatting classes talking points of the day: to lament the loss of life in Charleston. There's a bit of spillover from the prior meme concerning the chances one arrested by police in America will make it alive to trial. The white suspect did, presumably by this narrative of protest, a black suspect would not. I have no opinion but that of common sense. Murder is murder. The death penalty applies. Let justice be served. Those are the goals. Everything else is just political talk in service of a Left or Right Agenda. I got no time for that.

I read in a book that 'American culture' is oxymoronic. I'm starting to believe it. Our politics are very cheaply value laden and our social sophistication is too thin to keep it in check. I wish it were otherwise but that would be wishful thinking. I'll deal with the reality instead and find my only comfort in avoiding the madness.

I have compelling reasons to celebrate today, and no compelling reason to consume the narrative of loss, tinged as it might be today with racial and Second Amendment overtones, implications, insinuations etc. I have the benefit of being able to talk straight about this on my blog. Not that I expect many Facebookers to check out all of the words. That too is OK. I'm comfortable. This is where I speak my full mind. It's too bad Facebook has more mindshare than the blogosphere. It has become the television of the age. 

Tech Support PsyOps

My first world problem.

So AT&T screwed me out of 12 months of international wifi at 60 bucks a month. The best I can get is a 60 day refund under the normal policy, but I got 120 days. Big whoop, I'm ready to threaten changing providers. So I'm sitting on the phone with Jane who is going through pushing buttons and clicking her mouse, and she's mouthing her actions. "OK move this over here, minimize, click that, enter ID". 

Suddenly I'm not mad any more. As much as I want to punch somebody in the nose for this blatant ripoff, Jane is all breathy and vocal fry on the phone like she's Donna Summer singing Love to Love You Baby. Except it's all her thinking out loud about the actions she's taking on her terminal. "Mmm" she says, "that's strange". I'm sitting here getting all warmed up despite my actual intent to go ballistic because she's being all compliant and doing the best she can. WTF! I'm being mind-boinked by a CSR with a phone sex voice talking about rollover data plans. 

Either AT&T has seriously upped their psy-ops or I need to take a cold shower before I get on the phone with customer support. Probably both. What is this world coming to?

I Am

Fifty Four 

I think I understand people. Most people. Some people are beyond my understanding, and I think it should stay that way. What I know is that life is like a series of mountains and gates. You become your habits of climbing and passing through. It may very well be that the biggest things I have are my ego and my will to live. They keep me working for the best, to survive and let the upside take care of itself, but to take that upside and own it. I am perceptive and articulate and I have a pretty good memory. I am armed with logic and empathy, and I have my own family. That's the foundation for a life well spent, and I'm pleased with what I have become.

As some readers know, I am engaged in my Martial Education and I am noticeably more muscle and less fat than I've been in a decade. It's a good start. But there are still some Liberal Arts and Technical educational disciplines I maintain. Let's cover a few things which remain as my current deep questions.

The best way I can describe this Liberal Arts problem of mine concerns the ethics of the virtuous man in the woods of chaos. How should one engage the man who tattoos his forehead with the mark of the Beast in reaction to the evil he perceives in the world? How much patience should one have with moral laxity? I have little patience with things that are broken, but while people are not things, a person who behaves with only a fraction of his humanity engaged is asking to be abstracted. To what extent is it in my position in society to insist on virtue in the collective? Do I have to assess the whole or just the man within reach? Could I waste my entire fortune in sympathy with the degraded and corrupt? Could I exhaust my tolerance and patience addressing every corruption? What is the appropriate middle ground, or is moderation itself the agent of complacency? 

I suspect there's a classic book that handles such questions well. So I am engaging some selections of these swapping out some of my recent boredom with science fiction, and moderating my patience for the true detective stuff which has become recently delicious. 

That's the conversation I want to have, Mr. Crowley, if you're interested in another heart to heart. It's the conversation I'm ready to have with anyone who will put up with my willingness to consider nothing as settled. 

On the Martial Ed front, as it were, I'm rather stunningly pleased with the amount of ease with which a physical manifestation of self expresses itself. That is to say, when you go from fat to thin, or vice versa, it is deeply transformative not only of yourself but of your impression of others who do not. Let me do an analogy. I think it was Freakonomics or perhaps Ariely who evaluated the self-esteem of people who wore knockoff clothing or jewelry. The people who wanted to signify their status with a fake Rolex watch who knew it to be a fake were much less confident in themselves than those who wanted to signify their status with a real Rolex watch. So in fact, it's not the guy in the Ferrari who has the mental problem, it's the guy in the Mustang who drives like he's got a Ferrari who's doing the compensating. I can verify this for myself remembering the day I was driving my BMW 535 and got passed on the freeway by a BMW 540. Although, at the time I thought the guy in the M5 was over-compensating. I should have really just wanted the M5 and have done with it. 

So I have come to think of all of my prior fake exercise programs and fake diets, now that I am serious about both and am getting the sort of results that both impress me and leave me in pain. I know all of my previous efforts to be less than totally committed - even as I sometimes adjust my commitments to my new regime. However, I have the confidence that I am doing the real thing, which is based on the fact that I have ordered the Navy Seal workout and have seen that I do much of what they do. It is that commitment to the warrior standard that puts my ego in check and forces me to deal with the more ultimate question. 

This is very much in parallel with what ESR says about the moral clarity learning to use a firearm imposes on the thoughtful person. Which reminds me of a famous lyric fraught with elision. You may know Folsom Prison Blues:

When I was just a baby my mama told me. Son,
Always be a good boy, don't ever play with guns.
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die

 There's a big gap between playing with guns and shooting a man just to watch him die, but people seem to think the gap is mighty small between the wish and the deed. That's just happy talk. Going the distance is difficult. There is no room for the passive voice. It's not what you aim to do, it's what you practice doing.

On the Technical side, as I progress on various fronts from Gearhead to Hacker to Maker, I am learning a great deal these days about the systems that make modern banking possible. And although I would probably prefer to get into the business of big data for water systems and have responsibilities for the most basic of industries, I'm not convinced that banking itself isn't one of those. Nevertheless I'm going to be proprietary about what I'm doing there other than saying that I've just discovered another in the Mae family beside Freddie and Fannie. 

My life is good and I've never been much happier for any reason. This dude abides.

Report From A Few Feet Off the Upper Middle Class Floor

(from the archives & previously unpublished Nov 2007)

Last August I reported to you from the Lower Upper Middle Class. Since then I've gotten a promotion and I'm essentially living at the level of risk that was involved with the China Deal. All I can tell you is that given what I've been dealing with over the past 12 weeks, I'm hella glad I didn't pack up the house and head to Beijing. There's more than enough drama here at home. Which is an interesting revelation that opens up other doors as well.

What I've got now, that I didn't have but always wanted, is my own company with some bank in the bank. It's not my bank, but I have about as much control as I need. I'm running my piece of the business on a relatively smooth track (finally) but there are all kinds of huge challenges ahead. I have basically made the transition from a software professional to a software executive, and I see why a lot of people don't make it.

It gives you a different kind of headache, executivity does. It's rather like... it's like tending a garden inside of a batting cage. As you are nursing your plants, and flowers and vegetables, out of nowhere comes a 90 mph fastball. You quickly learn that you now have to keep on a catcher's mitt. So with one tender hand, you feed your garden, with the other you dodge and catch rockets. The more you tend to one thing, the more the other gets away from you.  You have to develop a completely new rhythm.  That's what I'm doing, getting used to the new rhythm while keeping the bottom line in the back of my mind. Tracy Chapman was right. All that you have is your soul.

I understand why phony people become ruthless.

I'm almost at the point where money is not a thing. I'm about one or two bonuses away from never having to deal with another class of problems. From that point, all I have to worry about is an exit strategy (if that's what we decide) and the odd calamity. Outside of that, I have a good deal of confidence that I'm not going to have to worry about a lot of things I've been worried about too long. That is, if it is actually true that the rich get richer. I know it's not, and I'm not buying any Krystal any time soon.

But there remains the matter of subduing the self, and coming up with the boundless energy required to keep up people's confidence in your ability to lead. This is very difficult work, work I couldn't imagine doing with anything but a

The Ride Along

Like many of my fellows and most of my closest friends, my priorities and concerns were significantly changed by 9/11. That shift ultimately moved me from Left to Right. Folks who know me know that I tend to be something of a fearless adventurer. I go there. I follow where my curiosity and truth lead me, which is generally outside of the comfort zone and into the danger zone.

These days I’m engaged in what I call my martial education. As part and parcel of that I am preparing, as intelligently and reasonably as I can, for survival in the worst country America could become. That stands outside of my prior fields of ambition, but the more I study history and pay attention to the world outside of my comfortable upper middle class lifestyle, the more I learn. I find this new world fascinating. So I joined the local citizens police academy.

In my corner of Los Angeles County we are fortunate not to suffer from a lot of the gang problems elsewhere, and although budgets are always tight, it’s not from citizens trying to defund cops. So for some time now we’ve had a citizen’s police academy. I’m in Class #38 which runs from January to May, three hours a week. Officers and staff from the Chief on down, come to instruct us on how our police department conducts its business from everything to animal control to internal affairs to the City Attorney to SWAT to communications. Every week there are at least two sessions that give us way more info than you might think is possible. Last week we learned about the K-9 patrols. Next week is a focus on domestic violence.

As part of this instruction, everyone in the class has an opportunity to join an officer on patrol. I chose the 8pm to midnight shift on a Friday night into the relatively rougher area of the north side of town.  Here is my story. 

I hit the streets with Officer K. As we left the station and he prepared his Dodge Charger squad car, I picked up the sense that we were late. He was all business as he straightened things up. Usually officers go out singly in the squad car; he pulled some stuff into the trunk – while he was there, he showed me the orange handled less-lethal shotgun. We got in and I asked about the ground rules. I could talk and ask anything I felt like.  We took off to the Northside.

My left arm was squeezed uncomfortably next to his console and keyboard that projected from the dashboard into the space between the driver and passenger seat. On the computer screen was a series of Windows looking screens mixed in with some text only green screens. He popped back and forth through them with ease. Cops have as many acronyms as we do in IT, but most of theirs relate to 10-codes and penal codes. So he’s driving along, banging on the computer and listening to the radio. Dude is multitasking like a pro.  Our first call comes. I become instantly aware that we are on the other end of 911 calls, and they’re constantly happening in our city of 67,000.  Our first call was to a local park. Nine males were reported to be smoking in a non-smoking area. I joked with K that I’m sure he could handle that without much trouble. He seriously replied that he’s not interested in starting trouble where there is none, that he’d use his nice voice.  It turned out that the offending smokers had moved along before we arrived, and I am reminded that cops will tell the assholes to move along so that we don’t have to, but by their mere presence a lot doesn’t need to be said. I was reminded of how interestingly that works from several angles as the night progressed.

We stopped for a quick meal at a local healthy chicken joint where we met another officer and his probie. The cops sat with their backs to the wall and tore through baked chicken and veggies. Officer K pulled off the skin from his bird and sipped his big Coke. We hadn’t been outside the restaurant 20 seconds when the call came for a 242. A fight. It was at the big park where all the joggers and soccer players hang out. The time was about quarter to 9. 

 As we pulled around the second to last corner the dispatcher clearly said ‘vehicle vs pedestrian’ at the same call. Possible hit and run. This was not your ordinary fight. The squad car lights flashed red and blue as a crowd of young men were waving us in. Officer K was out of the car almost before it stopped. As usual cops arrive on scene just after the crime, and so the police work began. I stayed in the car as more units poured in. There was a stabbing. I could hear people saying that the back of the victim’s shirt was soaked in blood. He lay down behind a minivan in the parking lot over to my left. The ambulance and fire truck were there after a short period and more cops came in to tape off the crime scene, two large rectangles in separate areas of the parking lot.

Officer K allowed me full access after 20 minutes or so. What happened was that a player got a red card near the end of a game, and a fight broke out on the field. After the game, the two teams kept fighting and breaking up fights and swinging and grappling again at the two areas marked off in the parking lot. And then it got vicious. I followed K into the larger of the two areas where the victim had previously lain bloody and he began questioning witnesses.

Everybody seemed to have smartphones but nobody could identify who was fighting whom. Plenty of selfies but very little incriminating evidence. The vehicle in question was identified multiple different ways. Some said it was silver, others said it was grey. One guy said it was burgundy. Everybody pretty much agreed it took off, burning rubber out of the parking lot. One of the witnesses got a partial plate. That same person was read some legal notifications, and positively identified one of the players from the other team as in the melee against the victim. K took statements from half a dozen witnesses. Then we crossed the field to get half of roster from the rec center staff. Now we were getting somewhere. Almost.

The kid with blood on his knuckles sat quietly under a large tree in the parking lot median.  He didn’t see a knife. By this time we had deduced that the primary suspect must have taken off in the vehicle, but this was the only one on the team who was identified fighting the stabbed player. A dozen witnesses and ‘Knuckles’ were all officially detained. A couple of sergeants on the scene directed officers back and forth coming up with questioning strategies as they tried to piece together exactly what happened. We came up with a new set of questions for Knuckles, now he opens  up with a name, ‘Folder’.  There is only one name that resembles that on the roster, but that person is not around.

The senior sergeant wants to bust Knuckles and says so with some enthusiastic choice words. Officer K, whose call this is, disagrees. Knuckles is too calm. By now he’s been sitting under the tree for over an hour. Even though he’s answered questions, this whole thing is still a mystery. When three or four groups of men are fighting, what they see of the other fights is very little, what they say about their own fight is typical. Yeah I threw a few punches, but I was breaking it up. The general rule is that you let fighters fight. Nobody presses charges. But a stabbing is different. If you’re fighting 300 yards away from the first fight and break out a deadly weapon, that’s attempted murder. We’ve dispatched two sergeants, a fire truck with four guys, an ambulance, the local security guards are here, there are at least 5 city cops including Officer K and I, plus the CSIs and we’ve been here almost 90 minutes. If we let Knuckles walk, we’ll never see him again.

There are families and friends of the soccer players still hanging about. Some can’t leave because their cars are roped off in the crime scene.  The other half of the roster comes, as well as intel on the vehicle. The sergeant orders us to the neighboring city to go get it. Officer K is harried. All these statements and paperwork are going to have to be done. The 911 calls are piling up because we couldn’t make a good arrest or figure out exactly what happened. Now we’re heading out of town to confiscate a vehicle. I’m excited by the fact that I can stand see and hear everything that’s going on and I’m trying to solve the mystery myself. Fine for me, I don’t have to do the paperwork. Before we arrive, the call comes over the radio that Knuckles was arrested on an 836. This is a provisional arrest without charge, in the grey area between reasonable suspicion and probable cause. K groans.

We arrive and park in the street near an alley a block from the house of the owner of the vehicle. There are three other officers on scene, one from our town and two local cops. The attitude is more loose. We’re shooting the shit, but there’s an undercurrent of nervousness. This is definitely a burglar bar neighborhood. There’s a large abandoned building overshadowing the place, a line of aircraft trail out to the east. We are under the flight path for LAX. Lately there have been a lot of shootings around here, they say. Nobody knows why. It’s 11pm and we’re about to grab the vehicle of an attempted murder suspect.  The tow truck arrives, and the plan is set. Can you hook up this vehicle quickly? We’ll give you cover in case the family starts beef. Some cars are arriving in front of the suspect’s house. Time to move.

We jump into the Charger and flip a U turn. There’s still a little traffic around and people are looking around to figure out why there are three cop cars here. We're agitated that it takes 30 seconds to drive a couple hundred yards behind these rubbernecking guys in their slow cars, but we don't want to blast lights and sirens to get these civilians out of the way. We take position on the far side of the house and vehicle. Sure enough, the witness got the license right. Lights come on people come out of the house, some men, women and kids. Officer K gets down to business and the tow truck dude works his end. I’m staying back this time.

It turns out that these two guys, the owner of the truck and his passenger, another young kid were super cooperative. Yes they know Knuckles and Folder. While the fights were going on, they wanted to get the hell out, and so they did. Their soccer team is mostly friends and family and Folder is a friend of a cousin. They’re not surprised that he would do something like that. We have the rec center’s roster and they identify that he put a fake name (not that ‘Knuckles’ and ‘Folder’ are real names) on it. The kid pantomimes the fight. He actually did see Folder on top of the victim beating him while he was face down on the ground. It was interesting to see the way he held his fists when he recreated the fight, those looked like stabbing motions to me. We have a name, and a cell phone number of our primary suspect. Our work here is done.

All of this time, I pretty much played it cool and poker-faced. I know people couldn’t tell what my position was. I was dressed in tactical black, sometimes witnesses at were ease, sometimes they got nervous. Officer K was consistent at all times interacting with the public. I got a sense of his confidence and sense. While my mind was rushing all over the place, I could tell there were very clear priorities he was working from. Although that's to be expected, I still find it remarkable, the calm in enforcing the law and the details of the workmanship that make something like a stabbing just another day's police work. 

There are still a few more classes for me to attend before I'm done, and I don't know which steps are immediately next in my martial education. This has been an eye-opening experience in understanding the justice system and the priorities of my local cops. I'm still glad I don't have to do the paperwork. 

My Black Life Doesn't Matter

My life matters. That should be obvious. How could it not? But I'm not representing myself as having a #BlackLife that matters. I'm not that kind of commodity. I own my own blackness and it's not up for symbolic manipulation. There is no victory in that game. People might think it's not the same old skin game, but I think it is. Either way, my investment is particular, nominal and minimal.  

It wasn't always that way. I can remember when Debra Dickerson wrote a book called The End of Blackness. The very idea got on my nerves. That's because I was making a name for myself as a black blogger, and in particular as a black conservative Republican blogger. Maybe her blackness didn't matter, but mine did, and I resented her representation. I might have come to some arcane cul-de-sac of black cultural significance which might seem like a dead end, but I always found a way, back then, to invest in a new path. 

For most of my adult life, I wrestled with my own blackness. Mostly because it was so easy for me to be black. I had no Duboisian dual-consciousness dilemma. I struggled to understand other black American struggles and find common ground. So I'd find myself writing essays about my own identity that I had to write and rewrite. The essay was always entitled 'The End of My Blackness' and I first wrote it somewhere around 1986 when I started working full-time at a Fortune 50 company that had already awarded me three summer internships. I was in Corporate America in a technical job that was not an Affirmative Action hire. I worked in the executive suite of division headquarters, had my own large office with two desks and got along with all my non-black peers. I didn't have to shave or even explain to my boss why black men can't be expected to be clean shaven every day. I did watch the Cosby Show and I did walk, talk and dress like them. For many people in America at that time, my life seemed unreal. Unreal for a black man. So while there were still plenty of things I enjoyed about being black and being me, I was gradually experiencing a gulf between the reality of my life and what people commonly called 'the black experience'.

Writing the essay was just another thing that I did, more often than not, just to mark the passing of time. But in fact it was always true that there was some conventional barrier I passed that seemingly vaulted me into some area of unreality. These days I would have to look back to find something that I might still resonate with emotionally. I'm perfectly happy being considered unreal, a unicorn. I don't get upset by other people's failures to see me for who I am. 

What I say these days is that "I'm from a small town called Black". I 'never forget where I come from' but that never determined my aim. I can't go home again, and I don't need to. I don't need to hear it every time the Grammys are awarded, that Clifford Brown was a great black musician. It doesn't bother me that I can't hear him on the radio when I turn to the (ahem) Urban Contemporary station. I already fell in love to Clifford Brown's music. I already married that woman, and I own the album for myself. Whatever is said about 'black culture' today is not something I need to squabble about. That's what it's like to come to grips. I embody all the blackness I ever was, good, bad or indifferent. If Chaka Khan is every woman, I'm every black man I ever needed to be. I have that dignity; I'm shamelessly self-possessed and I don't particularly care that I am. I am what I am. Sobeit.

That sense of well-grounded confidence is not negotiable. Not with the 'white world' nor with the 'black world'. These are oligopolistic markets for dignity and certain fingers are on the scales of #BlackLives. So I'm not going to stand in line and weigh in. I don't need the drama, or the approval. I'm not defensive or offensive about it. I've solved my own race problems. I guess I always have, which is why I struggle with the idea of Blackness which is mired permanently in the zone of, well, The Negro Problem.  

 Have I transcended race? No. I haven't transcended humanity so I don't expect to transcend human folly. I could be shot dead tomorrow by a Klansman, run over by a drunk driver, drop dead of a stroke or fall off the beach facing balcony of my house. Everybody with a racial theory will figure out some racial proximate cause for my demise. I don't get to argue with the chorus of "I told you so" after my death. While I'm alive, it's a different story because it's my life as I define it. Mine is not your life, certainly not your vision of blackness or #BlackLife.

Some people will read this and think it must be awfully difficult for me to find my way in America, given this country's history (whatever they interpret that to mean). I've come to expect that sort of thing. Call it 'racism' if that makes you feel comfortable, but don't try to tell me that you're fighting on my behalf in the streets because you know my #BlackLife matters. Don't try to tell me what wall my back is up against, or what demons I must face. 

I'm pretty happy with my life. Clap along. 

A Black American Short Story

I am from a small town called Crenshaw. Crenshaw is actually a series of neighborhoods in Los Angeles.  About 100,000 folks live there from Manchester to Pico, from Figueroa to La Cienega. It was and is still the center of black Los Angeles. There are many stories about Crenshaw. You may have heard of them. 

Like with all of America, class matters. I've said black America splits up into five. Sticks-Projects / Ghetto/ Hood / Burb / Hill. Crenshaw doesn't have the Sticks, there are no rural shotgun shacks, but it does have public housing projects and Section 8 housing. You've probably heard of 'The Jungle'. There are ghettoes too. I grew up in the 'hood. Our middle class was American lower middle class. Big families, many originally from Texas. Our upper middle class, was solid American middle class. Our upper class was American upper middle class. You've probably heard of  'Baldwin Hills'. That's when I was growing up in that small town called Crenshaw. Now things are lining up. 

When my father left the Marine Corps and moved from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles, he became a civil servant. This was 1962. Los Angeles was segregated and that's why, if you were black (Negro at the time) you landed somewhere in proximity to Crenshaw. We were middle class for blacks and ours was a good solid neighborhood, but unlike other neighborhoods we were a black neighborhood. You didn't so much move there because you wanted to, but because your choices were limited. So the result was that we had a broad economic and cultural diversity of black people in our neighborhood. To our left, was Rev. Robinson and his wife, an elderly couple. He never left the house not wearing a suit and hat. He always drove a brand new white Lincoln Continental. To our right were Mr. and Mrs. Arnold and their eight kids. He was a truck driver with a slim moustache,  hard greasy hands always in coveralls. They had a yellow Chevy Biscayne station wagon. Poor Mrs. Arnold, when Maurice Arnold died, the kids went wild. We were in the West Adams community, noted for its stately churches and quiet residential streets and yes its red light district. I grew up in a three bedroom house with a detached garage on a street called Wellington Road. In 1966 when we bought the house there were still white folks living in the neighborhood. They were all gone by 68. In 1968 America was on fire. 

I attended Virginia Road Elementary and Holy Name of Jesus School. I never sat in class with a white kid until I was 14 years old.  I was the school brainiac, the oldest of five children and I wore glasses. I loved playing football, hated that I was too short for basketball, and couldn't understand baseball at all. I could swim, wrestle, tumble and do a double front off the one meter board. I was skinny, tough and fast. I was honest and good, but I was an adventurer. I would take any dare. I played cello, jogged every morning and read science fiction.

I wound up at Loyola, a Jesuit Prep school, instead of Palisades High School, my first choice. I wanted to run long distance, play baseball and become a jet fighter mechanic. But I ended up finding my feet sophomore year in Debate, French, Geometry and computer programming. I was a logic beast. I still loved science but not so much science fiction even though I read all of the Star Trek novels. I tested well. I did little homework. I was a Star Wars nerd and wannabe pinball wizard. I graduated on my 17th birthday, a four year varsity springboard diver, and captain of the winning intramural soccer team with 80th percentile SAT scores and a 2.91 GPA. I had no concentrations - no single thing made sense to me with a career path I could envision. I was recruited by Pitzer, Haverford, Georgia Tech, Bryn Mawr and Florida A&M. All I cared about was USC Electrical Engineering. I got to USC and dropped out second semester. No money.

I worked at Fedco, which was basically the 80s version of Costco. I sold radios, boomboxes, car stereo. I bought audiophile stereo DJ equipment and did receptions and church dances. I bought a motorcycle and rode Mulholland Highway at unsafe speeds. I grew my hair to shoulder length and dated a girl with dark skin, big legs and long braids. I listened to New Wave and electronic music and roller disco'd on the weekends. I made it into the Teamsters and hung out with Vietnam vets in the warehouse. I quit the store after the strike didn't get me a raise enough to afford my own apartment. I wrecked my bike, cut my hair, got a job as a teller at City National, worked downtown, got a new girlfriend with light skin, perfect diction and short hair. My parents divorced, I moved in with my Dad and bought a Karmann Ghia with his assistance.

I was about to get into the management trainee program at the bank at the recommendation of Ken, the Sr VP, but I decided I wanted to go back to college and get my degree in Computer Science. So I went to State in 1982 until I ran out of money in 1986. But I got three internships at Xerox, won Dean's List, served in student government and pledged Alpha Phi Alpha. I did every dimension of college life except graduation. No matter, I became a wholly different young man, inspired by the books of Thomas Sowell, the music of Arif Mardin and a haphazard philosophy somewhere between Ayn Rand, Malcolm X, Yukio Mishima and Henry Miller. Yeah, I know. 

Somewhere between 1986 and 1992 I learned pretty much everything I needed to know about yuppie existence, corporate employment and Los Angeles. I got sick them all and joined a small software company and moved to NYC, became something of a neo-bohemian deep into semiotics, performance poetry and Beethoven. I moved to Boston and bought a Canon SLR, dropped in and out of aikido, capoeira, basketball, multimedia and speed dating, which hadn't been invented yet but...My wife, who at the time was my ex-girlfriend gave me an ultimatum. I took her up on it, provided she would take in my son born in Brooklyn, and we were married in 1994.

We moved to Atlanta and brought up three babies in the Northeast suburbs. I gave up my six figure entrepreneurialism for FTE benefits at another small software company which helped my move West back to California Christmas of 1997. We bought the minivan, and stored five tons of accumulated furnishings which we were not able to recover out of hock until 7 months later. Our rented house with the pool became the center of the mommyhood of the three Mrs Bowens. There was happy happy cousin pandemonium. We made grandfather into the doter. 

I commuted to Silicon Valley and almost got rich. Then the double whammy of custody (of my son) and tax problems hit. It cost me the ability to buy a house in California, a non-trivial task under the best of circumstances. I have never recovered from that financial loss, and so I became, at length, a better person. After 9/11 we settled in Redondo Beach, one of my favorite places in the country. We have been here ever since. I worked as a traveling consultant and by now have visited all but seven states in the US.

Along the way I kept blogging and my writing life online, dating back to Xerox days in 1986, fulfilled a number of purposes. It got me into NPR and the Republican Party. It got me speaking dates and 1.6 million hits over the years. It has taught me a lot about myself and about people. Professionally, I have done very well and am still reaping the benefits of building systems all over the country in most every industry. I have accomplished a wide variety of modest successes. The journey is an inexhaustible narrative I am happy to share.

It only serves some marketing purposes, I imagine, to call mine a Black American story, I have little interest in all the ways I have seen to approach 'black'. I have my own way and I don't presume that it is anyone else's, and yet I know my story speaks to all curious people. I've never been particularly good at abstracting the meaning of my life - I let people react and try to correct misperceptions. You see it doesn't make any sense to me to write without a healthy does of self, so I always do. That is, when I'm writing for people. When I write for machines, there is no self, there is only my idiosyncratic style. I'm from a small town called Crenshaw, which is black in the same way only in the most mundane manners today as 40 years ago when it was home. What I know about black is one volume in a massive library written by people mostly dead. I think there are some fascinating chapters in my book. Mine is the tale of the traveler, up from freedom bouncing from liberty to liberty. 

I live in the Burbs now, in very close proximity to the Hill. What was it that Orwell said about the lower edge of the upper middle class? I work at home as I presume the best writers always have, and I write for computers and people to sustain myself and my family. I'm happy with the balance but still have ambitions. This year and next will bring to a close the familiar chapter of being Dad. We'll see what comes next, but I have an idea. More later.

It's a Battle for the Hearts and Minds

JK is one of the good looking dudes from my old neighborhood. We are fraternity brothers, and like most people from the old neighborhood he's exceptional. Almost nobody from my 'hood disappeared into mediocrity, we're all somewhat extreme. I met him among many of my frat at a smoker in Mid City this evening. Afterwards, since some brothers were from out of town, we made it a point to take in some seafood at Harold & Belle's. I forget how good and how reasonable they are. I'm going back again soon.

We talked about the world, because we've seen it. More of it than we expected to see, I'm sure for all of us. Character counts, and we all had a lion's share. In the end, JK, who knows how to turn a phrase had the most compelling tale to tell. His tale, about a chaplain's assistant who refused to be separated from his charge, going two levels up the chain of command was inspiring and instructive, but it was one phrase tangentially contextual that caught my mind. It was something I know I hadn't written directly on - something we'll cover here.

But first a bit of context. I'm a bit of a prodigal when it comes to hanging out with such excellent gentlemen as my fraternity has produced. You see, I'm an Alpha Phi Alpha brother but despite that I have given up my rights to be a member in good standing with the Talented Tenth. I grew up adjacent to but in close social intercourse with the communities of Ladera Heights, Baldwin Hills and View Park. I didn't want to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant. I wanted to be a scientist, but a scientist who drove a convertable Mercedes 450 SLC. My father was an old school Episcopalian (good) but also a black nationalist (bad) and a US Marine (what!?). My mother could pass any paperbag test (good) and was a Catholic from New Orleans (good) but converted to the Foursquare Church (bad). Yet both were civil servants (not bad) and conservative in that unique way the black middle class is. And yes we were totally white collar. Still, I was the prodigy and did my requisite hobnobbing at cotillions and partied with the cool kids at Palisades, Harvard, Westlake & Loyola. I wanted and expected the tudor gothic house. I just wondered how I was going to get it with my Engineer's degree. At some point, however, I became gradually outcast - perhaps more in my own mind - from the mainstream of those of us dedicated to Uplift, the Struggle, the Movement and Community Service. I made a series of radical breaks with traditions, but I still love those very specific peoples. There's no way I can explain it all. But I'm glad they know me. I'm glad to know them, but I've been out for a long walk on the Right side of the wall.

JK spoke about the absurdity, from his unique point of view, of the way America's foreign policy puts us into conflicts, especially in the Middle East. He described his understandable difficulty, as an army chaplain, in digesting the political objectives surrounding our engagements in that part of the world. In the end, duty prevailed, but the phrase 'hearts and minds' stuck in his craw. And why shouldn't it? As he went over that matter several things occurred to me, one of them rather unique. From my own grandmother's lips used to come the phrase "You just want to stay mad." in describing the refusal of any number of peoples to be pacified by American military action. 

You cannot presume to win hearts and minds simply by providing security.

We Americans tend to assume that people want what we have, simply because we do. There is a kind of tacit acknowledgement by all Americans that wealth and fame is what we all want. That subtext out of the way, we debate endlessly about the ethics of means. You cannot have a political discussion in America that doesn't boil down to a tug of war about the means, but everybody promises the same ends. Education. Health Care. Employment. Infrastructure. We know that a world of immigrants beat a path to our doors for those things, and all of us in the spoiled 5 figure middle class want incrementally more. We can get into full preacher mode verging on indignant hostility when we talk about the gap between black teenagers in urban Chicago and white collegians in suburban Virginia despite the fact that there are literally billions of humanity who would risk much to get into the South Side, even for the conditions at the end of the Great Migration generations ago. 

And yet when we attempt to go about the planet doing God's work in 'nation building' it seems to strike all the wrong chords. What sort of nerve do we have providing the Infrastructure for Education, Health Care, and Employment in Iraq? What kind of American exceptionalist arrogance is that? We are easily accosted as wrong for attempting to provide for others what we all clamor for here at home. The irony weighs a ton. And yet human nature provides the perfect answer (see above text).

Dare I raise the question of police forces in America? Of course I dare. Because nobody wants to live in thugland, especially those with infrastructure, education, health care and employment. Everybody in America agrees that public safety comes first, without which even our greatest cities fail in misery and shame, not to mention are more than a little bit backwards cities and towns. We all agree on the one hand, that nobody will succeed in business or society when there is appreciable violence in the streets. We are reluctant to agree that you can't jawbone violence into submission. Killers need way more than stern lectures. There must be fierce retribution and zero tolerance, right? This country's citizenship has rent its collective clothing for the past several months over a handful of deaths. We're dying to see peace and quiet, truth and reconciliation.

But people have decided to stay mad. 

It occurs to me, as one of my brothers intimated about the depth of culture and history in Israel, that we in America might decide to carry on grievances about slavery for 400 years beyond today. Maybe nobody in the large majority of African Americans wants to get over it. So let's just assume it. Let's assume that I, and the 3 or 4 million in the Talented Tenth are the only ones capable of 'just getting over it', even though only a third of those actually *want* to get over it. So let's say I'm in the minority of the minority prodigally engaged, but substantially divested of all racial baggage. Let's say that I will never be the one representing or represented the 'permanent interests' of the African American community (as that is generally interpreted to be vis a vis the Legacy of Slavery). Let's say there's only half a million of us so dedicated and so consecrated. We're happy. We are Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele or whomever we are. We have our own reasons for our own patriotisms. We're satisfied in the mainstream. Our lives are secure.

But the rest of us, so the logic goes, are oppressed or suppressed or depressed or otherwise flattened and hard pressed in our communities. The rest of us want to stay mad, and we never worked our way out of our ghettoes. We live on 138th and Lenox and we have never been to the Central Park Great Lawn to play frisbee. We live in the 5th Ward of Houston and we've never gone on the tour of NASA. We don't know our way to your America. We are hypersegregated and we're always and forever going to need some extra efforts to rescue us out of our pressed situations. We're always going to be that Other America no matter how many sturdy hard-working immigrants arrive at our shores volunteering themselves into the melting pot.  We are always going to be the descendents of slaves and that will always be the determining factor. So what if we live in America? So what if we have security? So what if this is the richest country on the planet? All the more reason for us to stay mad. Or so the logic goes.

It bears repeating. Battles for hearts and minds end up just being painful battles, because some hearts and minds are closed. They may wear advertising about 'any means necessary'. They may say 'we want a national dialog'. They may claim that an equal opportunity requires an unequal push and so on and so forth, but every bus has a front and a back and in the end, some folks are just more comfortable at the back of the bus. 

No matter what you say, people have their pride, and that's what this is all about. Pride is not logical. Here's the thought experiment, which almost sounds ridiculous to bother explaining. What would you rather have, education, employment, health care and infrastructure or your community pride? Are you so proud of your ways in America, knowing that by sticking to them you lose education, employment, health care and infrastrucutre? How far back into the Legacy of Slavery or the conflict between Israelis and Arabs or the split between Sunni and Shia are you willing to dig in? How long will you refuse to conform? How long will you refuse to melt, to intermarry, to blend in, to get it where you fit in, to compromise, to let bygones be bygones, to bury the hatchet, to get over it? How many generations will you accept the burden of pride? Is it worth it? Yes? Because you just want to stay mad. You reserve the right to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance. You reserve the right to veto the settlement. You reserve the right to opt out, because you are not committed to integration. Segregation now and forever. Because Pride. 

More specifically, when it comes to violence, pacification does not provide acceptable justice. That's because  'The People' don't exist and so the Justice System does not satisfy the granfathered exceptions to the social contract granted to My Special Community. That's Israeli justice, not my justice. That's Shia justice, not proper Sharia. That's the white people's System, not mine. Hearts and minds aren't equal. They want to stay in their own little ghettoes. They want their own inviolate turfs. They don't accept the mainstream. They must have their own Pride Parade down Main Street, and City Hall better not deny the permit. So don't send your army in here to try and fix things. We like it the way it is, and who do you think you are anyway?

We know this ends badly. History is violent. People bear grudges. Forever. 

But the premise of progress is that lives can always be improved. So a Progressive agenda seeks to square the circle and reach out to the pressed peoples and make them over. It desires to do so with the assumption that what it has, the others do not, and their lack ought to make them submit to the program. When that fails, the opposition is blamed, but never 'blame the victim'. Really?

My Stoic Journey: The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Well this Christmas I celebrate the success of the project I had several years ago to get the hell out of the Enterprise software business and get into Open Source, DevOps and the Cloud. It's done. I'm there. I work at home and run several suites of stacks for several customers and that's all good. The Last Kid is a senior in highschool and we're in the middle of planning how to ditch the four bedroom house for cheaper, cozier digs. 

Along the way, some unexpected things happened, most significant of these were a dramatic increase in my credit rating and consequent quality of luxury furnishings. But seriously, it was the discovery of Stoicism and my martial education. These two things, which I didn't plan, came sideways out of the discovery, I suppose at long last, that I really don't like people in actuality as I do in theory. In theory I am an absolute modernist liberal. In practice, I feel most people don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. People meaning the people who practice democracy in America as a form of cultural identity and social complaint. I've concluded that things fall apart and at this rate my best efforts should be in divesting myself of the of the emotion so many have put into public debate. 

I was introduced to Stoicism, although I didn't know it at the time, by the following quote by John Boyd. 

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.” 

My mind always drifts back to a series of afternoons in Southern California back in 2008 when I was working in Orange County. I was on the precipice of accepting the job before my current gig. At the moment I was making out quite well as an independent consultant. Although I was communting 100 miles a day and gas was approaching $4, I was happy and confident. A bit too much, I thought, in my BMW 750il. I considered my neighbor and friend who had recently purchased a large deisel Ford pickup truck. It was an anti-vanity. The issue of the day was immigration and I spoke for a moment about Jameil's Law on the local radio show with Warren Olney.  But my mind during lunches and commutes were focused on the larger role of long term thinking as I engaged the podcasts of the Long Now Foundation, of which I am now a member. In the long haul, I thought, I want to turn away from the politics of the sort that placate a loud public capble of rationalizing away the very meaning of 'illegal alien' and toward science. Scientific discipline has taken a back seat in our discourse and I don't want to be the guy in this society driving a luxury sedan. I'm about hard and excellent work at the top of my profession, or so I thought. And so in those days when nobody quite knew how bad the economy might get, I began a long march towards new sensibilities, anticipating no democratic solutions. 

So I was preparing myself for things to get worse. In fact, I wanted to purchase a Hummer, making a kind of outsized apocalyptic gesture. In the end, I wanted something that said smart survival. I wound up with a Toyota FJ Cruiser, and it has become my favorite vehicle ever. But deeper than this outward sign of an inward commitment, I was seeking a way to leave the chatter behind. I made a name for myself as a black Republican and founder of the Conservative Brotherhood, a move that was optimistic for values against a practical backdrop that was stunningly mechanical. For anyone who bothers to look closely, the GOP struggles mightily with reconciling the needs of electoral power, dedication to virtues and the resposibilities of governance. Pick one and a half. It was a boulder I'd rather not push. 

Fortunately I had dedicated my blog, the center of all my public thinking, to Socratic dialog, and people were still engaging me well enough to spark my own thoughts on every significant public matter. After some time however, once I got my final new job, working at home made me rather stir crazy. So I used Meetup groups to get from behind the keyboard and into real dialog. It turned out to be better in my own lab and library than in the agoras of Southern Cal. I met a few interesting people, but I would hesitate to call them friends. They too were single-minded or abstracted beyond much friendly use. Still, the philosophy meetup groups, the cloud computing meetup groups got me going. Raising my expectations and reducing my needs began to start coming more naturally. I decided not to be disappointed by disappointments in the field, and stick even tighter to long term thinking. 

Playing a major part in my transition was the entire zombie vibe that has infected our society. So I really began to think about what if democracy really did fail in America, not just in parts but the whole thing? I knew instinctively that we would revert to hierarchies and tribalisms, as many of us are doing in our solopsist idiot ghettos behind the barbwire interdictions of political correctness. But what if it weren't just Antioch University? So I began to develop my Peasant Theory, already making a very strong statement in my own sights that Obama's electorate was no place for my sort of long term thinking. 

Oddly enough, if these lessons in disappointment weren't quite enough, a couple video games helped push me the extra mile. Of course I read Seneca and Epictetus, but it was literally a boss battle in a game called Amalur that brought me to write:

As I approached the highest levels in Amalur, resolving the ultimate faction quest of the sages, I battled the Archsage's mental demons one of which was Ambition and the other Indifference. Having won, I got to choose and I chose Indifference as a power. Indifference is the power of equanimity. I know it contradicts Ayn Rand, but perhaps now is the time to consider disinterest. For years since my 40s I have been waiting for all the kids to eat first and being a river to my people with the pride of earning and giving away. But now it all starts to feel more and more like Indifference because it surely is not Ambition. Ambition is a tool to make one's river wide and deep. Indifference serves wisdom best. It makes one confident in judgment. The Judge is critical, but does not belong. 

I was becoming very judgmental. And it was finally Harold Bloom and Charles Dickens that helped me understand myself. People were behaving, according to me, at very low standards, and yet the chatting classes kept expecting to outsource a new generation of experts by public acclaimation and internet aggregation. We were and still are in the midst of a crap-populist revolution in America, both political parties harvesting shit tons of power by the buttload from the manufactured consent of a nation of asshats. And I knew that Wall Street was going to feed its own and the Exxon would still be Exxon. While the masses were tweeting out selfies, there was real long term thinking done by industry. Sure much of it was infantilizing the once formidable American middle-class, but once they decided to spend money through Verizon and AT&T texting adolescent spellings rather than essaying in paragraphs, well.. certain dislocations were inevitable. My job was not to outrun the bear, my job was to be in my castle not searching for mystical communications with nature in the first place. And so Bleak House has been my guide to what civilization can be without democracy. 

In the back of my mind is the Gangstarr soundtrack. 

Check it stupid 
While you're out there, on the main streets frontin 
Your game's week, so I'm huntin you down clown 
Cause you need to learn somethin 
All that bluffin, won't get you nothin but killed 
No mission fulfilled, because there's others who will 
get jealous, hell if they can take clout from you, they'll do it 
So that's what I'm about to do, I'll step to it 
and strip you of your pride (your pride) 
And then I'll stick and I'll rip you up from all sides 
or possibly I'll let you slide, slime 
Cause you'll set your own death in just a matter of time 
Yeah, and I'll be somewhere on the sidelines, y'know 

I won't disclaim all of that gangbanging harshness. What made us think we could be mellow in the first place? You cannot be mellow on credit. You're owned. Don't get me wrong. This is not pessimism. It's not even particularly skeptical or cynical. It's the mere acknowledgment that in the long term, to paraphrase Taleb, whatever can be, will be. In the long term, a black American president is inevitable. So is a limited nuclear exchange. The point is not to be shocked, but to be prepared. There are always backstreets. There are always sucker MCs, there are always men whose games are too tight to come apart at the seams. The trick, as Kipling would say, is to walk with kings nor lose the common touch. To observe judgmentally at the appropriate distance, and to have a home to return to at the end of what may or may not be an eventful day. The Chinese curse is not to live in interesting times, but that you would be become overly shitfaced by the whipsaw of the crap-populism of interesting times. I walked down the crapulous backstreets of Dickensian London. I get it. Buy better boots. 

One of the most intriguing ideas I have entertained in the past decade was an understanding of the best reasons for war, which have nothing do do with self-defense in the immediate sense, but the defense of reason itself.  The purpose of war is to destroy myths. The purpose of war is to restore human faith in cause and effect. The purpose of war is remind humankind of its limits. I didn't expect to be thinking such thoughts, but there it is all put together. It's only that thinking about my developing Stoicism that concerns me. Do I need war? Am I indifferent to that path to war? Do I accept it like the tank captain in Fury? "Ideals are peaceful, history is violent." 

The other day I read this excellent review of Mein Kampf by Orwell.

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. -- George Orwell, 1940

I cannot be indifferent to that probability happening here in America, in the long term. If I were to mind the currents to a greater degree, I might be alarmed by those signs I could see. But I have decided to limit my field of vision to my own domestic tranquility, to my own probity, to my own property. I no longer am concerned about how I appear so much in the public sphere so long as I have a Western gentleman's comforts and privileges, because I aim in no uncertain terms for Western civilization to be sustained. Sinatra may be dead and Sammy may no longer dance the old soft shoe, but their pictures are still on the wall in my favorite restaurant where the bartender has read Kingsley Amis. I can survive another Blitz when Duke Ellington is triply redundant in the Amazon Cloud and I can still get packet radio. More importantly, I have friends with whom I can trust my life. I have tapped into some military tradition, and I will some more.  

Here is where things get a bit nebulous, because here is where I am. I don't have all of my answers, but I know where to look and whom to ask. I know that vodka makes good mouthwash, and I know I can drink vodka straight. I am a new organic all over again, and my loyalty remains to the city states of Los Angeles and New York, just in case things mostly don't work out. I can lose weight and run. I can shoot and cook and mend wounds. My martial education is advancing and I will have covered all bases by the time I reach 60. 

But. Hitler.

You see I understand and forgive the world its callow activities. I must. I have children I love, and I see the extent to which I have entrusted their education to the decrepit mediocrities of the American public. We don't know what class is any longer, because so little of what we have was forged by the harsh realities of war. We can lose the New Republic in a heartbeat because today's billion dollar fortune bears no resemblance to that of Carnegie's. Old money is dead, and hackers are trying Bitcoin. There's no gold standard, so you really have to get your own gold. We could lose the whole Republic in a heartbeat if the whole thing goes off standard. Which standards matter? (He said rhetorically as if to placate those post-modernists who actually wonder). I suppose Plato spoke about golden souls, did he not? I am ultimately in the business of aiding the survival of the Western, modern liberal ideal, in theory. But in practice, I leave my house in an urban assault vehicle. I don't survive on hope. I'm too heavy for that. I fall through hope's thin rafters so I'm all about concrete foundations, Fred Flintstone in Bedrock. Fred does not go to war. He is good natured, but very practical, and very defensive of his women.

Will that be what it takes? Will it be war that brings us out of the confusion that allows our politics to suffer in such reputable treachery?  If so, then let me be a war profiteer. Let me gain strength from the suffering of mankind, like a surgeon. Let me not profit from mankind's foolishness, like a rock star politian. I don't know. Will I be indifferent? I will work to be wise in my judgment, knowing judgment must come for each of us. We are men after all, and we do good and evil and must meet with our due rewards.

For the time being, I am an engineer among people who read tea leaves. I mock them. Yet I resist the impulse to slap the teapot over into their laps and rudely interrupt their mindless meditations. I sit in silent judgment, good natured and affably indifferent. I enjoy the tea. But I also don't complain about the price because I am part of the system that delivers it to the store where the common man shops. I am invested in keeping the ships afloat and the planes in the air. There remains infrastructure to be put to good use in the modern world, despite how many asshats vote for those who would deconstruct it mercilessly in search of an idiot-proofed utopia. Still, I'm not sure how much not to care the common man's ever more common mistakes when the health of the nation seems impaired by it. How many of us are just passengers on this ship?

The German comic Henning Wehn says something very deep about clapping along and enjoying yourself. I am Stoic. I am doing my work, and calculating, observing and judging with a studied indifference for the purposes of wisdom. I am reducing my needs to zero while focusing on my long term thinking, prepared for what can go wrong in my house made of bricks. I'm not just clapping along and enjoying myself in the public sphere. 

French Dressing & Democracy

When I was 9 years old, the fine folks at Virginia Road Elementary School experimented on us kids. You see we had lost the brick building that housed our cafeteria to the big Sylmar Quake in February of 1971 and so we now got bag lunches instead of yummy cafeteria food. For some reason they decided to pack French dressing in those little plastic packets we are all now familiar with. Of course it was horrible. Nobody wanted to eat it. So some kids had a great idea, let's use it for fighting. 

We would collect the packets at lunch time and hide them in the cloak room until after school. Then, out on the sidewalk, we would place them on the ground and stomp them with flying orange results. The splatter was fantastic, and we transformed new clean clothes into wonderous patterns of stains of the sort all of the Tide commercials promised they could remove. Of course we were encouraged to stop by the administration, but their problem was twofold.

This kind of battle is absolutely irresistable to 9 and 10 year old boys. It is impossible to convince us that this was anything but the most hilarious fun that could be had. Nasty smelly orange French dressing that nobody liked could serve no better purpose than marking nons, hooks, punks and poohbutts in after-school wars. We kings of the school had our obligations. But not only that, they kept supplying us with the goop. What are we supposed to do, just throw away food? 

The experiment lasted a week, but I still remember. 

African American, In Case You Forgot

I'm actually surprised that nobody remembers how the change originally occurred. In the late 80s when professors like Skip Gates was making a big splash at Harvard and Toni Morrison was the toast of the planet, a monumental book was published called the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Anyone who was paying attention would know and recognize that a new generation of scholars were getting a foothold in the better class of universities around the country, and Black Studies Departments were in the intellectual conundrum of only having a couple decades of history to justify their existence. The newer, younger, smarter black scholars in English for example would be quick to point out to people who didn't get it, that authors like Frederick Douglass didn't call himself 'black' nor did Jean Toomer. The expanse of interest in the 'black experience' had to be put in a more appropriate context. So the academic world rightly adjusted its terminology. To talk about the corpus of literature, music, dance etc of blacks in America, you couldn't just overuse Black America - so the term African American was used as a blanket term which was more academically proper, demographically equivalent and politically neutral. Americans of African descent thus became this in the abstract for the purposes of more accuracy - you could then put slaves, ex-slaves, free persons of color, Coloreds, Negroes and Black Americans all in the larger category and use fewer asterisks, anachronisms and other such malaprops.

Around the same time, a charismatic dude named Molefi Asante wrote a 50 page book called 'Afrocentrism' which kicked off yet another chapter in the African American history of mobility in identity. (See? I used it correctly there.) This could be thought of as a second, or third if you want to count Garvey, attempt at a Pan-African unity in identity. For a short time, I myself identified with an international jet-set of 'New World Africans' while living in Brooklyn partying with Spike and dating cute Francophone chicks from Senegal. I almost got into the kinte cloth business. But that was then.

I would gather that there are still a number of folks who are fascinated by the cultural dynamism of that international jet-set including the likes of Zadie Smith and Cornel West and all those who did Bring the Noise/Funk in those glorious early 90s, but Janet Jackson blew up and bifurcated the dreads from the crinkles and as far as I know, the twain never rejoined. By the time John Legend and Common went back to short hair, I think the whole Afrocentric thing was over, but I can't say with any accuracy because I went into the suburban daddy business. Suffice it to say, the whole African angle lost currency, especially for those who don't even read 50 page books.

I think it came as some surprise to some that we went through a period of Bone Thugs & Harmony after all highbrow folks went through, which is part of the reason Lauren Hill was such an incredible surprise, but I digress with these cultural touchstones to point out that your basic 'black culture' goes through many shades and degrees within the spectrum of African American history. I have made my peace with the fact that it's under no direction or control but rather a manifestation of who's following whom, a very personal choice.

I can't account for why people focus on race, when culture is so much more nuanced and interesting, then again, the politics of race in America is pretty much the same stagnant story, and like I said, a lot of people can't be bothered to read.

Civilization Down Under

So I have been in Sydney for about a week. This is my second trip, for business rather than pleasure. I'm getting to see a great deal more because I have a weekend to myself.

The first time I was here was 14 years ago. I came for the Olympic Games attached to my wife's business. She helped manage the team that was in charge of getting food to the Village. Crazy busy work. There were several things I remember about that trip that bear recounting here. 

The first thing was that like the people of Atlanta, I found Sydney folks barely global but mostly local. I thought that the sports announcers were in a league all by themselves, with the uncanny ability to make every sport seem fasciinating, even women's speedwalking. I found a lot of parallels between Aussies and Californians, a love for outdoors, sports and animals. I found the food here lousy and can't say I got one good meal for as much money as I paid. I was impressed by the weather and the openess of the people. It was very weird but delicious to have a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with beet, or as they call it here, beetroot.

The most profound things that happened when I was here were two. After the close of the games, we had a big party and some Maori (and all of us) got drunk and so they taught us their secret tribal dance. The dude from Hobart wanted no part of it. The second thing was that when the USA men's 4x100 relay won they got booed. That event was the springboard for the existence of this blog.

Somebody has been saying that nationalism isn't a great idea, or that maybe it once was but now is not. I'm influenced by that concept and I think, these days 14 years later, more at civilizations, languages and laws as organizing principles of people. I think diet and religion will become the biggest things if and when I get down to rethinking for the last part of my life - these are probably the most unchanging parts of a person's life. But as I'm down here in Sydney, I am thinking about the extent to which this place is a nation and is not. 

I am oblivious to Australian politics, and clearly most Aussies are oblivious to American politics. Smart people seem not to have any clue as to what our American sense of exceptionalism might be. Perhaps I'll get to that conversation, but it's not important that I do. For the moment I can take some notice of what seems to go on here without any such subtext. I am about to embark on the last part of Churchills review of English civilization and that is most appropriate so that I can swing back around in a few weeks and go back at it. I just finished the chapter in American Caesar in which our hero saves Australia by defeating the Japanese at Port Moresby.

Yesterday I went out on my walking tour of the city. I started here in Surry Hills and headed up toward the CBD up Elizabeth and then Wenworth St.  From what I can tell, Sydney gets vertical very quickly, which means their crappy buildings tend to be taller. There isn't a large area for lofts and warehouses on this side of town, so I was somewhat surprised to see such large run-down joints so close to Hyde Park. Celebrating my own Memorial Day here, I went to the Anzac Memorial and noticed how realtively empty it and the park were as compared to the new Westfield shopping mall under the big tower. 

Surry Hills itself is a gradually gentrifying neighborhood. I'm staying around the corner from the large government projects in a quiet secury post-Brutalist apartment building next to Reader's Digest, which is a very strange building indeed. Just up the road is a secure cube with a stainless steel door, but most of the neighborhood is that kind of unique row house design with the wrought iron fences and balconies. The nicest of them are over in the Armani District of 'Paddo', or Paddington. 

In a week, I've seen about 6 Africans. It's rather stunning. Also, if my eyeballs are right, there are that many Latins here as well. I question my eyeballs because there are a larger number of Indians here than I see in California and they tend not to be professionals - a broader cross-section. I only caught a few Americans over in the trendy section, and there are a lot fewer Nordics here as well. It's an interesting mix. Most of the people seem a little less athletic than in SoCal, which shouldn't be a surprise, but everyone seems to be a little shorter and homlier than I kind of expect.

Downtown in the splashy mall, the mildly upscales are a lot of Chinese. They're all on holiday I think - with their big watches and designer shopping bags. Mothers hold the hands of sons. Many prams but no so many kids. Even in Hyde Park, I saw maybe a half dozen 8 year olds. I managed to avoid the garishness of Kings Cross, because I was on my way to Paddington. I wish I knew about the hills, I would have gone straight out Oxford instead of the back way from Kings Cross, which looks like the old grungy part of Times Square 1983. 

Paddo turned out to be much like Manhattan Beach but with a bit more citification. I found a really cool Chap-style men's shop with $300 canes with silver caps. Top hats, dinner jackets and flash vests. Smashing. I then continued back downtown on Oxford Street and bumped into a Texan Coast Guard SAR who runs a bicycle shop there. We chatted for a bit, one of the longest conversations I had all weekend, then I continued back to where the Courthouse is. Lovely color stone. By this time I was quite hungry but found that at 3pm, nobody expects anybody to eat. I wound up back at the other Armani disctrict, the Westfield mall and had some overprice sushi from a girl who didn't understand the concept of 'lemonade', so I sucked down the Sprite instead. 

By the time I got to Circular Quay, I was exhausted, and having eaten a whole bag of chocolate macadamias, I was fairly stuffed too. Bad meal planning. I cabbed it back to the pad. My cabbie, an excitable old gent, did a John Wayne and a  Cagney impersonation for me. I answered back with a Jimmy Stewart. My Jimmy Stewart is pretty good...

To be continued..

Eighty Two

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.

Gaming is now a huge industry beyond the dreams of us older kids. I am amazed. EightyTwo. I'll be back.

How I'm Living - Part Two: Digital Media

Virginia Postrel asks:

Do you have, or have you had, a large book, record, or movie (DVD/VHS) collection? How has it changed as everything's gone digital? Advantages/disadvantages? 

Yes. It has changed quite a lot. Admittedly I'm on something of a cutting edge, being an IT professional, the advantage is that I've gone through several iterations of the business of what we in the business call 'lift and shift'. 

Music
I currently possess about 25 thousand songs on close to 4000 albums in digital format. Now this is actually small relative to many folks I've met in the recording industry.  It's relatively large for laypeople and only just now accomodatable for easy, secure digital use, by which I mean streaming my own music from the cloud.

I started collecting music as a DJ in 1979 and had about five milkcrates of vinyl, most of which were albums but about a crate and a half were 12 inch singles. I still have many of my old favorites like Reach For It by George Duke, and IQ6 Zang Tumb Tuum Sampler but I've replaced all of my actual favorite songs from those. I started buying CDs in the mid 80s when they first became available. I can still recall the days when you couldn't get reggae music on CD. I got up to about 800 or so and then stopped counting.

About 10 years ago I ripped all of my CDs to disk and then started selling them to Ameoba and gave several hundred to my sister. Right now I have about 500 in the house and about two milkcrates full in the garage. Now here's the odd thing. I've been buying external hard drives pretty much every year because they always fail. They were getting to fail on the regular so I had to come up with a strategy. The first strategy was to duplicate my music on multiple drives. Before cloud backup systems became widely available at reasonable prices (about 4 or 5 years ago), the safest thing to do was manual JBOD replication. I've spent $600 for a home RAID system and it blew up too. So I realized that I had to re-buy some more of my must have CDs when I couldn't recover from disk, just in case. 

Then that created a new problem. Now I have 6 versions of my favorite songs. Which one did I rip at a high bit rate? Which one did I get from a friend? What song is 'Track 01'? BTW Gracenote is one of the great innovations of America. Who says metadata isn't important?  So I had to invest in a deduplication software program, and once again when I switched over to Mac once and for all. 

When Steve Jobs finally announced iCloud and its replication service, that was the beginning of the end. I migrated all of my deduplicated music, finally onto a single massive disk drive and let Apple do the rest. But I'm constantly pruning and clipping and gardening my music metadata, because neither Shazam, iCloud, Soundhound, MusicBrainz nor Amazon can remember all the details perfectly. Not to mention how reissues make identification even more fuzzy. Chances are that if you didn't buy the original CD or vinyl you cannot know that the metadata are correct. Even so, iCloud was good enough.

However, I knew that Google and Amazon would be getting into the business shortly. In fact, I have always purchased MP3s from Amazon and played them in iTunes once all that DRM nonsense was worked out. But no longer. While I still have all of my 500+ CDs and 25,000 songs on hard drives, I only listen to streamed music from the Amazon Music Player. I can upload unlimited amounts of new music, which I almost never do because I buy it all from Amazon. I still have an (old) CD burner in my (old) MacBookPro for MP3 disks I burn for use in my truck, but everything else is streaming digits. 

I should say that music quality matters a great deal to me, but I cannot afford to be the kind of audiophile I'd like to be. So while I have a very nice set of powered studio monitors and subwoofer in my living room, my ears have dumbed down to the standard of digital fidelity. 

Movies
Unlike music, most movies I like are generally unrepeatable. Once you know Keyser Soze, it's over. Furthermore  I can multitask quite well with music, in fact some improves the quality of my work, but movies require focused attention. For me, movies are all about the visual experience, so I still go out to see first run special effects blockbusters. Some of them I don't mind seeing again once or twice, and of course there are a few delights from which I never tire. One of these happens to be The Fifth Element. Yeah. Action and spectacle. But I also like short films and I have collected almost all of the Pixar shorts. I miss the Spike & Mike film festivals and all of that in general and have lowered my expectations for film boosting that for literature and video games. 

I 'own' streamable copies of just a dozen or so films and I possess about 120 titles on DVD. I haven't bothered with BluRay at all. I own a subscription to Netflix and have had it and Tivo since the very beginning. I used to rip Netflix disks onto my hard drive but they were susceptible to the same hardware failures as my music. Plus, even as I traveled with a very small portable hard-drive on my laptop, it finally wasn't worth it to watch my own in-flight movies. Reading was just better. All of my VHS was Disney crap for the kidlings, but they've outgrown them and we garage-sold them all. I cannot imagine that I will purchase any more than a dozen hard copy movies for the rest of my life. If I'm not in (cheap or free) streaming range, I won't ask for video. 

I should make note of the point that I consume video vastly differently than I used to. That is to say I watch almost no 'primetime'. I will watch the extraordinary live sports event, Tour de France, Olympics, Super Bowl, World Cup, NCAA Title Game, but other than that, everything goes to the DVR. Even for massive hit series (of which there have only been about 7 or 8 worth my while since the debut of 24) I tend to wait for the critical success to happen and then watch a couple seasons's worth in retrospect. In fact, my taste in video tends towards that serial mode. I consumed all but the last season of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones that way. The only thing I watch daily are my YouTube subscriptions.

I've never been much of a TV person since I moved away from home. I bought my first black & white 12 incher after my 30th birthday and vowed never to have one in my living room - a vow I kept until.. oh wait, the kids. When I was single I only watched Seinfeld and David Letterman to understand what people were talking about at work. Other than that it was strictly News Hour and Charlie Rose. That would be from 1982 until 1997. So basically after the end of Hill Street Blues until the Teletubbies, I'm a blank.

Books
My father has one of the most impressive collections of black literature of the 60s that exists. I grew up building bookshelves. I still tend to be the kind of book snob who denigrates people who don't have big shelves in their living rooms, and I will check the titles I see and make character judgments. But I have definitely changed all that and only a fraction of my books are shelved in the house. I keep a small technical libary in my office about 50 books and a smattering of others. There are 100 in my big ornamental shelf downstairs and another 100 strewn throughout other nooks and crannies. There are probably another 200-300 in the garage.

I bought the Kindle within a few months of its entry into the market. According to Amazon, I have 401 books in that library. Additionally, as a subscriber to Audible, I have amassed about 120 volumes. I read about 2 or 3 books per month which is about a third of my reading. Mostly I'm online reading the hundred or so blogs and sources in my RSS. So a huge amount of my reading has shifted from books and notes taken at seminars, to online. 

About a fifth of the books that I get from Audible are reference books, history mostly. And for those I find most appealing, I will also purchase the Kindle version. I often want to cite something from those books I find compelling and I enjoy swapping back from reading to listening. That said, I get most of my listening done when I drive long distances or at night before bed. 

When I buy actual books, they are mostly technical texts and older rare books I remember from childhood. I just bought a farmer's encyclopedia published in 1892. Very cool. I wish there were more books in digital form. I actually don't like the prospect of inheriting that large physical library. Books are meant to be digested, not shown off, and it's always about what you're learning now isn't it? Attachment to the printed page is sentimental, a worthy sentiment to be sure, but they take up a lot of space. 

How I'm Living - Part One

I recently stumbled upon the website of the Catholic school I attended for the 7th and 8th grade. It looks very good. So I have considered going there to make a speech. And so I started making a speech, starting with combatting the presumptions I wish to avoid about being a 'black role model'. I'm fairly confident that I can do that, and several years ago I pretty much figured out what's important in my life such that I'd make a fairly similar speech no matter who was in the audience of kids, racially speaking. But that's kind of marginally interesting; what's more interesting is how I'm living now and if and why that matters.

So this.

I'm thinking it's particularly interesting to consider how I'm living principly because I'm a father of three who works at home doing cloud stuff. At first blush, that doesn't seem like saying much until you add all the pieces together. I do that periodically as an old habit; I play 'time travel' and introduce my younger self to my current self in the future. So some of this game about what you would tell young people is easy, what message would you want to hear about the future? Most of the time, it comes down to how living in the (present) future is similar and different from what you (and everybody) expected. It starts with history.

The fact that Barack Obama is the 43rd President is an easy thing to talk about, but what's surprising is that he was neither Ron Brown nor Colin Powell. Those were the leaders of the conventional wisdom from my POV. But even more surprising is the lack of enthusiasm, and even negative empathy among the mixed feelings I have for him. Which immediately brings up the fact that I am a Stoic aiming for my Martial Education and the implications of my prior Republicanisms, my organicisms and my dropping the privileges of the Talented Tenth into which I was born and raised. There's an interesting personal history of my own existential development the most notable I think is the extent to which I have a studied immunity to multicultural appeals and imperatives. That's interesting because it goes to the heart of why I don't want to be a black role model and the implications for who anyone should be at all. 

That I have attained the kind of life that reckons with such questions of humanity speaks to my intelligence which I have begun to recognize that I have somewhat underestimated. That sounds weird but let me put this another way. According to something I believe which I recently read, my IQ which has consistently tested between 130 and 136 puts me in the class of 'gifted'. I always wanted to be a 'genius' but that requires 150, I forget what they call the guys with 140. What I didn't know was that where I am puts me in the 98th percentile or as is popular to say 'the 2%'. I knew that my current income puts me in 'the 5%' for that demographic and I know that I live in a neighborhood that's about 1.3% African American. But in none of these ways do I feel so rare. I actually take it all kind of personally and reckon that I never knew how hard it would be to find friends just like me. Nevertheless, through all that, I feel that this sense of apartness has given me the distance and freedom to make sense of more than a few things, which I have done dutifully as a writer. I am a writer and I always have been. I write for machines and I write for people. I write through machines to people. And I have a resume which tells people that I can write for machines. 

This brings me to the central intellectual subject of my life, which concerns the way that people come to know what they know and how they make decisions based upon what they know. Moreover how people make decisions given incomplete information, which is everything computers now produce (through writers who write for machines and/or people). And it is this that brings me into touch with the subject of education and history and what people can be presumed to learn, know and practice. It's all very woolly, I suppose, but I am a member of that woolly class. I believe that the fate of such a woolly class is embedded with the fate of humans and having come from relatively humble origins to this statistically rare and advanced position in American society is something worth noting, at least by anyone who'd bother to have me speak. 

In my time traveling reveries I describe the wonders of the cutting edge of information technology, of my library and diet, of my travels and family, of my avocations and remaining hopes, of how I've dealt with the changes in society and the world. But that's very expansive and I don't want to write about all that here now. What I think fits is the particularly odd combination of things I do now as somebody who works at home in this overlap of relatively exclusive communities and what I think it means.

So that's next. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Black History Month 2014

I almost didn't notice that it's black history month this year, but I did notice that I've been hitting some racial topics over the past few weeks. Most of that I think had to do with my old angle on MLK subsequent to his birthday. I have long held that King mistook non-violence for a strategy when it really is a tactic. It certainly was the right tactic for the context of civil rights in America, but that was all about solving the Negro Problem, which was a smaller problem than the entire existentials of black identity in the world. It turned out, of course, that black identity in the world got only a marginally effective kick in the pants from the Pan-African idea, and Harriet Tubman was really more actively creating freedom than the Black Power dudes. But I digress..

I never did get the wording right in the context for putting King in the proper bucket. That essay stands unfinished. Since that time I've defaulted back to the rhetorical question of whether King would have been big enough on the world stage in the alternate universe of Nazis winning WW2. See how non-violent he would have been then. 

Pops is in the following video, and I think it's a good indication of perhaps where his grandchildren's generation puts all that context. All's well that ends well. They'll have other problems, and it's fairly certain that they do not feel the obligation of the race man, rather that there is some evidence of some multicultural accomodation in a country that can't get healthcare quite right but is trying...

I've only watched Pops and a few short seconds of the other interviewees, and I pass it on without comment on them. It's actually interesting that he mentions the white kids he grew up with in elementary school. He never actually talks about them, but has many fond memories of Hillhouse High School. The last time he went to a reunion, Ernest Borgnine was hanging out there, probably their most famous graduate. Funny how long ago and how different a time it was when somebody like Ernest Borgnine could be a star in America.

He did talk about the incident in Torrance at some length with the family, and I'm certainly in agreement with him on the conclusion. But in fact *we* were not intent on moving to Torrance, were we? I'll have to look that one up. As for the Obama celebration, I think this little vignette really exposes where he lives: in matters of the spirit. He definitely was inspired by the entire affair, although I cannot recall how much he got involved the second time around. His idea about the 'real' LA harkens back to the days when the Watts Summer Festival truly meant something special out here. There's that romantic black cultural nationalist in living color. You can catch him whenever the Watts Towers puts on a show.  

I'm likely a bad interview of Pops, but it's nice to get him on record. I'll work on it.

Too Quiet

I occurs to me, as I listen to my son prepare himself a 2000 calorie dinner, that the idle mind is a playground for the Devil. And so my wife still loves psycho-sexual dramas, bless her heart. She introduced me to 'The Following' and I have watched seven episodes this past week. It's unbelievable but entertaining. 

I've noticed that the plot started thickening and moving too slowly as they decided to, watch yourself I'm about to spoil you, focus in on the dynamics of the three-way killers who are holding the child of their cult leader's ex-wife. I mean three way as in boy + boy + girl two of whom are in love with the same boy.

Is there anything we won't swallow?

Perhaps not. Perhaps in our evolutionary state, outstripped by the comfort of la vida loca here in Upper Middle Classville, maybe we are so short of actual dangerous stimulation that we need to focus on something ugly and terrible just so we don't get bored out of our gourds. 

But there's another way we deal with ennuis. We get obsessively petty. For example, somehow I managed to spend 175 bucks on Valentines dinner for two at the local upscale hotel. My wife and I do not watch our figures or the calorie counts much. So believe me when I tell you that short rib was short and we had to get our Jack In The Box on, on the way home. When the surf part of Surf & Turf is two shrimp, something's wrong. Aside from it being Valentine's Day with my wife, I was bored to shit, but a bit peeved that I didn't have my good knife with me. I watched the fluffy people watch the ice dancing in Sochi on the big screen, and even though the Asian kid in the white blouse fell down, there wasn't much action to be had. And so I was again double dipped in boredom, but I also envied the man sitting next to me his seersucker jacket and red Gucci shoes.

I searched my mind for another activity. I'm 52, I like drinking new kinds of bourbon and scotch. That's what I know. I didn't even think for a moment about joking about taking her to the shooting range, but my head was completely empty. I have everything I need at my two story, four bedroom, two bathroom home. I don't need to be out and about, and when I am, I'm sheepdoggish, looking for some shit to go down. It never does. We've had 2 murders in 17 years over in this town. Nothing's dangerous but the drunk drivers and the scatterbrain motorcyclists. I just wanted to go home and play Battlefield 4, where I must think quickly move around the video game level and kill or be killed. We went to the local poolhall instead. It was tacky, but still nothing intimidating.

I am not compelled, and that is my luxury. I have everything I need for everyday, so I have begun to prepare for the extraordinary. People about me say some kind of apocalypse is on the horizon but I don't actually believe it. I want to exercise my Second Amendment rights, and yes sometimes I go into dangerous neighborhoods at night, but I don't think the zombies are coming. In fact, I rather like the whole zombie angle of shooting. That's me, the zombie hunter, because only fantasy is noisier than the quiet we have around here.

The Spousal Unit jumps on my case because we have gone three or four months without healthcare. It's all getting sorted out, because we always sort things out. She handed me an envelope with disdain today. I was wearing my contacts and could not immediately tell that it wasn't something from the IRS. But it was a $38 parking ticket. Horrors. 

I'm not giving up my stoic demeanor. I remain prepared for the catastrophic failures, like Fernandez wrote about Venezuela and the Economist is writing about Argentina. But the catastrophes, like snow in Atlanta, seem a long ways off. So I fill my mind with dangerous fictions, and so do you.

My Twenties

I scanned my diary. Both literally and figuratively, I took about 12 binders of handwritten notes on canary quadrille and eyeballed passages and pushed them though my automatic document feeder at 600 DPI. I then sent them up to the Evernote Cloud where they will persist in PDF format forever, or perhaps as long as the electricity flows and people care and I pay my bill. I kept the originals, and they will go somewhere cool and dry for my grandchildren to stumble through a generation hence.

I was crazy.

I didn't know how to live, but I knew how to think my way through life. The amount of thinking I did on matters most people seem to improvise their way through is staggering. I hated the very idea of "bumbling my way through, somehow". For me, everything had to have a plan, a reason. I was here to make a difference, not to make friends. I was here to make an impact, not to merely survive. I remember telling my roomate, Spy, "I don't live to eat, I eat to live." That's why anything from the microwave that would settle my stomach's grumbling was fine. That's why I believed a pair cha shu bao for lunch three days in a row was fine, except for the fact that I was still a bit hungry. Learn to cook? Why?

I imagined myself dead and wrote the letter I wanted to be read at my funeral. Reading it today I see echoes of confusion and madness, and something of a total inability to see what I meant to other people and what they meant to me. I was probably the most aggravating person in the world, walking through it without an evolved sense of decorum and yet desperately searching for that very thing. I was full of annoying, piercing rude questions, swinging like Tarzan from clifftop to clifftop on the thinnest of conjectures, defying common sense at every turn. 

I read and I listened as if each indulgence from Coletrane to Coleridge would yeild up one more bite of civilization. Yet each shrunk me like Alice deeper into isolation in the rabbit hole that was my world. Literature became an elaborate tangle of bridges to nowhere. And I never found my contingent, except in contingent parts of people all around me. 

There was one person I got right. Well, there were two. There was myself and there was Cynthia. Everything I wrote about her was right on target. Everything she made me know then, I still know today. She is the only woman I ever wanted to live with, and she is the only woman I have. Tomorrow I'm taking her out to Donald Trump's country club for a romantic brunch. She reminded me of the date. I hadn't throught much about it last night as I was going through stuff. My standard valentine, by the way, was the 10 pound, $50, 2 foot wide heart shaped box of chocolates. Sorry, as fertile as my imagination was, I'd be three tangents from reality if I didn't do something typical to the extreme. 

My mother always told me that I go from one extreme to the other. It is my way of accomodating things that make no sense outside of my universe. What do you want from me!? OK here!. Plop. Subtlety is for the undecided. This should make you happy. It doesn't. But they acknowledge the thought that counts, only after the extreme act. 

At some point in my twenties I decided that I didn't want to be a Buppie. I wanted more than just a condo in a nice neighborhood and a job and invitations to beach parties. I wanted to explore culture and understand it all. The mere money and a good life of accumulation wasn't good enough. So I took off four years and moderated my technical cares for the possibilities of cultural production. I was a writer, after all. I had a lot to say. I had a world to make sense of. Ultimately I cannot say that it was a waste of time. I may be fatiqued by it all now in retrospect, which is why I know my crazy was satiated, but it needn't have been that way. If I cared more for my career, or more for domestic bliss, I could have taken all those distratctions more seriously. I would have demanded more from them. I probably wouldn't be writing so much now, rather in force of personality I would live more in the world outside of my head. But I like the world inside of my head and I am tremendously benefitted by the discipline I have mustered to handle the wisdom I now possess. But it did make me crazy.

I wrote to Swerdloff that I was a very very uptight young man, possessed by a set of ideas without which life appeared random and pointless. So I was guided by the implications of those ideas despite it all, it being the reality of the world I now inhabit. It was a safe place to keep my self, but it made the ordinary social intercourse quite difficult. I processed way too many symbols in my 20s and early 30s. I am time travelled to fractions of my past and I recognize myself, before the liberations of my children's smiles and my wife's cooking. I stand now, rescued and with simple purpose. Life is great.

My Guardian Angels

A woman whose name I cannot remember told me something I'll never forget. She said, that you can never tell how something you write will affect someone else. She meant it in the most positive way, saying I had written something that inspired her. And since that day some 15 years ago at a meetup in the SF Bay area under the rubric of Howard Rheingold's Brainstormers, I have remembered to keep a high, healthy respect for all of my readers. Another thing I remember is to never underestimate the power of chance. 

This evening, I am compelled to recognize one person in particular and several others. As is my convention, I protect their identities - which means I'm going to have to give them pseudonyms. As I think of it, I can only think of one name for my primary guardian angel and that would have to be Xavier. 

I met Xavier about 4 years ago in a creole restaurant in an upscale black neighborhood in Washington DC. He had been a longtime reader of Cobb, my blog, and had contributed a fair bit. He was ex-military and was having some health problems of his own. That was clear when I saw him, and I say it as if it were obvious, but I had never in all the years head him complain about it something that obviously slowed him down. There was nothing about our online experience that gave me to expect that he might roll up in a wheelchair, and as I try to reconstruct the memory - there is nothing to reinforce its presence or suggest it in his personality. There was just the surprise of it. If it was actually there. 

These days Xavier watches over me on Facebook. I don't know it; I couldn't guarantee it, but I sense it. If I were to disappear, he would notice. If someone were to challenge me in court, he would be my character witness. I'm not certain of it, but I feel that it is true; Xavier watches out for me.

I don't know why. We are perhaps kindred spirits. Perhaps we take joy in similar things. I've never bothered to really ask, but I don't want to. I don't have to. Even if I'm making this whole thing up in my imagination, it remains something I expect to be true. I try to do right by people and those who understand that principle will reciprocate, not necessarily out of any high falutin' duty. They just do. That's how I feel about this certainty that Xavier cares. He just does.

When I was a kid, the oldest of five and nearsighted and fast and skinny and bold for my age, I wanted an older brother. Somebody to tell me the shortcuts. My father was something of a New England fish out of water in California, but he never broke ranks with the old school. I lived among rougue fatherless roughnecks. My father wore horn rim glasses and never cursed. He never lifted weights. He never cheered for the Dallas Cowboys. He never pined for a V8 Mustang. He was as blisteringly severe as Professor Snape, but unlike Snape, he never lost his composure. He was not the kind of man to ask embarrassingly stupid questions, even when he was in a mood, as he often was, to be perversely goofy. I could have used a big brother, instead I just got over it and tried to be one. I protected myself. 

And now, 40 years later, by chance I have a big brother, of whom I ask for nothing. I have become accustomed to asking for nothing. I wonder if I have passed that trait onto my children. My son makes enormously boneheaded mistakes, and he doubles down before he knocks on my closed office door. I am writing like the patriarch Lannister, minding greater affairs, and reply in monotones. I get him to fix things, but I would fix them. I fixed my own mistakes. I own myself too much perhaps. It took me a while to care about what people misinterpret about me. I was 35 before I managed to grow a human interface complete with smiles, genuine warmth and a lack of condescending judgment. Finally in 2003, I decided to write with some personal purpose and Cobb was born. I think it grew me some big brothers.

I thought I was complete but still missing a few pieces that didn't much matter. There was something martial in me I never fully realized. I took more pride in my father's military service than he did. But now I know another reason why. He tried some military discipline in me in an incident he describes but I could not remember. It reduced me to a snivelling diaper, and so he swore off it. Yet I felt only the backbone of it in my upbringing and the pride of seeing his panoramic wedding photo in full dress uniform. I remember him telling me the struggle he had as a black man in the USMC of taking his ceremonial sword off base. Having to petition my CO would have made me bitter. My father conformed into another shape and reserved his harshest criticisms of me whenever I drifted near the idea of service. He was in that way the ex-Marine that Marines often brag they never become. Where there was no pride for him there remained discipline and principle, and I grew up on those disciplines and principles which inevitably lead me to where I am. 

You see he couldn't resist introducing me to Robert Ludlum. And say what you like about its literary quality or formula, at the age of 19 I dove right in and that world completely replaced Robert Heinlein. In this way, having grown up the oldest son of a reluctant marine, I identified completely with Jason Bourne. The analogy extends as well to my Black Nationalist upbringing as well. I was forged in a forcefully forgotten world. 

And so my big brothers, my blog readers, my Facebook friends are military men. I have connected in principle to a shooter in Utah, an active duty father in Colorado, several disciplined martial artists, a CIA operative, a couple submariners, a big old bear from Texas, and a man who has named himself after a secret weapon. They have reminded me, without coaxing, of something that I deeply am yet remain uncertain what to make of it. Still, I may be the recorder of our times, and do them some service as well. To the extent I am a writer and my words reflect what we all see similarly, I will continue my part. 

You know who you are. Thank you. 

The Dying Truth, Lone Survivor and the Sophomore Dog

2014 is my sophomore dog year. Sheepdog that is. I took all the survey courses last year and got my puppy feet wet. I'm never going to be anything more than I was when I was a kid, which is a big brother among the three big brothers in the neighborhood that kept us gang free. Codename Kool Moe Dee: Wild Wild West. I'm not ever going to pretend that I'm a warfighter or that I actually have some kind of metaphorical war to fight. But I do have the mentality and last year I connected some intelligence with my guts and made sense of all the fighting I've done in my life. I know with clarity that am a sheepdog in my bones. Can't help it. Just going to try and be smart about it.

I knew I wanted to see Lone Survivor. I didn't read the book, but I've known about Luttrell for a while. I'm sure I've heard him on one or two SOFREP podcasts. I think last year was when I read two or three of the sniper biographies that pulled me into that particular orbit. I didn't realize it was his story in particular but I knew it would be interesting to me in the same way some people are drawn to the story about the dude who cut off his arm to go rock climbing, or put on 50 pounds to prove something about McDonalds. It would be a kind of standout story that crosses over into the public consciousness. Except I know something about people who do for real. At the end of the day, they tell the dying truth.

Indulge me for a moment's consideration of the concept. We have a bit of society that is entirely skeptical of the dying truth. The dying truth is what you tell when you are absolutely convinced that what you know is real, right and that you cannot see it any other way. The dying truth is what you'll tell until your dying day, but most of the time it doesn't get told at all because you really don't care if people know, or believe you or not. You just know what you know. When I first became a writer, I always thought about this kind of knowledge - the sort you imagine a war correspondant tells in the salon of society matrons, or the adventurer tells in the offices of the philosophical society. It is that thing that defies the conventional wisdom because you cannot follow convention to find out such knowledge. It perplexes because it must be experienced. So you have to wonder how much of the dying truth anyone in society actually gets. When Merriwether Lewis returned to become the toast of Saint Louis, half of his diaries were lost. He didn't show the scar where he got shot in the ass by one of his own men. Some audiences demand only glorious narrative. Some storytellers indulge them. There will be a thousand reviews of this movie and how many of those will be written by people for whom the spirit connects beyond the infotainment factor? Such connections don't always matter, but in stories about life and death, in tales about the truth you will tell until the day you die, it does. 

We are fortunate to live in a nation of millions, and with a million millionaires there are often enough parlors that are built on dying truths themselves. I know Wahlberg was a good choice to wear the bloody makeup and navigate a good fraction of that truth through the corridors of Hollywood power. Yeah the movie was still a movie, but it connected with the fighter in me. And it reminded me of the term, a term we probably don't use enough in this nation of millions: warfighter. I just so happened to watch a National Geographic special about the C-5M Super Galaxy airlifter. The colonel in charge knows it to be a weapon that serves the warfighter. Every time I hear the term, I identify with fighting spirit and the will to win. But I'm not going to get fluffy with my vocab to illustrate the feeling, rather I will just call it ineffable. When you know it, you know it. If you had to grow up streetsmart as I did, you know it deeply.

So at this point in my life, when I am beginning to peak out as 'Daddy' and focus again on my own growth and what I know to be true, I am coming to reconcile my fights and my will to fight, and my capacity to fight. It goes without saying that my reasons must be proper. What resonates from the film is all over the place, but I will talk about the bullet to Axe's head. It made me mad. It made me madder than I can ever remember any scene in any movie made me mad. I thought about it with Maestro yesterday - those movies when people walk out silently, overcome with emotion. Glory. Apocalypse Now. Schindler's List. Blackhawk Down. Saving Private Ryan. It belongs in that group of films, but unlike those, this movie isn't a big arc war film. It doesn't give you a whole lot of dramatic introduction. It gives you a close-up of a platoon of warfighters. Trained to be deadly. Trained to think on their feet. Trained to survive. Trained to win. It's the kind of head that it's difficult to crawl into, especially for a generation raised on the narrative of meaninglessness, romance and deceptions of All's Quiet on the Western Front.

I have begun to learn something I will never learn fully. That is how to fight with firearms. In doing so, I have to reject a lifetime of dramatic representations that make no logical or ballistic sense. I learned something about first aid last year. It was so simple, but it took 40 hours of experience competing with a lifetime of television fakery. Everyone of us who lives in the Idiot Proof City must at some point recognize how closely we are held hostage by the ignorance of interdependence. Some of us see it as we take control of our diets and realize the ultimate liberation of growing our own food, some of us see it as we exercise rigorously for the first time and realize how far we can run. Good literature can shake us up and make us realize we have been accepting conventional wisdom instead of dying truth. I have been consuming this kind of good literature for about six years now, starting with Churchill's account of WW2, and moving on to understanding the Eastern Front, and then back through time to Rome's Punic Wars and all sorts of history since then. But only recently have I begun to see how it applies to me personally, transforming from mere understanding to training and responsibility. 

What that means is, for better or worse, at that moment in the film, I felt that I needed to be a part of the solution. I recognized in myself the determination to be a force to be reckoned with as trite as that may sound. They say of the responsible man that he wishes he could have been at the moment of truth to make the difference because of what he knows he could have done. Yes, I'm a yapping little puppy, but I'm growing up. I understand the fight in the dog. That's what that movie was about and it most connected with me in that simple moment of dying truth. 

My First Grandmother

I have three distinct memories of my father's mother. And it's rather odd at this moment to consider them in the absence of a great deal of other stories about her. Sometimes it's as if she never lived, or as if she were an unfathomable legend part human part myth. Someone asked the question, 'What was the best advice your grandmother ever gave?'. I didn't know her well enough to parse any, but I have these memories.

The first thing you have to know about Lucille was that her nickname was 'Miss Madam'. She was exactingly proper. She survived polio. 

Memory One.
I am about four or five years old. That would make it 1965 or 66. I am to go downtown New Haven with my grandmother to the fancy department store. This, in a time when such things were not done by Negroes. I am dressed up in my light blue double breasted jacket with navy shorts. I am casually, but notably on my best behavior. Eyebrows are raised and I am reminded in no uncertain terms to be good. We go. I am good. We stay quite some time. We return. Miss Madam reports that I was a perfect gentleman. Eyebrows are raised again. 

Memory Two.
I am ten years old. I am spending the summer with my uncle in Cleveland Heights. Miss Madam will be there for a few weeks. All of my cousins are dreading the prospect. They call her 'Mee Ma' and says she is as mean as a witch. I have no such memories or experience. This will be my second time seeing her. She is as frightening as they say. She bosses everyone around. It's fascinating to see how she bosses my uncle around. I don't understand her. She seems relentless, but I have no idea of the reason. She sits on the back screen porch and smokes. My uncle told me the story of the Tell Tale Heart. I knew that it was Poe, but I hear it every night when I go to sleep in the attic. My grandmother tells my uncle to leave the poor boy alone. Aha. He was knocking on the wall.

Memory Three.
I am 12. I visit West Haven's icy winter. My grandparents live on Captain Thomas Boulevard in a new condo. Down on the beach there are horsehoe crabs. My grandfather now shows the effect of years living with Miss Madam. He waits for his time to be free, and then indulges himself. I see that he has made several ships in bottles. My, what a patient, perfectionist man. One evening we have spaghetti for dinner. I use a knife and fork and cut the spaghetti. My grandmother explodes. She knew my father married a woman with no sense whatsoever. I am taught to use a knife and spoon, swirling the spaghetti around. I never had seen such a thing in my life. 

That's it. Other than her raspy voice, her crisp diction and her stringent discipline, I have few other memories of my grandmother, and almost nobody tells us any funny stories about her. She died of emphysema around the age of 65. She smoked three packs a day. She was admired; she was respected. She was feared. She gave no easy compliments, but she was fiercely proud of all of us. She made us make her proud. The story I hear most often about her comes from my uncle.  Somewhere around the time I was born, he received his PhD in microbiology. The local newspaper came to interview the family and asked her what she thought of this achievement. "It's what I expected. He's my son."

It's odd that she stands as she does in such shadows of memory, but I do remember other things. She introduced me to fruitcake, which I do indeed like, and sherbet. But I do not remember anything resembling advice coming from my grandmother. No. She gave orders. 

Best Meals Ever

For a couple years I was an elite reviewer on Yelp. I would give a restaurant five stars only if the meal showed me something I'd never seen before and it was really that good. What I'm going to do now is try to come up with a top x from memory - that is to say without going back to Yelp and seeing what I wrote. So these will be in no reviewed order.

Whist: Santa Monica
Whist was a special meal for my anniversary when the Spousal Unit worked as a restaurant recruiter. So imagine you're a headhunter for chefs in Los Angeles. So we definitely had the hookup and had the chefs come out to meet us. Fabulous, daring meal. 

?: New Orleans
There was this little restaurant in New Orleans next to the Marriott a couple blocks from the convention center. It was on the corner. I had the most awesome shrimp dish ever. It was as if the chef knew how to capture the ocean breeze and put it into a broth. It made me feel like I was Aquaman and could breathe salt water, and this was what a fresh warm current tasted like. 

Musha: Torrance
Musha as anyone will tell you, is the most wholly original Japanese restaurant you are likely to find anywhere outside of the coolest neighborhood in Tokyo. You will eat things there you never imagined Japanese people ate. 

?: NYC
I really ought to remember the name of this joint. It was my first closing party. We got the upstairs room in a classic Italian joint over near the Citibank Tower on Lexington. There were about a dozen of us and it seemed as if we each had our own personal waiter. I'm sure that it went something like $200 per plate. I don't remember the main courses, but I do remember that we had 1977 Port and chocolates for dessert. Best service ever.

Del Frisco's Double Eagle: Ft. Worth
Basically changed my steak from NY Strip to Ribeye. It was as if I had never tasted beef before, it was simply that flavorful. Astoundingly perfect steak. Still hasn't been approached. 

 

Two Turntables & No Microphone

Once upon a time I was a DJ. I was a different kind of DJ, hooked into an interesting clique in black LA. I was Mellow Mike but most of the time I just used my regular name because there often wasn't a whole lot of dancing going on. I was the guy who did Quiet Storm receptions. My two most significant gigs were the one for the Brotherhood Crusade back in 1980 when the Nickerson Trio performed. They were a dancing, singing trio - basically En Vogue 10 years before En Vogue. Then when Maxine Waters was first elected to Congress, I DJ'ed her reception. I was the regular DJ for all of the dances at my church and of course all my neighborhood got to hear my mixes. 

I had a goregeous Setton integrated amp that blew 60 watts per channel and stacked Advents. I used Dual turntables with ADC cartridges. To top it off, I had Sony's first solenoid cassette deck, the TC-K6. Anybody who was an amateur audiophile could tell you that was a sweet little setup. So yeah I know the contradiction, an audiophile DJ , but as I said, I did Quiet Storm receptions, and you just don't compromise when it comes to sound quality if you're playing Mr. Magic. 

It would be a year after I sold my gear when Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel blew my mind and started scratching.  I did know there were some DJs doing extended breaks on the best beats available. They had the Numark mixers, but although I wanted the skill, my clientele was into that funky smooth jazz and songs they could cha-cha and slow dance to. Yeah we every once in a while dipped into Rick James punk funk stuff, but that was for high school kids. We were more sophisticated. The Invisible Man's Band and Herbie Hancock's Feets was more our style. Not to mention Ray Parker's  jams For Those Who Like to Groove. I could go on about Jamaica Funk, but the point was you didn't scratch and mix those songs. They had their own perfection, and no matter how much people wanted to dig into the urge to keep remixing the break for Lenny White's Peanut Butter, that was done with *tape* not with turntables live at a sophisticated party.

Nevertheless over time, I realized that things were changing and having two turntables and a microphone mixer that you only used like Levi Booker was going to be a trend with fewer fans as time went by. The kids wanted rap and scratch. I actually wanted New Wave, Ska and TwoTone. By the time Fishbone was on the LA scene, there was nothing interesting on the wheels of steel that Art of Noise wasn't doing best. 

Still I remember the days when I was putting my system together. There would always be something breaking down. One of the belts on my turntable would break and it takes a week to get a replacement. The special battery in the microphone died and I couldn't find another. I have run out of TDK SA 60 cassettes and have to use TDK D 120s. Three steps forward and two steps back, the volatility of chasing perfection left me oftimes with the almost perfect junior audiophile setup. Ever since then, I've called that condition 'two turntables and no microphone' or sometime 'one turntable and a microphone'.

I think I deal with the condition well. When I last spoke to my witch doctor, he told me not to worry so much. I told him that I was chasing small perfections; he said nothing is perfect, and I chose not to correct him. The other day I saw a quote about demanding perfection and settling for excellence. That's about my mania, but it always leaves me short a component. I have an incomplete collection of excellent bits and pieces, in myself, in my life. 

--

This Christmas, I earned so it seems, the biggest bonus I can ever remember getting all at once that wasn't a payroll error. And while I am scared to death to spend it because I'm sure it puts me in a different tax bracket, I have done quite a bit of shopping. I'm sitting on the cash until I can get my accountant to figure out what I ought to do, but maxing out a credit card or two in anticipation that I can blow at least a quarter of it. 

I'm happy to report that I no longer have any desire to own a Breitling watch. I don't want a Rolex either. I checked out an IWC. Nope. Don't want it. I have no need for a Hollywood Suit. I don't want a BMW. I thought about a paddle board and a scuba suit. Nope. I thought about some new studio monitors for my desk. I don't want them either. I restrung the acoustic guitar this summer and I've already decided to file for non-operation of the motorcycle. I do have to buy a rain cover though. 

All I want is a pistol and a camera. And a water hookup for my icemaker, and a new corner group. Throw in a rug and a new coffee table and I'm pretty much done. 

--

If you know anything about my wife, then you know that she has put up with my minimalism for a very long time. We had been married eight years before we finally got rid of the futon. I have slept on the same queen mattress on the floor with no frame and the same comforter since 1988. OK 1984. But the comforter is from 88. So ever since we moved to Redondo in 02, she has been the master of the found couch. We've had about 5 or 6, and I only remember the red leather one and the current corner group, which has been destroying my back when it's not poking my butt with that loose spring. So we're finally getting the big leather sofa and loveseat. No easy chair and ottoman, but I don't want them. 

I was originally going to get the Olympus PEN E-5. I fell in love with this camera when it first came out. I liked the idea and I have been surfing Amazon every Christmas since its debut. The other day, I finally went to Samy's Camera in Culver City with Pops. The Olympus was puny. I got a used Nikon D90 instead. On the spot, and a nice 40mm lens on the guy's recommendation. I saved 600 bucks. 

I was originally going to get an H&K USP 45. I really loved this pistol when I put my mitts on it. Last year I was sure that I was going to get a rifle, but it swung around on the Maestro's recommendation to pistols. You have to have your pistol skills the same way you have to learn to drive a stick. Once again, I took the recommendation of a pro and picked out a Sig Pro instead. Saved 600 bucks again. 

OK so now it's all going into the corner group. But I'm happy about that. That's for the family. And quite frankly I'm shooting frames to be with my dad and shooting bullets to be with sheepdogs. Pops and I are going to spend a lot of time together on photo shoots starting tomorrow. I'll finally, after all these years, have a fast digital camera, and I've been wanting one since back in the days when there was a company called Cingular, like 02. 

--

I have something that I call The American Price. It's the premium we pay for having exactly what we want, which goes far beyond what we need. What we want is mediated by our class desires and the amount of self-confidence we have that we can flaunt or ignore them. I'm very much aware of the American price when I go into a store and talk to a pro, because they are competing with online markets, fashion commercials and friends' advice. It doesn't often work in their favor unless they work in the Apple Store. Speaking of which, the last time I went into an Apple Store, there were at least 50 employees in red shirts. They can't all be full timers can they?

The American Price for a shirt includes the overhead of advertising it on television, the cost of logistics to get it from China to the US, plus the additional cost of getting it from the central warehouse to the expensively designed high rent mall store. Plus you pay for the pro who, if he actually knows his business, will be fighting against all of your expensive prejudices and desires with real world knowledge and experience. If he's honest, and most pros are. 

We finally pay the American Price and not only do we have an article of merchandise, we have a story of anticipation and desire, a human drama of saving, scrimping, thinking, choosing, acquiring, using and critiqueing. Our anecdote becomes fodder for the next pro to wrangle with. But even in all of that meta shopping, we increase the value of the product in this virtuous inflationary cycle.

--

I was telling Pops something about the Idiot Proof City and our expectations of meritocracy. The way I see it, most of us are rather shameless when it comes to exploiting our knowledge. That's what the Idiot Proof City encourages us to do, to prove we can master the city with style. It's not enough to have a beater that gets us from A to B. If we're smart, we get a better job with a better company so we can afford a better car that gets us to A to B about the same time in traffic, except when we honk our BMW horns, we make people both envious and angry. It's still a better car, with better looking people in the cooler looking commercials, wearing nicer shirts. BMWs and Lexus autos have audiophile systems built in, although now nobody uses cassette tapes.

Priests and spies have valuable information as well, but they are trusted to discretion. The rest of us get knowledge as cheaply and quickly as we possibly can and shoot off our mouths and resumes as loudly as possible. Then we can get the interview and name our own American Price for our labor, if we're good enough. Our hiring managers then begin their own  human drama of  thinking, choosing, acquiring, using and critiqueing. 

--

I want a pistol because I'm trying to escape the Idiot Proof City. I don't want to go as far away as the Meat Eater on the Outdoor Channel. He's way down in New Zealand hunting chamois and Canada geese, fording rivers with ice-floes. I don't hate the idiots that much, nor do I love self-sufficiency to that professional survival level. But I do want to be a free man and add as many skills as I can so that I can buy something used and broken, be my own pro and put it back into working order. I don't want to depend on the whole inflationary system of commodity delivery. I don't think the whole thing is going to crash, it's just going to degrade the quality of items it delivers to mass markets. 

You can't get audiophile integrated amps like you used to. The whole audio industry has been dumbed down. You can't get quality chrome cassette tapes any longer. Reel to reel? Not at the mall. See in order to get excellence, you have to understand perfection. You actually have some resistance to overcome to realize that perfection even exists. Then you have to separate function from fashion. That's harder to do. You'll have to rely on a pro, or become one yourself. 

The road to becoming a pro has no exit strategy. You can't just swallow the knowledge whole and barf back quality labor. Even if you put quality in, you can't regurgitate quality lickety split. You can expect the American Price immediately because the organic pros, well they don't necessarily want to be in the Idiot Proof City. The City has room for inflated commodities, but no mass markets for those who understand perfection and demand excellence.

--

What if there is no meritocracy? What would we do in America? Could we be unpopular DJs for the sake of sophistication? What if you couldn't describe your skills in a quick paragraph, and no household name celebrity would get on television and give an audience of 10 million the number give your labor a text thumbs up?  What if you had to just relay the acknowledged purity of Grover Washington Jr,  without shooting your mouth off, just providing the music? 

Sometimes the best way to 'add value' is to shut up and provide, and not to inflate. I can't expect everyone to be a pro or even want to be a pro. But there's something about quality for the sake of competence that gets buried. There's something wrong with driving a car whose features you can list in braggadocio but whose component perfection you cannot understand.

I don't know how to end this essay. There's probably a way to wrap it up concisely and cleverly, but I only want to tell the stories, not be so clever. I hope you find something useful in there.

2013: A Year In Review

My brother asked me and my answer was that I don't think I know who I am writing for any longer. I mean it is satisfying that I get my 200 hits a day at Cobb, down from 600 a couple years ago down from 1200 a few years prior. If I suddenly got 2000 hits a day, maybe somebody in the comments would let me know something I don't. But I should be satisfied, and now I remember that I am, just writing the stuff that doesn't get written elsewhere - the stuff I wished someone would write for me. I'm doing what I think is proper writing and perhaps there are others out there like me.

But last night I got a bit of an itch. More on that later. For now, I'm writing about the year of a man. Me.

This is the year that I finally figured out what to do in my post-political world. The best revenge is living well, but ever since I got sick and tired of political debate I hadn't really found something more compelling. But I fell into the right groove this year with my martial education, which may come at the death of my writing career for the next decade. 

I have become a junior sheepdog and a Stoic. I no longer engage in much wishful thinking at all. I survive and let the upside take care of itself. And in that regard I am reinforcing what I know has been true about my rise to success which is that I have merely avoided as much foolishness as possible. I am not brilliant, but I do have a good memory and I always believe there is a better way. I live as much as possible with no regrets and make as few missteps in the maze as I can recall, recalling that I have a rather good recall. And when I cannot, at least I can read my own writing and blogging and most of my notes which report facts as well as I can parse them. My writing and reading have formed a cycle of virtue and decreased my appetite for reading a blatherous universe of things I've said better and with more detail than what I presume the average peasant consumes. Yet there is a bit of satisfaction I don't have given the enormous volume of bodewash presented to the credulous and superstitious minds of the millions. But there are still libraries and universities and university libraries. 

I'm folding my Men's Group. I like everyone I met, but I fear that I am just too odd for the lot. I don't understand why and am not really interested in determining why. It is part and parcel of my desire to be Stoic. How shall I put it? I am of no mind whatsoever to create an emergent need for myself, but I surely aim to be prepared for any emergency. And thus my value in society will be that whose company probably will not be sought outside of desparation, which while not delightful, is comforting. I don't know whose company I should seek, but I tried. Weird. I never quite know what to think about the fact that there is no Barney to my Fred and no Moose Lodge in sight. It's just a very strange predicament. Strange indeed. So. No more Men's Group. 

I did find a bar. I've been there about once a month. It was OK. It's still OK. I will return.

• New refrigerator
• New Couch
• New XBox
• Calesthenics - 1 each per day to 100 each situps, pushups, 4 count jumping jacks
• Tai Chi
• New Bike
• Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb
• Move static websites to Amazon
• Move Limbo to Evernote
• Mac Mini
• Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay
• Find a Bar
• 35 Year Reunion
• Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach
• Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake}

 

I got the refrigerator, and a motorcycle, and I did no calesthenics. I did a little Tai Chi and I will do some more. I don't care about digital integration so much no more. I got the Mac Mini and it was worth it. I bought a half dozen knives and my two favorites are missing. I spent a lot of time with people I used to know and I'm still very different. I never finished the first draft of Borky's Beach. Maybe I'll do some more writing this week while I'm still on vacation. Meh. No bike. That was more social. I'll do the solo gym.

Fatherhood has been a challenge this year. I'm in transition from Dad to Bank of Dad and also Dad & Dad Consulting LLP. I have had to break out the ledgers to keep track of what I'm spending on the fledglings who are growing up straight, but slo - o-o-w ly. I'm going to have to keep the castle a bit longer. Sheesh. I realize that if I had more money I would have spoiled them. Now I'm going to have to homeschool them - it's my own Finishing School, I guess. Because the world of young American adults is so chock full of insipid foolishness.. argh. Don't let me get started.

This has also been a good year financially.  My FICO is the best it has been in .. well since they invented FICO, and that's nice. I'm going to manage that even better next year. It gets easier. I did well in the market - my only regret is that I didn't buy four times as much Amazon as I did when I could have. 

I took care of my health, mostly. I'm better now than I was a year ago, not by a whole lot but, I feel good. 

What did I do in 2013 that was really different? I seriously thought about getting into motorcycling again. I read a lot of first person fiction. I finally got Cthulhu. I decided never again to buy cheap shoes. I got more belts because I lost an inch on my waist. I perfected my office. I read a lot more history. 

My coding is way better than a year ago. I have completely given up on Essbase and the Oracle stuff. I found the best text editor yet (Sublime Text). I overdosed on Amazon. I actually overdosed my brain and got used to working 10 hour days. I gave more consideration to Web stuff, eww. I decided not to leave the South Bay for meetups, because really there's nothing that great in Pasadena or Santa Monica. I decided to give in and just assume I'm hacked - although I am going to do more crypto this year coming. 

Basically life happened. Big deal. Sorry to bore you Future Self. 

Ogre

I met Bruce Sterling at UCLA somewhen about 1989. It was before I moved to New York and before the founding of the EFF. I had three distinct impressions. 

1. Dude was scary smart.

2. Dude was scary rebellious.

3. Dude looked way too young to know what he knew.

If I had finished up at USC as I planned, there was no question that I would have eventually fallen in with the dudes at the Swamp, the fairly well known geek hangout. I would have met a dungeonmaster. I would have been deeply into D&D. As it stood, I failed to make the connection. But since I had the audacity to write games in FORTRAN and found something fundamentally fascinating about bi-directional printing, then I would have been a lot more likely to trade the privilege of running USC's data centers for the sort of rebellious pose characterizing the name Bruce Sterling evokes. I liked him and I agreed with everything he said, but I think he had a lot of nerve to be poking his finger at those he did. Rich white boy. 

I didn't have time for that. I was working very hard for respectability in a society I didn't comprehend. I saw him as somebody throwing vases against the walls of his parents estate. Of course it didn't matter whether or not his parents had an estate, or how precise his aim. Destruction is destruction. I was a black man living every day life as a symbolic threat. He looked like Spritle Racer with acne. All he had to do was shut his mouth and he disappeared. I did not have that luxury in 1989.

Today I saw a picture of a box about the size of a carom table. Inside was a game called Ogre from a company named Steve Jackson Games. I read The Hacker Crackdown when I lived in Brooklyn two or three years after meeting Sterling. I thought of most cyber stuff about the way I thought of 'Lawnmower Man', severly lacking in aesthetic value with very little appeal outside of that which is given by a good crossword puzzle. I was one of those people who at once desired the distinction of belonging to Mensa or the Triple Nine and yet found the distinction worthless if not annoyingly alienating. I dug those like Feynman from a distance. I never had my own personal college professor. 

My friend Bryan Alexander digs ghosts and, well horror and scary stories. He's a college professor who lives in close proximity to nature and the understanding that what humans build, nature takes apart. He understands the moral dimension of destruction and failure and while he doesn't get all post-modern about it, he gets the deconstructional narrative of grand guinol. There's probably no better person on the planet to talk about the implications of the rise of Zombie Apocalypse stories in America. Bryan knows the literature, backwards and forwards.

I've begun to purposefully pay more attention to Bryan and he has been very kind in mentioning me by name over the past few weeks on Facebook. This is fortuitous because I have come around to the side of destruction, in the necessity of it. I've been knowing about Cthulhu for a long time, but I only recently decided to read what that fiction was all about. Somewhere between the fictional Mountains of Madness and the actual endurance of Shackleton is everything that human beings need to know at this moment in history. 

It was Bryan who took the picture of Ogre. As soon as I saw the logo of Steve Jackson Games, it took me back to the days in which the existential dilemma of being a young black urban sophisticate wrestling daily with call of cyber geekdom. I have been neither as both simultaneously, half-tracking through the woods of identity. Enough to be in it and called of it, distrusting both and unable to escape either. And in all that, no compelling need to *be* a rebel. Even now. Steve Jackson Games was persecuted by the US Secret Service. It said something profound about the imagination of the cyber and the warfare and secrets deeply implied in the strategic and tactical thinking of gamers, coders, warriors and spies. 

I am a console gamer. Skyrim is everything Dungeons and Dragons wanted to be, and in the imagination of those at the USC Swamp, I'm sure they inhabited the mind of the Dragonborn so many years ago. I can't say I feel jealous - I have had the ultimate dungeonmaster expressed as the world created by Bethesda for my XBox 360. And I stand in awesome anticipation of the next journey called Destiny, which is coming next September from the acknowledged master masters, the crafters of Master Chief, Bungie. There is the possibility that I will live in that world. There is the likelihood that in my dotage, I will remain in such worlds at nearly infinite stretches of imaginary time. I will experience all the destruction I might be able to handle and having it all realized, I will be ready to die.

I have raised a family. It's difficult for me to imagine Bruce Sterling married with children, but that may be so. Nevertheless, I don't entertain dreams of purpose dedicated to attacking the System, but of living in better worlds. Like Professor Farnsworth, I'm much more likely to become sick of the planet and go find a new one. I think of destruction as the thing that compels people to know reality, as the noose focuses the mind. But I am by nature a defender. I am the big brother without whose dependents I lack purpose. If nobody read Cobb, I wouldn't write it, much. I'd keep to myself, I imagine.

Adventure games are literature puzzles. Chess. Risk. D&D. I see these as things for people who don't actually know karate. Karate is stochastic and involves real risk. When you have to think about getting actually punched in the face, it's not so much fun to be a rebel. 

No conclusion. Just observations kicked off from a picture from a friend.

Round & Round

There are several men I know with whom I identify on multiple levels. I have taken time to call them my Exixtential Partners, meaning that would it not be for the random opportunities and chances, I could see myself living their lives and they mine. Some of those men have come by here at Cobb periodically, and sometimes they only appear in my stories. I feel that in my life I have been drastically short of such people and I imagine that many other men have lots of close friends, or at least it seems that way in beer commercials.  My friends are dispersed around the country. They are online in gamechat rooms and blog commentaries and Facebook timelines. They are a busy signal away on toddler lockdown or squirreled away doing important anonymous work for the nation. They are at a remove. 

Now that I am on the doorstep of being an old coot, it seems increasingly important to me that I get in touch and stay in touch with that diminishing group of people who might understand my jokes and not be offended. This is especially true since I work at home without the benefit of shallow but comforting professional lunch dates on the daily. 

Over the weekend, I think that I may have bumped up my Partner list by two. That's pretty extraordinary. It is due to the work of the man I now call Maestro. He knows a lot of people worth knowing. So the bottom line is that Maestro introduced me to Felix and NightCrawler, both extraordinary dudes and we'uns went a-shootin' in the boondocks. 

There were several significant things I noticed about myself and of society in association with the outing. At two days distance, I find the most amazing thing about this particular shooting outing, which will have been about my fifth or sixth in life, is the level of subtlety, or undercoverness, with which it proceded. After a casual breakfast on Saturday, I calmly went over to the local outdoor shop and picked up 200 rounds of 45 230gr FMJ ammo. I'm completely comfortable with those technical terms, and have no problem spending the $120 bucks required. But then I know that I have crossed a line that make most people I have known to cross their eyes and ward me away with crosses. I was very conscious of the weight of the ammo case in my hand as I walked back to my truck and closed the door on it. As soon as I got home, I found a lock for it and locked it up. I never bought ammo before, and kept guessing that there must be some protocol. But the whole thing was quiet and uneventful. This kind of thing happens every day. 

There was a monstrous dinosaur that munched its prey and spit it out covered with slime all before the sun came up in the morning. It's the Crackodon. I battled the beast at 0630 hours on Sunday at the supermarket rally point on our way to the ranges. As usual, I beat the monster down with a couple of Red Bulls and got the goo off me. By 0800 at the Starbucks in Valencia, I was in high spirits, as were my compadres: four extraordinary men, telling jokes and stories, in one pickup truck heading north with a big locked box in the back. 

Felix and Maestro go way back to high school where they made friends in physics class. Both of them are about 7 or 8 years older than I. Felix has an old black & white picture of himself  in college where he looked like a brainy Danny Bonaduce. Now he looks like Steve Jobs' older brother. He stuck with the physics and has, most certainly, an enviable workshop. NightCrawler has the gnarliest scar I think I have ever seen. Like me he was born in a naval hospital and makes code run. He may be a few years younger, that or he covers his grey very well. He helped me in a very precisely geeky way, although I forget the name of the bone, I know exactly what part of my index finger should rest on the trigger.

--

We got to the spot, deep in the rugged shallow canyons near the illusive Santa Clara River. Paved road, cows, dirt road, deer, road runner, paved road, red tailed hawks, dirt road and then we were there. I've heard of this place, but it's a lot more intimate than I imagined. We signed in, paid, and drove further. We unlocked the members-only gate further up the road and found our pristine range. This is rather what I expected golf to be like. I guess I never quite made the right connection. Golf courses I know are not quite as beautiful as I expected, nice though, but completely over-crowded and overpriced. This gun range was nicer than I expected, quite inexpensive and completely private. Unless you count the booms echoing off the hills from shooters down the trail. I liked it. I felt at home. 

Maestro got me started with the .22 conversion on his .45 Kimber. I relearned everything I knew from scratch, but the safety rules were the same. I began a great number of drills with a four-step draw and in no time I was making big puffs of dirt behind the targets I kept missing. Four steps is an understatement. There are about 200 things to remember when you're handling the firearm, lessons learned from generations of shooters that can only come with practice. 

The quality of instruction I got from these vets was superb. I've head some of it before, but I shut up and listened. I learned that I've been doing a lot of small things wrong in my mind, and practically did the one thing I thought I wouldn't do, which was leave my finger on the trigger too much. I wasn't fumbly but handling a pistol properly is like playing the bass line of your favorite song on the piano. Even though the notes are simple and you know them, it's still all about touch, and you cannot master the touch and the bassline always sounds clunky until you play and play and play. 

I got out about 200 rounds of 22LR and a couple dozen of the 45. This was more than pretty much all my previous experience combined, and yet a drop in the professional's bucket. The big bada boom clumsiness I felt the first time I shot a Glock was not there at all. I learned how to use my left hand this time out, and figured out the squeeze. I still over-muscled my right arm, but taking the 'dynamic tension' concept out of my head helped me do that. Now I have no fearful anticipation of recoil, yet I'm far from relaxed. But it's joyful work. I very much love the idea of being certifyably technically proficient with firearms. Beats the hell out of golf. Yet golf has the same kind of learning curve. You think about your grip all the time. You think about your aim all the time. You think about what's in front of you, how far, what the wind is doing, where you shot the last time, how and when to adjust. Shooting is marvelously complex and sophisticated, and deadly serious. And like golf, when you're hitting your targets, it's pure pleasure.

By the end of the session, I managed to pop 4 out of 6 plates in one sweep at about 7 meters. I learned that it's more important to bring spray paint, masking tape and index cards than it is to bring a knife and paracord. I'm having a hell of a time with good men, the sort I have to trust my life with. 

And then we cleaned up, continued the incredibly geeky conversation about barrels and sight picture and dominant eyes and what you can actually hit with a deer slug at 100 yards with no scope, and the difference between combat shotguns and precision rifles and machining tool steel and carbonizing furnaces and the economics of high quality optics. My kinda folks. 

We slipped back into civilization, minding at all times who was taking what of our hardware and where to park with respect to our cargo and its relative accessibility. I got home around 3pm, exhausted and giddy. I can't wait until next time.  

Martial Education Update

Update: I passed.

Background: I started. Below was unpublished from September 20th.

So my theme in 2013 has been the end of my liberal arts education and the beginning of my martial (arts) education. To those latter ends I have enrolled in a CERT class.

Aside. The point of my martial education is to re-educate myself as to what I should be doing with my body, in every way. And my perception is that our society has decided, and I have defaulted through my social success, that I should be a very different kind of masculine physical presence than that of the ideals I was raised on. For one example, hairy chests. But most importantly, I think intelligent fools like Steven Pinker have ruled the day and suggest that mankind is done with war and therefore martial skills are superfluous as well as odious. I'm investing the rest of my life to avoid the Gordian knots of this world's Pinkers. 

Immediately that means understanding how to take care of myself. CERT is a step.

So last night I learned CPR. I was one of the few people in my class who had never done it before. It was very exciting. But there were three extraordinary moments in the class for me.

The first was that I really am the kind of person that wants to charge in and fix things. I am comfortable taking risks, but I don't really understand the kinds of risks associated with medical emergencies. 

The second is that I do loud talk my way through things. I am immediately, in any foreign situation, starting to socialize the lesson when there are people around me. I observe, I come up with an assessment, I ask if anybody agrees or knows better. I voice my assumptions, and I come to a decision quickly. Even if I don't act, I reckon about what should be done, what hasn't been done, what might have happened before. This stuff is automatic with me. 

The third thing is that I impress people as being strong and healthy. I am, but I compare me to the me of my peak, and I feel my own pain. So it's kind of weird being 5 10 (that I think is short) and over 200 pounds and having people say I look good. I am kinda powerful and I think I'm pretty rugged, but it just feels weird for me to say so, because of the context of what I think a real atheletic performance is. 

Today I mark the successful end of the first practial phase (as if I had it planned or something). But the news is that I successfully graduated from the Redondo Beach CERT training class #49. I got my green helmet and my certificates, and some really great hands on experiences.

CERT stands for community emergency response team. We are basically volunteers who have climbed up a couple steps on the Ziggurat of Skill when it comes to, in California, earthquake disaster response.  We put in about 30 hours over the past two months covering subjects like First Aid, Disaster Psychology, CPR, Terrorism and Searh & Rescue. Moreover we had to run self-study and pass two FEMA certification exams on the rules of engagement for ICS 100 and the NIMS framework. This was very fresh in my mind Saturday morning as I went to the final drill at Station 2, (because I crammed at the last minute). 

In addition, I have taken about 8 hours of the FCC Technician prep course for Ham Radio from a damn fine operator named Ordway. I haven't taken the FCC test and probably wont for some time, but that's a part of this arc in my life as well. 

I have been invited to get involved with the next junior police academy, but that won't happen for me until the spring. At that time, I'll probably retake the entire FCC prep. My head is just too full right now for anything else, and I do have my day job to keep. But I have to say that this has been a much more exhilirating and exciting experience than I expected. In some ways I feel as if I have been living under a rock. But as I look around I'm starting to see this as part of the legacy of my family. More on that later.

Cobb readers know that I'm done with politics and what has shifted me in this direction are several factors. The first, of course, was the downturn and my unwillingess to be the slick dude. Speaking of which, let me tell you a story that I haven't put down. 

About eight years ago I had an assignment out in the City of Industry. Working in a warehouse that was cooly kitted out I sampled all the energy drinks they had on sale in the cafeteria and settled on Red Bull. I signalled a bit too much that I was going to get the China Deal and left that contract too early, but it was the last time I actually loved Visual Basic. One day I'm sitting next to another contractor and he's shouting on the phone just a little bit too loud. One of the first rules of being a good contractor is that you shouldn't draw too much attention to yourself for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that your presense in a company is an admission that the people around you are incapable of doing what you are doing. Not to mention that you're definitely making way more money. Well this asshat is pacing back and forth on the phone cursing out loud... wait for it.. cursing out his Porsche mechanic. I was mortified for the guy as I watched people's reactions around the room. Well, that sucked. 

It's funny that now that I think of it, I was in the market for a BMW 540. I ended up getting the 740iL, because, you know, I got kids. But only a couple years later I was looking to get a big old Hummer. Hummer is a different kind of slick, I suppose, but not so slick as ruggedly competent. 

Not long after, a couple of my gamer buddies died. One of cancer, the other in a motorcycle accident, and I had to admit, being around 50 years old, that I would have to start dealing very practically, not just abstractly with matters of death. So I had to squeeze a lot of frivolity out of my system and start taking seriously that old Danny Glover quip "I'm getting too old for this shit". Moreover, bullshit. So when I came out of the funk that the death of friends puts you in, I had to deal with the fact that I wasn't dealing with that fact. When the downturn turned down and I started hearing out Nouriel Roubini.. yeah you know the rest. 

Bottom line, I had to figure out how somebody like me then gets to be more like somebody like me now, and nothing really clicked until late last year, early this year when I discovered the Nutnfancy Project. 

• A Steampunk Riff
• EDC
• A Martial Education

And then there's my New Years Resolutions, let's see.

• New refrigerator (check)
• New Couch (picked out)
• New XBox (meh)
• Calesthenics - (not)
• Tai Chi (on the way)
• New Bike (not)
• Integrate Cubegeek & Cobb (nevermind)
• Move static websites to Amazon (whatever)
• Move Limbo to Evernote (check)
• Mac Mini (check)
• Start Men's Meetup in SouthBay (check)
• Find a Bar (check)
• 35 Year Reunion (check)
• Finish First Draft of Borky's Beach (half way)
• Read Classics {Middlemarch, Don Quixote, Finnegan's Wake} (no)

It turns out that I've gotten a lot better technically, focused on my job and a lot better strategically gathering my interests and disciplines into a consistent direction. I've also shifted my style of being a father but that's a whole other story. So my Peasant Theory is panning out. My commitment to Stoicism is working. My reading of Taleb went way better than expected, and I managed this opportunity to get a genuine, certified sheepdog position and responsibility. This is turning out to be a very interesting year way to the plus side.

And the whole thing is at this stage in my life, I want to hear the gritty stories and I want to be engaged at the level younger people don't want to hear about. Could say a lot more but, Ill save it for the comments if any... 

A Civil War of Words

We hung out at the Angel City Brewery. I like hipsters. I mean now is a really good time to be a hipster. It's peacetime. 

There was a bluegrass band, there were about 12 different kinds of beer on tap, all suitably microbrewed. I had the darker nitrogen ale. People brought their dogs, their flipflops and their retro glasses. There were chessboards, Jenga and darts. And ping pong table over in the corner next to.. wait for it.. beanbag. Lots of 20somethings and a brazilian taco truck outside. The doorman wore upside-down Ray Bans and there were girls on roller-skates. The atmosphere was perfect.

Doc and D, his wife were there with Pops and I. I had a couple of ground beef pastels too. We talked about Lovecraft and Robert Browning and TED and The Long Now and Doc's writing projects and battling Federal agencies and farming and getting offline and Airstream trailers and weird dogs and Ferraris and Nazi slogans and asceticism and food riots and the coming American civil war. 

I don't think there will be another civil war. I think we're too lazy and there's really not enough at stake. Doc thinks that 30 million more Mexicans is all it will take and we'll go to shit. I probably agree. I took the eastern route to downtown and drove behind a Chevy Avalanche the Mexican driver of which threw several handfuls of trash out of his window as we drove down San Pedro Blvd. This act reminded me of something Victor Davis Hanson wrote about how America is a paradise for people who are escaping hell. So what's a little trash? Drive around that neighborhood, you'll see that the people don't mind it so much. I don't think many Mexicans today come to America to make anything more than a better life for themselves, but that doesn't make it a First World Standard. I mean Puff Daddy is making Frank Sinatra money. Do you think he cares about the kind of standards Old Blue Eyes sang? Nope. Wait. Is it OK for me to say such things? Do you feel the transgression here?

I sat through the second lecture today in my FCC Technician class. It was really moving for me to be retaught the kinds of things my dad taught me 35 years ago about variable capacitors, diodes and Ohm's Law. There's almost 400 questions in the pool to get a license to operate a ham radio, but any idiot can do texting. When the earthquake hits and the cell towers are shut down, all the idiots will be out of luck,and what took me 10 hours to learn on a couple Saturdays could be all the difference. 

You see, our cities are idiot proof. That means you get to have the benefits of the material wealth of the American middle class, but of course we keep lowering the bar and waiving the ethics tests. You don't have to be physically fit. All the curbs are cut for your wheelchairs. All the 800 numbers are bilingual. For those of us US Persons that an 8th grade education is something to brag about, rest assured that there are political advocates who will agitate for your equality in all things. The California Legislature recently passed a bill allowing illegal immgrants to serve on juries. Thankfully, the governor vetoed it. But it has come to that. No effort required.

The deft multiculturalists have tossed modernity into the dumpster and every tribe has its champion. I still like hipsters though. They work at being cosmopolitan. Hipsters are easy to spot, they wear the uniform. They signal their hipness and they pay close attention because they value society - the society of hipsters. Acoustic instruments are meaningful to all of them. Hipsters have values and they discriminate; they have ideals and they criticize. They strive. They put in work. You don't just happen to be in the Angel City Brewery, you drive there from far away. You meet friends from out of town, or across the Pond. Effort is required.

But it's a peacetime effort. It doesn't have to be couple with the objective realities of an economic downturn. You can still be a dot com marketing manager. There is still plenty of trust fund money. Hipster clothes aren't cheap. And hipsters don't really have to care about amnesty for 30 million Mexicans and even if you paid the LAPD officers $5/hour and all those jobs went to Mexicans, there won't be a civil war. Because before that happens, niggers and honkeys will get real. 

You see, the good old days were the good old days because there wasn't enough middle class to go around. There was middle class scarcity, and that meant in the middle class you were scared of falling out of it. There hadn't been an economy of sociologists and other innumerate graduate students with bullshit theories of causality getting over on the American public. Now any 1000 people hitting a website connected to a university is a trend. Last week 10,000 people wanted to adopt the same 15 year old boy. People tend to believe anything because there is an economy for every fool idea when you live in the broad luxury of the American middle class. The fool idea that meat for breakfast is a horror began the legendary cereal aisle in our supermarkets. Juice, toast milk and cereal are a complete breakfast. What about bacon? It's making a comeback, but cereal is still an economy. We have room for all economies. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis and solopsis. That's because there's no middle class scarcity.. 

Until there is. 

But I don't think it's going to come down to guns and blood. All of the ugly politics that we seem to have all sorts of disposable time, energy, money and blood vessels for is going to move out into the open. The rugged apparatus of the American system is going to do just fine, because the people who really run it are smart people deeply invested. But the false generousity is going to fade away. The lack of modernity and the tribal spirit is going to get energized and even though civility would be just as easy as putting on a creased pair of pants, the tribe of baggy saggers will refuse. It will be in your face just as plain as throwing trash out of a car window. Just as plain as smoking cigarettes in restaurants. Just as plain as Cher saying that Tea Baggers should be shot. Not only will Peasants be Peasants, but very intelligent people will prefer to be partisan and lose rather than use logic the other side agrees with and win. That includes the Solicitor General. 

In other words, long before people start burning down buildings and throwing rocks at police officers, the veneer of civility in politics will be long etched away. Political correctness is going to die, and the real hatreds fueled by our idiot-proofed cities will become self-evident and self-perpetuating. Not for the hipsters of course, because the hipsters have cosmopolitan society and they are willing to sacrifice for it. But more and more tribal Americans want conflict. They want class warfare. They want to win at any cost. They want true conservatives and true progressives. Which side are you on, dammit!? 

Me? I'm keeping my eye on the hard sciences and industrial infrastructure, escpecially of course that thing I call industrial information technology. You know, the kind that banks and insurance companies cannot function without. There may come a time when people say they don't want electricity and banks, but that's a long, long way away. 

I think our peasantry is going to shame us all, and we're going to wake up. At least a few of us will, and we will step up. People who are angling for this war are convinced that there's not another Colin Powell alive - that there is nobody and nothing emblematic of what's right with America. They say politics is war by non-violent means. They also say that politics ain't beanbag. They're correct. But this is peacetime, and I know where they play beanbag. 

The Long Form

One of the most frusatrating things about being me is that I think too much, and I think that I think too quickly. I can't really tell because in the whole of my life I haven't had the good fortune to have a close circle of friends with whom I shared intellectual curiosity and interests. Instead, I grew up as a writer in the form that the Internet provides having written on compelling subjects for years and years and years in various obscure contexts. 

What happens is that when I get around people I am very content to hear them say what they like, uninterrupted, while my mind dances circles and tangents around the subject and I make inside jokes with myself. Online, however, I am augmented by the memories I have stored in 11 years of blogging and all the other crap I filter through my head; it makes me positively aggravating. I keep it to myself 90% of the time. The other 8% I write up long form on the blog in a Socratic way, but always with the passion of asserting conviction. Ideas are always blowing and I'm not one to luff my sails. Sometimes that's tacky. The other 2% I just talk crap in three or four sentences. 

I'm talking about Facebook and why I feel I must withdraw from it. Facebook brings me into confrontation with ideas which never get fully expressed. It's like radio and television. It encourages brevity, and I have been seduced into saying curt and quippy things that don't bear scrutiny and merely provoke. So today I'll quit. 

The incident prompting this needn't be discussed.  I percieve that one or two people may be aware of it. I apologized and I am retreating back to the blog.

I hate the short form and without the subtleties of the feedback I used to get here on the blog, there's no point in saying what I have been saying the way I have been saying it. I have been, to use the exact colloqualism, "I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying". The only proper way to express that would be Lagerfelds "I'm not saying anything, I'm just answering questions". But the problem is that I'm not writing, I'm just saying. Talk is cheap.

And so I will write and give up the conceit of being quippy. I have no use for throwing rhetorical bombs and barbs. Such mendicancy is unworthy of even the most ordinary purposes. So I'm done with it. I cannot argue for argument's sake and that's what I believe the form has been bringing me to. I must write with a clear mind, expositorily. I'll do that here on the blog. 

My Experience With Guns & Position on Gun Control

Today I asked this question:

Have you ever shot a gun, what kind, under what conditions and for what purposes? What effect does your personal experience with guns have on your opinion of gun control?

Answering my own question: I have shot a couple pistols, a 12 gauge shotgun and some really beat up 22 rimfire bolt actions owned by the Boy Scouts.  The pistol shooting was very dramatic and I didn't like it. The rifle shooting was tedious, frustrating and boring. The shotgun shooting reminded me of my first time sex, to wit that it was exactly what I thought it would be, I was surprised by how simple it was, and although the movement was surprising the first time, I almost instinctively understood what I was supposed to do. Outside of that first experience I don't particularly like shotgun shooting either.

This year, I aimed to purchase a precision rifle and/or a cowboy lever action but I was short on funds, plus the prices have gone up. I have never considered any need to buy a handgun or shotgun for self-defense. As I have seen and overheard conversations in gun stores, I feel rather about new gun owners what I feel about nouveau riche. They annoy me and I don't trust them. As I want to have a gun, I want it one of two ways. My angle is that of a 'sheepdog' and as a gearhead.

As a gearhead I think about owning guns and understanding all the associated technology, the math of ballistics, the mechanics of trigger mechanisms, the beauty and power of the machines. I appreciate them as stunning mechanical inventions as I do with computers, cars, aircraft, spacecraft. In that regard I'm like a driver, a shooter, a pilot, an astronaut. I want to operate them with skill because of the advantage it gives me. I as I become proficient in that way, I would become a hacker and maybe even a maker. I would like to customize my firearms. I would like to load my own ammo, I have some of the tools already. 

As a sheepdog (& Boy Scout), I think about owning a gun as being an amateur cop, in the exact same way anybody who learns CPR thinks about being an amateur doctor or fireman. It's all about taking an awesome civic responsibility but with a great deal of respect for what the professionals do. I happen to be taking emergency response training now, as well as pursuing my ham radio license.  

As a citizen, I am in conflict with my sheepdog self. Because I want to have all the personal power a cop has without the responsibility of being a sworn officer.  How shall I say it? Prosumer? There's a political part of me that likes the moral cover of the sheepdog, but I'd rather be libertarian about it and just have whatever-damned-gun-I-please-this-is-America-dammit. I say that in the same way that advocates for Gay Marriage argued that what homosexuals do is their own business. What I do with my gun is my own business. My reasons for having one is my own business. You have no right to restrict me in any way associated with criminality. Innocent until proven guilty, you're not going to round me up in your database.

Practically speaking however I believe very strongly that I'm going to do the upper middle class thing, which is to use my education and privilege and brains to do whatever I can do to have as much as possible. And that means I'll join the NRA and be ahead on policy discussions (I have) I will go up a government ladder of certifications, I'll make friends with politicians and first responders, kind of like I do as a computer hacker. While every common man is debating Andriod vs IOS, I'll be hacking. When the NSA is eyeballing, I'll know where and how hackers stay safer than the average Joe. As we speak I'm doing that community emergency response training eight week course. I understand, as the fire captains are telling us, that our first responsibility is to ourselves and our families, then we can help our neighbors without worry. 

This conflicts with my ethics and genuine concern for the common man. I want to live in a country where you don't have to use connections (like I will) in order to exercise the right to know, own and use guns.  And I will complain like a hypocrite when people finally realize, like they did during the LA riots or Katrina storm that protection is not on the way and the ordinary guy got screwed. And I'm going to be saying I told you so from a safe distance.  

So where I come out on gun control based on my gun experience is that, I think I've shot guns like the driver who has learned to drive with a stick. I understand and appreciate the old school fundamentals, and yeah I want more and better custom gear for myself, and I want to get really good. I think everybody should be able to do the same with minimal bureaucracy within reason. But that doesn't make me respect the average gunner any more than I respect the average driver. In fact I think most of them will be privileged fools, because I intend to train and get as good as I can. (In the same way I've been a motorcyclist with the attending superior understanding of the road than ordinary drivers). 

I'd much rather see a 'solution' aimed towards a lightweight liability insurance that people like me can afford and doesn't hurt my access any. I'll make loud noises about abrogation of rights and will not back down on 2A principles. But I will survive, stoically in the very same way that cops and security guards do. I do not have a lot of trust or respect for the laws that will ensue from this debate, in the exact same way I am not pleased with the way this country and government decided on Gay Marriage. I will continue to invest a great deal more trust and respect with people who see things my way as a sheepdog, not because of the credentials they have with the government with their badges, but with their skills and knowledge. If certifications and badges and credentials are what it takes to have possession of a suitible fraction of those skills and knowledge with firearms, then that's what I'm going to do because I think when it comes to gun rights, we are creating second-class citizens and chilling the options for the common man.

In short, if I have to be a gun-nut and a government certified gun-nut, then that's what it takes. I'll hate it, but I'll have my freedom.  

Related by Cobb:

• Reviewing the Moment of Death
• Another Good Group
• A Good Group

 

I should add the following about 'Reviewing the Moment of Death' because beside the fact that I clearly state above that I don't want to be a sworn officer, I am a lot closer to their way of thinking and their attitude of responsibility for the common man than I ever was in my life. And I am actually in the process of preparing myself for that actual responsibility so I don't get caught out. I *am* a sheepdog and actually always have been, but I know I can get myself in trouble out of ignorance in acting out that role. Like I said, in NYC I stopped a robbery on a subway and almost got into a fight between two Nigerian street peddlers before I checked myself. 

That encounter I had in Brooklyn about 20 years ago defined my attitude about guns the majority of my life. I presume that to be similar to many Americans.

1. It's easy to kill with one,
2. I don't want to be a killer. Therefore keep them away from me.

There's something additional about item 2 which is I think most Americans have had a moment of rage or disgust where they felt like somebody deserved to be shot, and could not really justify that emotion. So they want to keep guns away from themselves because they believe that firearms easily translate that emotion into death. (And this is how they feel about TV violence and video game violence, and most depictions of violence - that it's easy.)

It wasn't until I actually started studying and using guns that I realized how wrong the that assumption was. Guns are not magical Krell machines that instantly instantiate monsters from the Id. They are non-trivial technologies that require constant practice for competence. But they are also empowering and they force you to think as if they were magical death machines. This is something I have found extraordinarily well expressed by Eric Raymond. 

Nothing most of us will ever do combines the moral weight of life-or-death choice with the concrete immediacy of the moment as thoroughly as the conscious handling of instruments deliberately designed to kill. As such, there are lessons both merciless and priceless to be learned from bearing arms — lessons which are not merely instructive to the intellect but transformative of one's whole emotional, reflexive, and moral character.

I have been caught in the crossfire of a robbery in which my toddler daughter was present, and I have seen a teenager roll up and point a pistol in a man's face. I now know very well, since I have studied guns and shooting a great deal more of how to think in those situations. I understand the tactics and capabilities of shooters so that I am not purely emotional about the encounter. I think more clearly about what is and is not likely to happen. The emotions of fear and rage don't predominate, and it is my knowledge about guns and ballistics that control those emotions. They don't dispel those emotions, they contain them in a logical framework. I would assert that gun training is the only reasonable way to contain those emotions. That certainly cannot be accomplished by having no experience whatsoever, or by having an objection to experience. 

Consequently, I think that you honestly can divide the American gun culture into camps of shooting ignorance and experience. Note that I am saying there is a gun culture of American consumers of violent entertainment who have never seen an actual shot human or animal corpse or been personally involved in any kind of shooting. And then there is the gun culture of actual shooters, sportsmen, hunters, target shooters (either recreational or competitive), law enforcement, industry folks and military.

About that former group, and I say this as a member of that former group and a big fan of Bruce Willis movies. I find that they are utterly convinced by the portrayals they see of violent death in film, TV and video games and do not have any counter-intelligence that real shooters know about what and how firearm projectiles affect the human body. And it is the hype surrounding mass shootings that is nothing more or less than the awakening of that fictional portrayal in their imaginations. Every action movie is a mass shooting. Every violent video game hero kills 20 before he can be killed. A real shooter knows these things to be preposterous, but the first gun culture of America does not, not specifically.

I don't find this to be anything special. It is merely ignorance vs experience. But also innocence vs experience. It is completely understandable and natural for one to wish to keep one's innocence. I don't want to be a sworn officer, and I like most normal people, am queasy about seeing blood and much more about having blood on my hands. The gun culture I am a part of maintains this quality of human decency, and we also know as sheepdogs that we are part of the barrier against those who do not, whether or not we want to be. We require courage to take responsibility commensurate with our knowledge. That's where I am today. 

Overcommunication

I work alone a lot. So much so that I overcompensate with over-gregariousness when I meet new people. I've met a lot of new people in the past few weeks, and I'm a bit put out by how much I've put myself out there. 

but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.

And yet it seems almost impossible for me to shutup about myself and assert all these things about myself. I managed to get a class instructor to bring up a website with my picture. I sit at the back of another class piping up stentorian. I'm at odds with my volume. 

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

But the fact is that I am, because of the way I work, quite excited to learn about and meet men such as Thorn, Fei, Brin, Schultz, Lau, Kamath and especially Epstein as I have the past week. I work alone, and yet, there are these men who speak to my spirit; I find it very difficult to keep silent about myself to them. My stories come spilling out in the absence of drink. 

Enough said. Life is great. Sometimes handshakes are not enough. 

Genki Desu

I just checked this place for the spelling. Actually, Maiko taught me in 1987, back when I was reading Otomo's Akira for the first time.

The Moto Project

Doc gave me a Honda for my birthday. My plan is to take this gift horse and restore and customize it, at some risk to my bones and dollars. Then again, what would you pay for a very cool motorcycle? Right, so I pay all of that into making it snappy after which I would be rather delicate in riding it. That's the theory anyway. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about replacing my future horse fantasies with motorcycle adventures. I have always wanted to retrace the path of the Lewis & Clark expedition by horse - or at least one week of it with my family. However that will probably have to wait until we can all afford to pay for our own rental, by which time I'll probably be too old and cranky to enjoy it much. But I've had a revolution of my outdoor expectations. Quite frankly, although Pops still likes to rough it up at Big Bear, I have rather tired of the fun of camping. I've seen the wilderness, and there's nothing there but discomfort, and the days are long passed since I sought to prove something through trials of endurance. But fresh air and solitude, remoteness and freedom from civilization with a big gear kit. I can appreciate that. Day trips. Yeah.

All that has to take place on a different breed of bike. This one you see here, the Honda 919 is a sport bike. And it's really just my style, interestingly enough. I used to ride a hot little Suzuki back in the day, shart bars, Yoshi pipe, tuned Mikunis. To scrape the pegs on that badboy took more balls than brains, and quite frankly I didn't have enough of either. So since I rode hard enough to scare myself, I guess you can say I rode hard. The 919 on the other hand is such a superior machine, it seems to make effortless what I half killed myself doing in 1980. And this one's 11 years old. It's everything anyone would want who is not determined to go to the track, and the tracks are (Willow Springs, Buttonwillow) way too far to ride out to on the kind of super sport crotch rockets with no personality that they crank out of the factories nowadays.

So in my future, perhaps, is an adventure bike. Doc should be getting his any day now. Some day we'll ride to Sturgis or one of the towns in the area. That should be the start of a new chapter. Meanwhile, I'll get the Black Hornet up to code, get my cert and do some sport cruising on the weekends. 

 

The Santa Monica Samods AAU Diving Club

If I don't put this post here, then the web will have no record of what I was up to back in the late 70s. That might not be such a bad thing, but you know one day I'll be an old man and won't remember much of what I remember now. 

Our coach and fearless leader was Jim Wood. Jim was a great coach, dedicated, disciplined and wise. He had a soft side that he did not show during practice. During practice he was a hardass. After practice he would smile. Almost a different person. Jim was tall and craggy. He seemed a combination of Texan and Minnesotan. He had a sonorous but sharp voice and he sounded a little bit like Karl Malden. 

We practiced Wednesday nights at the new Santa Monica High School pool. It was a great facility. They had good boards and sprays. It was a long way for me to come by bus, but that's what I did. My brother Bryan and I.

Carl was our best diver. He was a great twister. I remember him working on his triple twisting forward 1 1/2. He also had a single twisting 2 1/2. Like all the best divers, Carl was fearless. Like all the mediocre divers, I hated double pikes and shied away from the 3 meter board. But I still did them. My best diving friend was Chris Monaghan from Culver City. I couldn't really understand him much at all. He was a good diver but had no force of personality. But he was a good kid. The captain of the Loyola diving team was Chris Horne. Much more personality, as in total geek. Chris lived in Palms, was a pale redhead with nerd glasses and zits and had a cool and quirky family.  In some ways he was a role model, in other ways not. He had a kind of lazy style as a diver, not quite snappy but elegant. I seem to recall that he had good entries but not very good tops. Still, he was way better than I was. The team sweetheart was Colleen MacNamee who lived over near the Santa Monica Airport. Her dad built her a diving pool in the backyard. She had every reason to be spoiled, but I can't remember if she was or not. I do rememeber she used to talk about how thoroughly green the chlorine turned her blonde hair. 

The Samod is a small fish I had not heard about before nor since, but that was what Jim named our club. We would participate in meets all over Southern California. Northridge Aquatics was a standard venue. There was another small pool with good boards over near the Budweiser Brewery in the Valley. Also the Jim Kramer Club in PV held meets. The first time I ever peeled was after a day at Madera, CA in the desert. Freaked me out that I got sunburned. They warned me, but I didn't think it was possible. Then I realized how many times I actually had been sunburned, the feeling was extreme that time, but familiar. 

My two best meets were the USA - Mexico dual meet at Santa Monica College, and the Chula Vista Invitational. In that meet I got my highest score ever, a 6 1/2 on a forward 1 1/2 pike. Sadly, Jim couldn't make that meet. I got third place - my favorite trophy. I got third at the dual meet too and received a medal. Good times.

I never hit the diving board but I did maybe one or two fail dives. I don't think I ever balked. I was a mediocre diver. I wasn't strong enough to be very good and of course I wore glasses. But I enjoyed the sport and did well enough to qualify for State championships. I used to think of myself as ranked 22nd in the State of California which, considering our champions, wasn't bad at all, but I certainly wasn't good enough to compete at the collegiate level. Chris Horne made the team at USC, I think but I recall that he quit after freshman year. 

33828662 was my AAU number. I did have an 11 dive list which was pretty decent considering that most kids who compete in High School have been diving for a while. Oddly, I never really wanted to be a diver, but a gymnast. Loyola didn't have a gymnastics team, nor a wrestling team the two things I could do well given my size. So I made lemonade.  I never quite got my forward 2 1/2 pike nor my single twisting 1 1/2. By the time I was junior I fell in love with soccer and the spirit went out of my diving. I couldn't switch sports and keep on track for four year varsity so I toughed it out. But senior year, my intramural soccer team won the school title. It was one of the things I was most proud of in high school. Odd that.