Heuristic #2

This one I gots from Dr. Gordon Livingston:

"How do they make you feel?"

It's a decision rule for whom you allocate time to. It's how you assess the quality of your relationships. Keep it simple - better/worse.

It's a valuable rule of thumb for me, because my mind makes so much noise to confuse the signal. Don't worry about who someone is, or why they do what they do, keep focused on how they make you feel.

On Paper

On paper, I am indistinguishable from a loser, and in many regards, that makes me a loser. Until things change.

Change perspective, and I'm currently ascending a peak of the grand trio - mental, emotional and physical health. All interconnected and inseparable of course.

Yet just before the weekend, my Dad voiced his concerns to me, and asked me if I 'was alright' and my immediate reaction was - 'boy are we on different pages'

I was blindsided. I would have thought that if there was any moment in my life to put myself in the 'least risk' category of whatever, it would be now. Yet my dad can't distinguish me from a junkie.

And on paper, I must admit, I am identical, the only difference is that I'm exposed to some future upside, whereas the future upside of substance abuse is merely the cessation of substance abuse. I could I guess commence the cessation of being an artist (the true subject of the conversation) but that is a very different possible upside to being an artist.

One trouble, that we are actually all faced with, is what we can demonstrate about our well being. It's easy to demonstrate financial capital, hard to demonstrate social capital. It's easy to demonstrate home ownership, it's hard to demonstrate ones exposure to a future successful art career.

And yet, people with savings and deeds to houses commit suicide, get divorced and snort things up their nose as much as people who don't. Happiness alludes us all to more or less the same extent. 40 year olds with beautiful children manage to have extramarital affairs and lose those children. People with full time contracts accept (on a right now, daily basis) severence packages.

People lose their houses, or plunge into negative equity, the great upside for them is that things look great until they go wrong. The exact opposite if you will of my lifestyle.

The price, I guess of being an artist is the willingness to look terrible on paper, and be prepared for that picture to remain the reality into the future.

An artist dies a death by a thousand cuts until eventually they expire. But occasionally they are going to score big time and be set for keeps. Truth be told, our parents will always be much more comfortable with the reverse.

People have received more damaging talks from their parents over the years, but still I was filled with disappointment and sadness. I almost ate refined sugar.

Flipside Upside

Okay, so today it really hit home, what the fuck I can't eat in my abstinence only approach to beating addiction. Particularly annoying since I'm really only quitting all these addictions to experience trying to beat addictions and not over any actual health concerns.

So after lunch with a delightful friend, and lunch was easy. What next? No caffeine, no chocolate, no icecream, no soft drink, no alcohol and perhaps most cripplingly - no pornography.

It's really the first challenge I've faced, at all. No coffee and cake. None for tohm.

But this is what I've discovered. Quitting addictions is a good idea, because you find almost naturally yourself being forced to actually do and eat what you are supposed to be doing and eating.

Because one of the first things you notice, is that you are often at a loss. Once you take all the refined sugar and caffeinated beverages out of my diet, you are pretty much left with a lump of protein. So without it even being part of the plan, I motherfucken started eating fruit and vegetables again.

Same same, once checking tumblr for more nubile pictures was no longer part of my daily routine, I actually started writing the emails I never got around to before. And I've picked up running, am slowly getting back into drawing and drumming. It's great.

The ability for one decision to cascade into a whole bunch of positive outcomes. This I guess is the common sense that outsiders can see when they naively urge somebody to quit their addictions. But the social factor is unavoidable. If after lunch, instead of coffee and cake, the done thing was a bucket of the Colonel's finest chicken, my task would be that much harder. Thankfully, I've never drunk coffee. Or as I said to friend Ann today 'Coca-Cola is pretty much how I like my coffee' so my task is not impossible. But after a big salty bowl of Ramen, it is still fucking hard not to eat something packed with pure columbian sugar.

I managed it though.

Osprey & Lyre Bird

Osprey = Sea Eagle.

Yes the Eagle, charismatic predator. Have I ever confessed this before, but that I am incredibly superstitious?

Seems crazy I know for somebody most sympathetic to deterministic, rational, materialist, anarchist view of the u.n.i.v.e.r.e, but yes, it's true! like most explosive athletes, I am highly superstitious.

And I've been feeling predatory for the last I dunno 6-8 months? Like I've had my teeth back the fuck in, and I remember an interview with Earthworm Jim designer guy talking about how he had one level where Jim is out of his suit and a really helpless worm character having to just avoid obstacles. Then you get your suit and machine gun back, and how in testing players go ballistic with the machine gun.

Like that.

You know, just like the good old days for me, in Ballafornia where I played 'who defers to who' on the footpath. I only had to defer to one Senor Ash Coates whom due to superior genetics and attending a school with more liberal rules regarding facial hair, had a full beard. But man when two adolescent kids pass each other on the footpath of Ballifornia's 'street' it was an exhilarating game of chicken every fucking time.

But anyway, I've had a bunch of important revelations, sort of thematically clustered, and that generally is good enough for my mind I don't need a coherent concise theory of everything.

The first came via Enneagraph, a personality test a friend posted to facebook, where I discovered I was 'Type 8' - Aggressive. It also described me as 'healthy' and this kind of fucking reaffirmed Gabor Mate's 'When the body says no' type message.

And then you know, I read a lot of One Piece, and Monkey D Luffy is you know just the latest most popular reincarnation of a very enduring archetype. And shit like One Piece is kind of a relic, in terms of being the same story as when I was a kid, and going back to the fairytales and shit of brothers grim.

What I mean by that, is that I realised Luffy actually helps people, saves the day, by fighting.

Here's the distilled thought all this lead me to: "I can't save you, you need to save yourself, but I can help you. I can blow everything up, so you have to save yourself."

Much in the same way, that it took me so long to overcome my existential crisis by realising that I'd known what to do with my life when I was but a child, I had realised that the conflict I introduced had had an intuitive sense to it, an intuitive altruism all along.

Aggression without anger, Phil Jackson called it. Just as predators can play a vital role in keeping eco systems healthy, so too does conflict play a role in keeping our society healthy.

Take a short walk from there to this video:


Being assertive, and aggressive is all well and good, but life is not binary, there's a food chain of aggression, and while it may feel pretty good to be a wolf among sheep, or a fox among hens, life needs it's Golden Eagles hunting the wolves and foxes of the Mongolian steppes. And just so, while the Golden Eagle may be king predator their, it's jumping off the wrist of a Hunter, the king predator of all. Yes, it is the hunter that takes the lions share of the presumably delicious wolf meat.

The comic vagabond, might refer to this food chain, as the spiral of death and killing. But the point largely is, that by being aggressive one doesn't necessarily prey upon the weak, but can with training and practice prey upon the predators.

And I guess also, to identify with the poor poor wolves, if I or anybody get too preoccupied with being a predator, and beating up on the weak, chances are we can forget our places, or more importantly our potential to be in the middle of a predator-prey continuum.

It was the remembering of this video, and it's many portents, auspices and ill omens that had me pause for thought about the predator I was spreading my glorious wings.

Then I went on holiday. I badly wanted to see a sea eagle, to observe it's majesty, sea eagles hunt the much more realistic prey of fish and eels. One year there was this massive old eel on it's deathbed stranded in the sandy shallows of the river of my soul and this Sea Eagle was hanging around watching and waiting for it's chance to grab a huge meal.

And the sea eagle this time round was sighted, it in fact dropped one of it's catches onto the bonnet of the ranger's car, to retrieve it's now dead kill. But it was not sighted by me. It alluded me.

But on the last day, around dusk, I was walking my meditative trail, and I came across a lyre bird. Here, here was my spirit animal. That bird the indigenous rated as 'the most beautiful bird in creation' a mimic, a chameleon of sound.

And I realised, in this place of snakes and lace monitors and eagles and insects and all manner of predators, this lyre bird survives. And is beautiful. And that more than their courage and aggression, these freedom fighters, these Luffy's and Musashi Miyamoto's and Phil Jackson, and Golden Eagles... they are beautiful. They are beautiful at heart and that is a common thread.

A thread I need to keep hold of.

Pretty Little Addictions

Gabor Mate said we are at our most judgemental and least compassionate of addicts when we are addicted ourselves. And our whole society is addicted, in one way or another. If I read the papers I'm fairly sure I'd see reports of societies compulsive addictive behavior.

Anyway! So I'm no exemption, so this year I started kicking my addictions to see basically if I could. It started with KFC, which I ate around 3 times a week. I ate it for the last time on December 31st, 2013. At first I merely compensated for the lost saturated animal fats and salt by eating McDonalds more frequently (I can't recall the last time I ate at HJ's) but this increased my experiences of shame, and with all fast food eatariums one never wants to need to be there as often as the kids behind the counter need to be there to pay their rent/cigarettes. So about three weeks later, I kicked McDonalds as well.

And that was basically it for junk food.

Prior to kicking McDonalds, I also abandoned pornography. I'd posted previously that Porno had become too hardcore for me, the way people were treated in porno videos had stepped up to a level that it was becoming impossible to depersonalise. But then I discovered that tumblr is basically full of butts, very attractive butts, in still photographic images and it was kind of a return to the good old pre-internet days where you hoped to get in the dorm on school camp with the kid who had managed to snatch a Playboy or Hustler. That except thanks to the internet it's like having 10,000 hustler magazines delivered every day. But I just dropped it, from my daily routine. Tumblr is gone. Pornography, nixed.

Australia Day was the last day I drank, and although I've never really been able to handle drinking, I don't really include it among my vices because I'm pretty indifferent to drinking. It's not a compulsion, I seem to randomly go 4 months at a time without drinking, and people I see quite frequently often remark that they've never seen me drink, or never known me to drink. So it don't really count, except in so far as I quit it now, I say no rather than merely not drinking without any conscious reason.*

Then I went camping, and had a good opportunity to kick what I felt was the hardest one for me - caffeine, particulary my sugar filled caffeine delivery system - Coca Cola and Mountain Dew. I had one week to get over the withdrawal then like someone exiting rehab back into their regular environment I was tested by the sudden availability of coke, mountain dew all around me. I have actually declined a free bottle of coke proffered to me by a friend.

It wasn't that hard. This is the concerning thing. I just made a decision, and then my vices are all falling like dominos. I experienced almost no withdrawels, felt better really quickly, esteem keeps picking up. It's been really really easy, to the point that I'm almost getting addicted to quitting stuff.

But you may notice, all my addictions are pretty lame. How is this exercise meant to make me compassionate towards those struggling with addictions to alcohol, painkillers, mdma, heroin, crystal meth... less judgemental.

The hardest thing has been when the thought enters 'well surely I'm not never going to drink Coke again in my life. There'll be some occasion like trekking through South America where a refreshing coke becomes the trustworthy option over tap water or something and it'll be no big deal...' because when I try to contemplate that I have quit something for good the exercise seems nonsensical, ridiculous. It's made me understand why the mindset almost has to be 'one day at a time'

The second thing is, that I'm sure I was only able to quit caffeine because I had the opportunity to remove myself from my environment. I was kind of leaving it till last, but saw an opportunity to be done with it, and did it. But had I not basically left society behind for a week, would I have had the will power to kick a drug ingested by 80% of the worlds population on a daily basis? I can't say, but I could at least guess: not by now.

The other thing, I have to consider is why I'm an unfair comparison to other people's addictions? Why in other words has it been so easy for me? These are my two best guesses:

1. Lack of stressors. Basically since the live exhibition, my life has been free of it's two leading sources of stress. Even so, both my 'major headaches' I viewed as net-positive on me, they stressed me the fuck out, but promoted a lot of growth, perhaps in the same way that drinking non-lethal doses of poison can make a body immune to poison. But by disassociating myself from my most stressful relationship (and hence graduating from psychotherapy) and putting the live exhibition behind me, I simply don't have any stress or anxiousness in my life, therefore, seeking the comfort of refined sugar, saturated fats, caffeine, and the mastarbutory aid of pornography has all been quite unnecessary in a stress management regime. In fact, a stress management regime has been unnecessary.

2. Infatuation. If you haven't been up with my posts, I basically became infatuated, and that means my brain has been getting doses of it's own good drugs for a couple of months. So, put simply, the kick I get from sugar or caffeine is all pretty limp compared to the buzz and excitement that comes from infatuation. It's winding down now to where infatuation has to translate into action, lest it translate into fear and frustration so it is kind of scary to think I may get discouraged, and turn back to my vices.

So fuck, what I'm seeing clearly now, is that the general populace has it arse-backwards. People with addictions don't need to kick the drugs to get their life in order. They need to get their life in order to kick the drugs. I've spoken with those wonderful, amazing people that have beaten serious addiction, and they have to do things to do so that most of us would find unimaginable, or naively simple.

Basically, they have to ditch their entire social circle. To cease associating with other addicts, with other misery, with other pain. So pause for a second and consider who's in the room next to you and imagine having to make the decisions necessary to never see them again.

You could be naive and say that obviously ditching your partner, housemate, family is very different from ditching an addict. But it's precisely your partner, housemate, family that define your sense of normal. They are what make whatever vices or even bad habits you have okay. There's a harder road to be walked, and that's mustering up the will to basically go against the grain of your own social circle. But just imagine how your partner, housemate, family, work colleagues would react if you said 'and tomorrow I'm going to quit my job and become an artist like tohm.'

In other words, to beat addiction is to introduce conflict. Disorder. Just as I realised while away on retreat that being a vegetarian/vegan isn't just a personal decision but a social one. We live in a society really fucken averse to conflict. If somebody is trying to get over addiction, you got to have their back.

*to be fair, I did adopt a conscious rule not to drink with any of my friends that I suspect 'need' to drink for the medicinal anxiety relieving benefits of alcohol, because I am anti self-medicating. This did lead to awkward exposures because for convenience sake I would tell these friends that I had quit drinking, then get busted by them at other social events where the company were to the best of my approximations drinking recreationally.

Heuristic #1

Comes from Warren Buffett:

'Never risk something important, to gain something unimportant.'

He then proceeded to explain that if somebody offered you a revolver with 6 chambers but only one loaded, and offered you a million dollars to put it to your head and pull the trigger, most people wouldn't do it. But few people recognise situations where they are offered $1 to pull the trigger on a gun with 1 million chambers. The risk of losing your life may be much much smaller, but the gain is so trivial, you just shouldn't take that risk.

I think this is a good rule of thumb to live your life by. 

Anti-Break Up

Ima not talking about 'the hook up' but rather, what transpired today at my psychology session. See thanks to government schemes I still had sessions up my sleeve, but today after running the two BIG epiphanies I had during the Christmas breaks by her, I informed her I didn't need to see her anymore.

Which like a breakup you never know, and nobody does, it is more on principle than in practice one says 'I'll never need to see you again.' But it's done, we did it and it feels so similar to a break up except it's the exact opposite with a psyche and that's the thought I wanted to share with you.

Instead of a conclusion to a relationship being brought about by the failure of the relationship, concluding a relationship with a psychologist indicates success. It's like this joyous, happy parting of the ways. Perhaps what Matt Damon was trying to express in Good Will Hunting when Ben Affleck goes to pick Matt up for work on the construction job and he isn't home, and then Casey Affleck moves from the back seat into the front and you're all like 'he's gone and that's the best news ever'

The first time I ever saw a psychologist, it was a time when I was losing my shit, like really losing my shit and I only got three sessions because it was on an EAP. My parents offered to foot the bill for some extra sessions if I needed it, but I figured I didn't since Joe told me the same thing every session and I'd just refuse to hear it, know what I'm saying? But I remember our last session it started pouring rain, so he gave me a lift the few blocks back to where I live. And Joe said 'I'm confident you'll make a full recovery' and that meant a lot at the time because it was really hard to believe. But I did, I got my mind back together and enjoyed better times than I ever had before.

But the difference was that that while successful was a sink or swim departure, and I managed to swim. This time, you know, there's no expiration of sessions, no dropping the patient off on the last ever meeting. I let myself out the door with the blessings and good luck of my shrink. 

I'm a normal healthy individual. Now I just need to convince the world of this fact. And I will. I'm confident.

Jazz Talk

So I was at an information session on super, and how they were investing stuff. This was prior to my degree when my interest in finance was just blossoming (before it withered and died) and they were saying a lot of things about dollar cost averaging and other investment things. But he was talking about the asset classes performance of the previous year (then 2006 or some shit) but the presenter from the managed fund made a point he needed to make: "profit = risk, and property performed best therefore it must be the highest risk."

It's a principle certainly, profit = risk. And you can derive from that principle another one: no profit = no risk.

Now let's talk about Jazz. I've only recently had the point of Jazz, particularly free jazz explained to me. It's about being open to new listening experiences, for the performers - communication. Of course it's also about experimentation, an open state that leads to creativity.

But I feel an injustice is being done. Jazz as a genre of music is low risk. And it must be, because it is so much less profitable than pop. Counter-intuitive yes, how can 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl' be more risky than playing free jazz that drives certain crowds out of the club.

But it's simple, everyone can assess and subsequently reject any particular sample of 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl' whereas one requires some kind of expertise or standing in a community to accept or reject an experimental jazz tune.

Experimentation, is a low volatility, tinkering approach that can produce happy and sad accidents. That is why I value free jazz, and Jazz's influence on the evolution of mainstream pop music is phenomenal. But the profitability out of more vanilla three-chord progressions is undeniable.

Jazz is your classic technology industry where the innovation is rare and hard fought for, and rarely does the inventor reap any profit beyond recognition from fellow experimenters. But it isn't bold and brave and furthermore, is not entrepreneurial. It's low risk, guaranteed to make no money and virtually guaranteed to not speak to an audience.

One can fail at pop, because it is a high risk genre to experiment with. Devolution of music into noise can ruin a pop composition. Not the case with free Jazz. The majority of free jazz music is certainly not worthless, discovering what doesn't work is still progress, but that doesn't mean that it is worth listening to. In the same way that practicing scales or rudiments is not worthless, but not worth listening to.

So Jazz away, audiences and performers can stand to gain a lot, but no kudos for being risk takers, it is the antithesis of risk taking.

Central Question of My Life

That alas, I do not ask often enough:

'What would the tohm that loves you do?'

In my case I feel it is both necessary and sufficient.

Management

Last night the band I manage had their first gig under my reign as manager. So it's official, I've finally made management though not in the way Mother predicted. It's really really really strange to have people actually listening to me not just out of interest but with the intent to act on what I say.

The strangeness is exceeded only by the privilege and honour of it.

I find Pineapples Inherently Funny

Probably due to lovable comedy show Psych.

But anyway, disturbingly the other day, and I'm just going to ask you to accept that somebody asked me 'which fruit would you beat somebody to death with?' because these are the kinds of questuroos I get asked. And I didn't even need to hesitate -

Pineapples.

Then I got stuck in a giggle-loop, I'm actually really good at self-hypnosis. Most of us are as children, our fun and games are real to us, well I retain that ability, probably because I just never stopped playing.

Anyhoo, I could actually... and this disturbs even me... hear my victims cries of minor pain, discomfort and overwhelming confusion as I wailed on him with a pineapple in each hand, and I couldn't stop laughing.

And then I realized that I could never explain to anybody else satisfactorily what exactly it was I found so funny, and this revelation has one reliable reaction from me.

I lose my shit.

I fucking lose my shit completely.

Anyway, think about it, pineapples are the perfect thing to wail on somebody with.

Years prior I had written a work document 'pineapple club' which was just the rules of fight club with the additional stipulation that everybody had to use pineapples to fight with.

So it wasn't even new, but it was still gold.

Fallin

It is unlikely that anything will eventuate. But those, are the odds I like. Subsequently though, let me have this. It's something my close friend and confidant Shona understands about me - simply crushing on somebody is a big deal for me.

And I watched the movie of "Choke" (don't) but even in lack-lustre movies shit can speak to you. And it was just a line poorly delivered, but it stands as a testament to Jesus' awesome radness, "Jesus believed that we are transformed, simply by the act of loving another."

Now that is reason for a Christ loving family to lock their hands in eternally suspended high-5's and sing out 'JESUS! JEEEE-SUZ!!' around some awesome spread of turkey or chicken and that thing where you put peas in a big old bowl.

I enjoy the revelation, which for clarities sake I am no longer talking about Christ, but the revelation that I like a body.

I enjoy it. Dan Gilbert's 'Stumbling on Happiness' talks about anticipatory pleasure, and that's a lot. Perhaps to my detriment I have retained a childlike proficiency at self-hypnosis, and thus I can kind of actually just go into myself and live my fantasies.

But it does have a transformative effect. Bio-psycho-socially, I am transformed for the better. Food tastes better, music sounds better, the music I listen to, the books I read, the movies I watch. It's not so much a change as a decision, a decision to embrace fully what it is I like. A decision as to what is suddenly filled with meaning and thus has unlocked potential. Even all my other relationships change in nature.

Who I can and can't talk about it with. Who I want to and don't want to talk about it with. Who I can share the joy with, and who exacerbates the frustration.

But on the whole, it's just a big big deal for me. And I love it. I actually love it when the dream changes and the future becomes imbued with new possibilities.

Just appreciate what pleasures life can give you.

I love you all.

The Subconscious Is Powerful

Noise and signal my friends. Noise and Signal!

Thoughts merely arise in our consciousness. There is no complete theory of mind, even for those who study it relentlessly. Maybe if somebody does understand what consciousness is, they at least don't to the point where the can explain to me so I understand what consciousness is.

I have no fucking idea what qualia is, I've watched Dan Dennett explain it twice now.

But there's this freaky freakish thought I think - if our conscious mind is something that merely happens, then our consciousness is more of a witness than an agent.

I've been coming to terms with the fact that the smart part of my mind is my subconscious, and when it comes to some kind of clever conclusion it just lets the part of my mind I think of as me about it.

My conscious mind is slow. Doofus slow. I've literally spent days marveling at my subconscious deduction and how many months (or years) it can be ahead of conscious realization.

What I'm trying to train myself out of is talking, and to do more listening. Which is difficult when dealing with the external world, but is super difficult when you are talking about your internal conversation. I have my bright but shy subconscious, that can figure things out without being able to prove them in coherent arguments, but is right. Then I have my yammering conscious mind, that can articulate shit and reason and all that sort of stuff and it's really impressive, but it can talk me into believing just about anything.

Gabor Mate says we have three predictive nerve centers, our mind, our heart and our gut. Actually lined with nerves. I haven't done my research, but I can believe it, I can be persuaded by my own experience, something that doesn't happen with my own experiences of psychic phenomena, dream interpretation etc.

Here's the break down though -

gut - signal.
heart - signal.
mind - noise.

which isn't to say that the conscious mind is useless. Clearly it is. Reasoning is useful, and is perhaps the only thing that gives us choice.

For example, recently I was in a situation I found emotionally dangerous, and without understanding it (until reflection) I got mean to scare off my assailant. The thing is had I been consciously able to acknowledge what was upsetting me, I could have reacted in a much better way.

My subconscious managed to do it's job, it was just messy, a blunt instrument it solved an immediate problem but created another one to deal with.

And I guess that's the hard task of learning to listen to impulses and instincts, they protect us from bad stuff, they acknowledge realities we find too uncomfortable to face consciously. The balance between conscious and unconscious behavior may actually be a mix I shouldn't fuck with.

It's easy for me to talk about now, because for now I can just marvel at the unconscious ability to set me up for good stuff too. But my instincts and intuitions have always been something I'm bad at listening too in the good times and bad.

It's much smarter than I am.

Priorities

For some reason, having mum around has me thinking of how I prioritise shit in my life. Probably because she treats me as abnormal, and maybe I am. We've always clashed because what she cares about I can't fathom giving a shit about, and vice versa.

Anyway after not much deliberation I figured out how I prioritise my energy, and must say that I feel it works pretty well for me:

1. My Mental-Emotional Health.
2. My Relationships.
3. Creative Output.
4. Everything Else.

And of course energy is distributed by a power law - I put orders of magnitude more energy into my mental health than my relationships, and orders of magnitude more into my relationships than my creative output.

shorty mcshort post.

His Smiling Face

I want to say up front, that I am not contradicting this post but contrast it. That link applies to our cognitive downside which is to ignore our intuitions. But I want to talk about I guess the limits of evolution. Not as explanatory theory, but just that all the problems we still have, have by definition survived evolution.

So you walk into a bar and check out the action. At one end of the bar, is a guy that makes you feel totally uneasy, his face is asymmetrical due to a broken nose and scarring, his complexion is unattractive - pox marked and pale, he looks unhealthy in some genetic way, yet he is tall and imposing, could easily overpower you. He is dressed in a way that suggests he is not that socially conscious and you hear him break into a laughter that makes him seem both oafish and ignorant.

Yes. By all means, ignore that guy. You make a beeline to the other end of the bar, where a young handsome guy dressed tastefully, confidently strikes up conversation with you. He is attentive and smiling, studying you in a manner that is flattering, not invasive.

Flash forward a few months, and you are sitting with your girls having coffee or some shit, and that guy is the subject of your conversation, you find yourself saying 'you don't know him like I do... he has hidden depths.' etc.

Here I must pause, because I don't want to be alarmist. I want to make clear, that what I am absolutely NOT advocating is the idea that you can trust no one. Indeed trust is the cornerstone of a relationship, not just a relationship but sex.

Just like the guy at the end of the bar had a bunch of visual and sub-verbal warning signs telling you to stay away, the guy you are now dating, the attentive one with the smiling face has his warning signs to. It's just the first reliable warning sign I've presented is the conversation we were having before I interrupted.

What are you saying to your girls? Firstly, you are defending you're boyfriend. It may seem innocuous and non-serious, but that's precisely what you are doing. There's a conflict going on, not an intense and angry one, but a tension. What you see in him is not apparant to all. Or at least doesn't seem that way.

You perceive a disparity in perception itself. You find your boyfriend to be nice, your friends don't find him that way. They need not be overt, but you've picked it up and now you are having this conversation. And it's a warning sign.

That's a hypothetical. But if I may, I have a real world example that's actually much more overt and worse. X is dating Y, Y tells X that Y is going to sleep with Z, Y then sleeps with Z. Y returns to X on another occasion and compares X to Z as lovers as a topic of conversation. Informing X that Y prefers Z as a physical lover.

It's a no brainer right? What might amaze people is that Y ever got to see X again to have the comparing lovers conversation. This isn't a modern progressive open relationship built on a strong foundation of trust, honesty and mutuality. This is a power play. A horrible abuse of power.

Now X and I are standing in a park discussing Y, and I am unequivocal on my advice that Y needs to be cut out like an aggressive cancer from X's life. X tells me 'but deep down she is a good person...' and I shall divulge no more, because that should be sufficient.

They are all good people deep down. The people that hurt us most often are those that have the opportunity to hurt us. I think ultimately letting somebody in close enough to hurt us is a worthwhile and necessary risk. Trusting people is most often rewarded, which in my experience at least, is the truth.

Fact is, that a 200kg gorilla has very little opportunity to harm or rape us. They look dangerous from a mile away, we gonna avoid eye contact. Just as people know to observe Gorilla's at a zoo, or in a national park being escorted by a guard, people know to observe men with scars running down one side of their face and russian mafia tattoos in a movie cinema, or at the very least from across the restaurant dining room.

There's a natural warning sign that actually makes paradoxically a lot of dangerous people quite safe. There are dangerous people though, that can get around all our warning systems, or use our own cognitive functions to get by our warning systems.

Fortunately, nature has some analogies:

The pink orchid mantis

the terrifying ant mimicking spider

If you can clickety click and look closely at the ant mimic, get good and creeped out. Those antenna's are legs, it's abdomen has conformed to the shape of an ants. It's an ant with eight eyes and legs for antenna. It creeps me out, thanks to the disparities in how I feel about ants versus how I feel about spiders.

And sure, we feel creepy looking at an ant-mimic, because we know it's a spider, and we are creeped out by the queerness of evolution to produce such a thing, but also because it would work. Intuitively we know that for the rest of our lives most of us are not really going to give that much scrutiny to ants to ensure they are indeed ants. 

Ants also I feel, are on the lower order of cognition, such that they won't have a test that says 'when greeting a fellow ant, count it's eyes' you can find some videos of ant mimicking spiders on youtube, and they do a good job, such that for the ant equivalent of the duck test - if it looks like an ant, walks like an ant and waggles it's antenna like an ant then it's probably an ant - the ant mimic passes the ant test.

It's going to get close enough to take out an ant, or other prey that is unphased by the presence of an ant. The Pink Orchid mantis isn't going to successfully infiltrate flower colonies, because that's not necessary, but things it likes to eat are going to walk up to eat it, and things that like to eat it and not pink orchids are going to pass it by. 

As the prey is naturally selected to leave better defense mechanisms in place, the predators are going to be selected for better offense mechanisms. 

Such that, we should all have a little compassion for X, especially X himself. Because the people that can do great damage are the ones that look like delicate flowers and friendly ants to our unwitting minds.

Fortunately, I am just as big a sucker for people's core of niceness as X that I knew exactly what to say to him - being the advice I myself cannot follow: 'So Y is a nice girl, victim of circumstances that needs rescuing, why are you X the person most qualified to rescue her? And what if your efforts to rescue her is exactly what she needs to sustain the behaviour?'

(As an aside there's a good heuristic test for whether you have the white knight pathology [chronic need to rescue others to have a sense of self-worth] or not, imagine if you can the person you are trying to rescue getting better by themselves, or even better being helped by somebody other than you. Do you feel angry and jealous, or genuinely happy for them? be honest with yourself.)

It isn't fair in analogy, to draw a line between dangerous people and predators, though predatory people do exist. Often dangerous people are for example, self-destructive. What makes them dangerous is that they will pull you down into the depths with them. Take a view perhaps that people for a moment are actually just colonies of ideas, and some ideas are malignant, such that a person is unconsciously, unwittingly and without control destroying themselves and other people. Their problems will most often persist because they are very subtle mutations of the norm. 

Your smiling mysterious stranger at the bar had he been picking his teeth with a bowie knife would probably be exposed far far earlier as somebody dangerous. But because he isn't aware of his subconscious drive to destroy your esteem so he can experience fleeting sensations of control that require constant feeding, you are also less likely to pick up on it. Or if your gut picks up on it, for your mind to make excuses for him, talk you out of it, listen to your friends advice to 'give it a try'.

I think, in fact, I strongly suspect that we do have a way to compensate for the middle band of subtle warning signs - it's called your friends and family. They are your extrasensory power. So to fold this post right back to 'you don't know him like I do, he has hidden depths...' there's the moment to shut up and listen.

It can as my friend Trav attests, backfire (to be clear, Trav is not X, nor Y or Z for that matter, hence I name him) but here's the premise of my working theory:

You do pick up that that flower has the posture of a mantis, that your fellow friendly ant for some reason has 8 eyes and knee joints in his antenna. But that's subconscious, expressed as gut feelings, and raw emotions of unease that remind you of regular horrible spiders and classic green mantis. Then your mind your conscious mind tells you to relax and starts making excuses and reassuring noises, you ignore the warning sign and press on.

Your conscious mind has a motivation - it wants drugs, it's a fiend. Your friends will experience your partner, without the dope and oxy to boot. They have no incentive to make shit up, they get a much clearer signal and much less noise. They may still have noise. Few bff's even say 'hey tohm, you need to dump this guy RIGHT NOW!' many of my bff's will go to an admirable efforts to try and like my new beau. Then they will respectfully say nothing.

There's the crux, how to get another perspective of his smiling face. To pull out far enough to distinguish whether his eyes make him sinister or sincere? Have your friends added him on facebook? Have your social lives seamlessly integrated? I don't know the answer, there is much conflicting good will. 

My first practical step, is to actually respect how easy it is for all of us to fuck up and take on a dead weight for years of our lives. Because they aren't people with Swastika tattoos on their foreheads and hooks for hands, they are nice people that just seem a little bit off but have many good and worthwhile traits. Be forgiving, and maybe just a little bit more skeptical. 

We all ask our friends why they broke up, few of us ask why they got together. 

365

So yesterday I completed an exercise that few have done 'a sketch a day' for a whole fucking year. I kind of can't believe I did it, because it's the kind of long term project one doesn't even notice hip hop happening while everything else is going on.

In terms of building a discipline of literally drawing every day, it was a failure, it was always going to be. I built in enough flexibility for myself to actually get it done from the outset. But the fact remains that I have done 365 sketches in one calendar year and now, on January 1st I don't have to do any to complete the task. There is a sketch for each day of 2013.

With it, ends my overcommitment of time (hopefully, though it's hard to see your overcommittment when you are committing them). When you add to 365 sketches, the 150 drawings I did for the thanxhibition, and the 30 drawings I did for the colour exhibition, and the 20 I did for the live exhibition, plus commissions and gifts, and don't even include the unpublished pages of comic books I drew, I produced close to 600 images in one year, almost two a day.

What that means for this year is: relax. It's time to move back from quantity to quality. 

Picking Your Battles

Book 1: The Death Dealing Sword

This year, it has come to my attention, that I was born, and raised, and trained, and schooled to thrive on conflict. To seek it out, to introduce it. In the past I've written about my distaste and suspicion of the popular school 'sport' of debating. To rehash briefly though - it teaches kids that values are arbitrary and the most important thing is winning. Such that I now think it is grossly irresponsible to teach kids the sport of debating.
But I've also written in the past about the 3-phases of being a foreigner in Japan, and without rehashing I want to transpose those phases into a learning cycle that may or may not pre-date me that I call exuberence-rejection-acceptance. I'm further stealing the three book titles from Yagyu Munenori's martial treatise 'The Life Giving Sword' to talk about conflict.

See as a plucky young adolescent, it was simply all about winning. Debating taught me how to argue, how to win. I would ride a bus from Ballarat to Geelong, speak for 4 minutes, watch for half an hour, listen to the adjudication and feel robbed and cheated and stay up all night replaying the debate in my head and thinking of what I should have said but it was too late. I had many sleepless nights following lost debates. My ego couldn't stand it.

Eventually, with experience and the right team mates, we started winning. I became an award winning speaker and then my team had an undefeated home season - losing alas, in the first round of the finals. The thing was, that back then I would argue with anyone. Nobody was undeserving of my scathing intellects bite. What was important to me was that everybody knew who the smartest douche in the room was. I would argue with anyone over anything. The important thing, was winning.

I had skills to get my way all the time. (Not all the time, I lost a bunch of times) But I thought there was this holy grail of being unbeatable logically.

I was over exuberant about intelligence, intellect, logic. Even though it would be almost a decade later that I actually first learned about formal and informal fallacies, rational debate and what an argument consisted of. I just had this clear cut path - fight my way to the top.

Because the emphasis and sole measure of success was on winning, defeating your opponent. I call this mindset 'the death dealing sword' a purely destructive tool - for destroying opposition, resistance.

Book 2: The Swordless Sword

I started debating in year 8, I would have been 14 at the time. I kept doing it until I was 18, at that stage a fifth of my entire life. I don't know when, but eventually my EQ started speaking up and noticing that sometimes people weren't impressed. They resented my aggression, responded with dislike, started treating me as unapproachable.

In a true blessing, I eventually realised that the people that were impressed by my argumentative nature were wrong. I would later learn of the psychological experiment that found in any conversation between strangers the best impression was created by the person who spoke the least. Some reflection as well that I'd never myself walked away from an argument thinking 'gee it feels great knowing how wrong and stupid I am!'

So I gave it up, (as much as I consciously could). Turned at some point, anti-debating. Decided that values aren't arbitrary, and bad causes should lose because they are bad, not because they are argued poorly. Good causes should win out, even if it's me opposing them.

And thus I entered my 'conflict rejection' phase.

The thing is, that some people, some cats never get to this phase, importantly they never realize the distinction between the competitive domain of debating and how things work in real life. There are four types of conflicts (broadly speaking) I define by their outcomes win-win, win-lose, lose-win, lose-lose.

Inside the context of debating, you have win-lose, lose-win outcomes. The positions are neatly mutually exclusive, one teams win is at the expense of the other. Simple. But artificial.

Outside of debating, you get lose-lose and win-win far more often.

Book 3: The Life Giving Sword.

I can't even recall what or when or with whom it happened. Whether it was on my behalf or another's. Which is strange. But eventually I had an epiphany in a situation where the very skills I had rejected became useful and constructive.

I do recall, miraculously getting my arse handed to me, and actually walking away thinking 'gee it feels great knowing how wrong and stupid I am!' I was literally overjoyed and freed by the experience of getting demolished. I like to think I lost that argument quickly and gracelessly.

But here is the thing. I once in a different context posed the question 'when losers win, are they no longer losers?' a fun little word game. But one that has come back to me very recently and struck me as entirely relevant. Perhaps a key to life.

Some people, unwittingly, unknowingly and through no fault of their own where born and raised to lose. They have learned self destructive behaviors, ones that not only hurt themselves but those around them. When these people win, when they get their way over certain matters - when their self destructive nature wins out - everybody loses. (lose-lose)

Here you have a context where if they defeat you, if they introduce or prevail in the conflict, not only do you lose - they lose as well. It's in their own best interests to lose.

Some people, unwittingly, unknowingly and through no fault of their own where born and raised to win. They have learned self promoting behaviors, ones that not only uplift themselves but those around them. When these people win, when the get their way over certain matters - everybody wins, even the 'losers'. (win-win)

Picking your battles is knowing when your victory's are at the expense of others and yourself. If there's a way to fuck up the battles you pick, it's when you stand to lose if others win (lose-win). But really the only fight to pick, the essence of the life giving sword is win-win. You practically have a moral imperative to introduce conflict.

But this knowledge is an artform in itself. fools rush in.

Malcolm Gladwell's Next Book

I finished David & Goliath, a couple of days ago. This isn't a review.

I'm currently reading Antifragile, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb a former subject of one of Malcolm Gladwell's articles in the New Yorker. I bring NNT up, because on a page I read this morning he talked about how professional journalists took his book 'Fooled By Randomness' and misrepresented his message.

I think David & Goliath is an important follow up to Outliers, because I think heaps of people read outliers and came away with the incredibly stupid '10,000 hour' rule. Again I don't know if NNT will comment on this in his upcoming chapters on the fragilistas, but it's the kind of thing fragilistas will misconstrue and trumpet on about.

I hate the '10,000 hour rule'. Not the rule itself, but the phrase. Short distinct and memorable, as opposed to the less memorable qualifier, that those who followed it - loved what they did. Loved what they did so much as to pursue 10,000 hours without really evaluating the probabilities of success or costs of failure. Gates to Gretzky they didn't so much as do the 10,000 hours but were availed both the disposition and opportunities to get 10,000 hours.

What I imagine, is Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother's everywhere pointing at a copy of Outliers and saying 'now stop playing and go practice violin!' then under their breath 'waste of motherfucken time...' or in other words, the 10,000 hour rule as misconstrued is employed as license for child abuse everywhere.

I don't like it. Paradoxically, I'm going to call the 10,000 hour rule lazy. It's just plain lazy to believe you can work hard and you will be absolved of risks and yet somehow the world will reward you for it.

So David and Goliath is a nice frustrater for fans of Outliers. Outliers though is a truly excellent book, as was Blink and the Tipping Point. David & Goliath is perhaps that first 'difficult second album' to the mega-hit of Outliers. I think it won't sell as well, won't be talked about as much and thus, a naive 10,000 hour rule will persist. Because Tiger Mother's can make their kids do 10,000 hours of violin practice but they can't make their child a dyslexic options trader, or trial lawyer. Hopefully though, the very notion that their child is not encountering enough adversity will frustrate their natural inclination to try and insulate them from all adversity.

So Gladwell's next book? What's it going to be? I have no fucken idea. But I think he like NNT (unashamedly) and Michael Lewis (unashamedly) are writing about markets as a consistent theme. And I think he touched on a viable theme to actually continue a thought into a whole new book - the full court press.

He simply asks why the full court press hasn't caught on, after it got an inexperienced coach to the national finals in his first season coaching a junior girls basketball team.

So you have the tipping point, about the spread of ideas, and then you have this story in David & Goliath and you have this interesting question of why some viable, proven, good ideas don't spread.

I just assert, with no evidence, (and no real understanding of how NNT's fat-tail investment approach really works) that as the world becomes increasingly globalised (flat world thinking) the more effective contrarian strategies will be.

Contrarian strategies are simply strategies that assume the majority can be wrong, they bet against the momentum of the market waiting for a correction they feel are inevitable. I don't know any unashamed examples, and despite Buffett saying 'our strategy is to be fearful when the market is greedy and greedy when the market is fearful.' and some such, and being a student of Benjamin Graham's 'Mr. Market' he denies he is a contrarian.

So I don't know if  being contrarian strictly means you are mechanically contrarian 'I must assume the contrary position' as John Cleese might say, a reflexive 'no it isn't' strategy. Or whether one can set about trying to make intelligent bets, and wind up being contrarian due to the collective stupidity. A de facto contrarian maybe.

Gladwell, could do a book about why good ideas don't prevail. I guess in a way NNT has done 4 books about why good ideas don't prevail. Michael Lewis kind of does the David & Goliath stories, which explain how good ideas can prevail (Money Ball & The Blind Side) but he hasn't really looked into why the bad ideas are so prevalent to begin with... ah... I can't make that call, I actually haven't read any of Michael Lewis' books. Liar's Poker is on my 'to read' list.

Gladwell though, can tell stories, and people have learned to listen to them. He (perhaps) presents empiric findings in the form of anecdote which sadly sway people more than raw data and empiric experiments. Gladwell can tell the story of Henry George, and why his economic model never caught on. Or the story of risk homeostasis. Or why lottery isn't used to select members of parliament/congress.

I think why good ideas don't catch on their proven merits is a most interesting subject for a book. Stories must abound on the theme.

Heuristic

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck." ~ the duck test.

Actually the wikipage on the duck test is pretty amusing, largely because a potent picture-caption combo.

The duck test is a heuristic, a rule of thumb. It may lack the precision of say, DNA testing, but it's good enough.

What is good enough? Something that works often enough to be useful, and when it goes wrong it's of negligible consequence. A heuristic survives because of it's imprecision, because it has a bunch of exceptions, it gets naturally selected out if these exceptions are actually of any concern.

Go ahead, try and imagine a situation, a dire situation where not knowing if something that looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, is of dire consequence?

Notice, that the duck test is not for example going to get Elmer Fudd confused betwixt firing at a duck or firing at his own daughter, or even confusing a duck for a rabbit for that matter.

As Douglas Adams parodied:

"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands."

Now I'm sitting with my friend Rod and he is talking about the launch of the Apollo mission. If the trajectory is off by 1 degree, just 1 degree, the rocket misses the moon by some hundred-kajillion-billion-miles. 

What's the solution?

I facetiously suggested you launch rockets in 180 directions, so one of them is bound to hit.

The answer though, is (hopefully) obvious. You build a rocket that can adjust it's course. 

I'm sure the apollo missions had a more specific trajectory than 'up' but essentially, when you are able to adjust that's really all you need.

NNT would cite domain dependent thinking, in that while it seems obvious to build rockets that can adjust course and cars with steering wheels and ships with rudders and pencils with erasers. There's times when we strive to an ideal of perfection, precision, as if the best approach to the problem is simply to get that trajectory absolutely right.

What are Carl Thompson's secret's to making the worlds best bass guitars? 'Use Good Wood.' not particularly helpful, but I think if you come across a number of master craftsman, practitioners, artists, chess masters you'll find they just have broad principles to convey. No specific technique like Kung Fu Panda's Wu Shu finger hold.

While presumably there's a lot of skill in balancing a bass so it sits right on the body, and placing frets so they achieve the right harmonic frequency, Carl Thompson pointed out the hazard of overdoing such precision work - he'd seen bass builders pet a fret board on that was thin as paint, so that it got scratched and was impossible to remove because the veneer was so masterful. Or wiring up the pots so the wire was the perfect length, then one of the pots busted and you had nothing to play with, nothing to cut away so you had to rewire the bass rather than just replace a knob or pickup.

NNT divides these principles into a dichotomy of being 'approximately right' or 'wrong with infinite precision'. Delicious.

Let's recap on what has been covered in this blog before.

So Miyamoto Musashi arrives late at Ganryu Island by boat, where he has carved a 'bokken' wooden practice sword from an old oar in the bottom of the boat. Sasaki 'Ganryu' Kojiro whose day goes badly enough for an island to be named after him is furious at Musashi's tardiness for their duel. According to legend, Kojiro drew his sword 'The Drying Pole' and threw his scabbard away.

Here remarked Miyamoto Musashi 'You've lost.'

What makes the legend plausible, is if you read the Book of Five Rings, I can't account for what is lost in the original language, but from the translations I've read, Musashi's confidence is about as complete as one could get. I can totally see the author calling a fight for himself, to his opponent as it is being engaged.

Assume the legend to be true then, Musashi knows none of the details, couldn't possibly know, how the fight would go down. He just applied a heuristic, a man who throws away a perfectly good scabbard doesn't expect to win. A victor would make sure to keep their scabbard, for being alive, they would need it to sheath their sword in.

The other (perhaps) heuristic or reverse heuristic to apply is that a man that turns up with a wooden oar handle to face a Japanese katana doesn't expect to lose (or even be hit).

Move past Musashi's voice in his book of 5 rings and you'll find it filled with vague hueristics, including his 'body of a rock' untouchable defence. I think it's a not-unreasonable inference that rather than some mystical technique that hardens Musashi to stone, the principle was to not get hit at all by an opponents weapon - based on the fact that Musashi in legend would fight naked blades with wooden practice swords, sticks, fence posts, scabbards etc.

Switch over to his contemporaries in the Yagyu clan, who devised the 'no-sword' school of kenjutsu, and their invincible defence breaks down to getting a good judgment of your opponents range and never letting them get in range.

I share all this to point out that those adolescent minds that seek out esoteric martial arts treatises for secrets to hidden human potential are often dissappointed that far from specific actionable techniques to dominance, the martial arts treatises are usually just a collection of heuristics.

But that in itself is telling. Because martial memes are subject to the same darwinian forces that apply to biology. Ineffective martial memes kill their host organism when stressed.

Sun Tzu's art of war contains no concise, comprehensive strategy of dominance. Just a set of rules that evidently over the ages and abstracted to other contexts work 'well enough' most of the time. The Art of War breaks down to a collection of duck-tests.

Get to the battlefield first and you'll win.

Take the higher ground and you'll win.

Always punish deserters and cowards.

Don't eat provisions provided/discarded by your enemy.

And so on for a bunch of pages, of which I'm sure history would find exceptions that would reject every single thing discussed in the Art of War as a hard and fast rule. But I guess that's why it's called the 'Art' and not 'Science' of war. These are just generally good strategies and tactics to adopt. They work well enough that they are a good basis to adjust from. And if you are aware that they are fallible, then they actually help you see that the problem is not as straightforward as it first appears.

Because what makes a rule of thumb smart, is that they have a built in stupidity, they are fallible. They inspire a different kind of confidence to say Modern Portfolio Theory - it's genuine confidence - the willingness to take risks rather than hubris - a belief in riskless-profit.

As President Ike quoted 'Plans are nothing, but planning is everything' as good a military heuristic as there is. Nothing goes to plan, planning allows you to recognise what isn't going to plan.

I also like the heuristic 'you know you've won when the enemy conforms to your strategy' you don't need to know the details, you can't know the details, you just need them to start behaving like you want them to.

I haven't read far enough into NNT's book Antifragile, he certainly included the memorable phrases of 'approximately right' vs. 'wrong with infinite precision' in the futile attempt to eliminate all risk from life. But I'm sure he's coming to the fragilista's and could predict that they will never use heuristics, or if they do, won't treat them as soft general principles but hard and fast rules - subject to 'insults from reality' as Sam Harris would say, an author I suspect NNT doesn't respect much.

Anyway, due to my current reading, I learned a new word, a word central to who I live my life and interact with my environment.

Precision is at best a training exercise. Heuristics are for going live.

Certified

I've had reason to think about the few truly failed relationships I've had over the years. By truly failed I mean they are, as of this writing over. There are people I can go a year standing on my head without speaking to or seeing, but the relationship isn't over, it's secure. It is ever present simply waiting for the time when it will be activated again.

My Japanese family might be a good example of this, we don't communicate much, until I go to Japan, and then they smoothly supplant my social life here. They are the people suddenly that I text daily, spend all my downtime with, laugh and joke with. I feel sorrow at our parting, but we both resume our lives for a few years until we meet again.

The failed relationships are also secure, they are firmly established as over. I have one, truly failed relationship. A friendship that ended because I was inspired to never exert energy to repair it. Then I have a few teetering on the edge.

I notice though, a pattern.

I have long felt that the surest way to misery is to keep score. My most disdainful and hated phrase in the whole English language is: 'I've worked hard.' In my view an almost equivalent statement to 'I took no risks' to which the only fitting response is 'duh!'.

What characterised my at-risk/failed relationships, is a form of this score keeping. The relationships I struggle to maintain are where people have become invested in a set of rules to deliver ... I don't know, happiness, respect, love, recognition etc. And the tension is all from the failure of these rules to meet expectations, the insults from reality.

Almost all the animosity, I feel, is directed at my (and often, everyone's) failure to play by the rules.

Here is the only rule, I feel, worth playing by:

No matter how much effort, or sacrifice you go to to obtain a certificate of greatness, understand a certificate of greatness is not a recognized qualification in greatness.

Listen Up Good Mother Fuckers

Last week I met with a wise man, a man I once said of 'if by his age I have half his knowledge I'll consider it a life well lived'

He is one person that has manhandled me, flung me around like a rag doll and just obliterated all my defenses. It was one of the most powerful and most enjoyable experiences of my life, I shall ever be grateful for it.

Anyway, I was explaining to him a situation, dilemma I was in, a central tension in my life. I have a question that plagues me which is 'how do I act with integrity?' I am fortunate to be experiencing remorse from one situation where I didn't as another near identical (but crucially, not identical) situation plays out.

That dilemma I might write about another time. 

But this post, this post isn't about me. It's about you.

The wise man said to me 'remember how I said love and hate are the two sides of the same coin: the coin is passion?' and I did both our brains are wired up like elephants. He said 'well helping and hurting are two sides of the same coin. What's the coin?' It took me two or three guesses before I got close enough for him to just tell me. 

The coin is empathy.

I don't want to steal a wise man's thunder, so instead I'll just say this very insight is very present in my favorite Lauryn Hill track - Ex-Factor note in particular the contrast between 'No one loves you more than me, and no one ever will.' and 'No ones hurts me more than you, and no one ever will.'

Now I was walking through New York looking for a shoe store lost and getting sucked again and again back into Mid-town, arguably the worst place on earth, truly the arsehole of Manhattan proving once again that the perfect body doesn't exist.

But I digress.

I overheard this lady on her cellular phone speaking to somebody she was out of sorts with and she kept repeating to my delight: 'Now you listen, and you listen good...' in a delightful ebonic accent. How I wish somebody would speak to me that way.

But I mention that to say this. So you listen, and you listen good mother fucker. I am trying to reach you, YOU directly because if I have one Christmas wish for peace and love and harmony it is this. Pay attention. Are you ready? Open up your mind and lower your defenses. Here it comes:

Asphyxiating infants aren't saved by asphyxiating infants. They are rescued by big strong fire fighters who are trained and equipped to rescue people in these dangerous situations even if they don't always succeed.

Drowning people aren't saved by drowning people. They are rescued by big strong life guards who are trained and equipped to rescue people who are drowning even if they don't always succeed.

Broken people aren't saved by broken people. 

It's a fairy tale, a fucken myth, an old wives tale. Moreover it's actually really dangerous. And just like an asphyxiating infant is more likely to have other asphyxiating infants around them than firefighters, and just like a drowning person is more likely to be surrounded by other drowning people than surf-life-guards, so too are broken people likely to keep the company of other broken people. 

Which is dangerous and bad enough. But please, please, please, please I am talking to you - STOP PUTTING THEM TOGETHER. The act of omission is bad, one I am now struggling with. An act of commission I hope to never ever have on my conscious.

It's a suckers game. Broken people will empathise with eachother 'He really understands me' are famous last words, because anybody who can recognise the self-destruction in another that they feel themselves is going to finally, be able to turn that destructive potential on somebody other than themselves, and be destroyed for it.

So let's be clear - absolutely clear. Asphyxiating people know how to asphyxiate. Drowning people know how to drown. Broken people know how to break. They have nothing to teach each other, they can just combine their expertise to amplify and accelerate.

[exhale]

Okay, so let's bring it back to my conversation with the wise man. I'm still really immature, this wise man can teach me. I can see the gaps in my understanding. I'm excited by it, it fills my future with potential and promise. My future looks bright.

What is empathy

Now you know, it's value is greatest in it's ability to travel. Somebody identical to you empathizing is almost useless to you, as their percentage of time experiencing empathy approaches 100% they are simply going to make the exact same moves as you are. When somebody exotic and foreign to you can empathize with you, temporarily they can inform themselves, correct for your weaknesses and make them irrelevant, amplify your strengths and move you closer to theirs.

That's what my wise man points out with his helping/hurting coin. A skilled firefighter knows the mistakes an infant is going to make, understands how they will panic, how their intuitions and instincts will betray them and can correct for them, maximizing their chances of survival. A skilled surf-life-rescue volunteer will know what goes through a drowning mans head, how their family are going to react, what panic will do to them and correct for them, maximizing their chances of survival.

The point is, that empathy is useful when you can actually choose which face of the coin comes up. When you have the skills and the training to choose between helping or hurting, cruelty or kindness then and only then can you really engage these situations.

The Utility of A "Stone Boat"

'A lot of comedians are very troubled people by the way...' ~ Dr Gabor Mate.

Our society has subscribed fully, impressively, recklessly to a notion of sacrifice. I don't know when or where and why, but we now celebrate the martyr and live in a cult of suffering.

It isn't Jesus. Jesus is okay, though I am persuaded by the charismatic Christopher Hitchens, that Christianity is a cult of suffering. Because it's more recent than that, more recent than capitalism as an ideology.

Capitalism, as practiced, as it exists as a lot of problems, but at it's core in it's naive conception it was underpinned by the notion 'we can all prosper together' which I'm sure has something to do with it's wide subscription. We subscribe wishfully, not empirically.

What prevails is the idea of sacrifice, that it isn't possible to progress or advance without some sacrifice. We praise Steve Jobs as a genius of our times, yet the man died of cancer. Bill Gates who does seem to have it all has been out of vogue for two decades almost. Eric Clapton overcomes his heroin addiction, wins a stack of Grammy's, is still alive to this day. Yet it is broke and abused Jimi Hendrix that died face down in a pool of his own vomit that is more celebrated.

We find something comforting about the tortured genius, we find some strange comfort in their incompleteness. The self defeating example of their lives. Hendrix is dead, did he ever find true love and acceptance? Did he have a safe place? Forget the music he never composed, he lost the opportunity to pursue happiness when he died.

Jobs had the world of nerds in his hands dancing, yet his cancer must have been incredibly painful, for him and those who loved him, a painful end.

In the modern era, we value the tortured soul as somehow worthier than that of the sage.

People who can render great benefit to others yet are unable to save themselves. We are being sold this story and we are buying it.

Japan has evolved into perhaps the most masochistic of cultures in the world, yet go back 3 centuries, and look at the decidedly un-japanese genius of that era.

Miyamoto Musashi died at the age of 60. What was his genius? Mortal combat, his very lifestyle was putting himself deliberately (and consensually) into mortal danger. He did not die in combat, he had many famous duels some of them resulting in the death(s) of his opponent(s). Yet he grew old and died, of cancer and his final work really is a sad tale of self-repression, but still compared to the life-span of his European counterparts Musashi lived 3 lifetimes, genius used to be the reverse of the 27 club. Everybody died at 27 unless you were a genius.

Then there's Yagyu Sekishusai, 'The Stone Boat' died at 78. His genius? Mortal combat again. Also regarded as invincible, I read his grandson's book. Where Musashi was invincible carrying two swords though, Yagyu was invincible fighting with no swords. He didn't need to draw against his opponent. He didn't even need to bear arms. This man had it all, by his full maturity.

He allegedly was not without crisis. He did withdraw, seeing no point in anything beyond his swordsmanship and described even that as having 'the utility of a stone boat'

I wish to rededicate my life to pursuing this kind of genius. This sage like genius. I've realised in the past week that I am still very immature. Incredibly immature. The thought excites me with possibilities.

love.

Free Won't

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) wrote in The Bed of Procrustes: "You are rich if and only if the money you refuse tastes better than the money you accept."

Beautiful.

When you start out on a journey, a vocation, you're highly likely to say shit in the neighbourhood of 'if only somebody would just give me a chance.' Chances and opportunities seem scarce.

But as you start to succeed, and as NNT has studied, success then compounds - opportunities become abundant and necessitate decision making - saying 'no'.

How do you know if you've succeeded? In short, it's when you say no to an opportunity. Success is heralded by opportunity cost.

Dr Gabor Mate of whom I don't know if NNT would approve or affiliate, but fuck it I'm doing it here didn't coin the phrase but employed it - drug addiction isn't a lack of 'Free Will' but 'Free Won't' an inability to say 'No'. The nature of addiction is a lack of 'Free Won't'.

I guess if I don't believe in free will, by default I don't believe in free won't. Still - a useful concept.

the trouble for couples

So I think recent (post wise) I already made this point, so if you're attentive you should blitz this test. If you know one of the 3 (or 4) basic concepts from which all my posts stem, you should blitz the test as well.

So you have 4 options:
1. good couple stay together
2. good couple split
3. bad couple split
4. bad couple stay together

Here's the quiz:

1. Which are the bad options?
2. Which are the errors?

Because this is a blog post - I'm going to put the answers in plane sight of the questions. The only truly 'bad' option is 4. Though it would be nice if 3 never happened in the first place. question twix the answer is 2 and 4.

I hope that's straight forward. If there's some 'ugh?' over the difference between 'bad' and 'error' let me put it in the flowery prose of Shakespeare for you:

"Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." you know what, that's probably paraphrased I'm too lazy to even copy and paste that shit.

So assuming no incredibly compelling extenuating circumstances, if a good couple split - it is an 'error' the wrong decision was made. But it's not 'bad' because the relationship was good. ie. you can look at it and say 'we had a good thing going on but it's over now.' It happens, a career can get prioritised, people can I believe even exit a good relationship to pursue a bad one.

That's all just preamble.

A friend of mine ended a bad relationship. I'm impressed. Because bad relationships are kind of like bad food. And food I believe is the most common substance people abuse. Like KFC, you know, you fucking know that it's bad for you. Yet, you keep eating it. You make a decision, Colonel, I'm leaving you tomorrow. Then the next day comes, there's nothing in your pantry, there's money in your wallet, you are suddenly hit by the physical withdrawel of sugar, salt, fat, caffeine. Every hit you can get in a value meal. And lo and behold, back you are at KFC.

Many relationships, particularly bad relationships are kind of functionally no different. People might be less good at realising that the relationship is bad for them, particularly if they have never had a good relationship. Which brings me to a side point:

"Tis better to have loved and lost..." If you've had a good relationship fail. You have a benchmark. It's very hard to enter or get stuck in a bad relationship after knowing what a good one consists of. Adolescence is generally where we have a string of bad relationships and bad sex until we figure out by trial and error what a good one consists of. Going from good to bad, generally only happens when somebody has never had a bad relationship to figure out what a good one consists of. My friend has a term that's probably useful called 'deferred adolescence' for people who haven't figured out 'not to date the dickheads we dated in highschool'.

Back to the main point, when you are in a relationship, any relationship you are going to get dollops of dopamine and hits of oxytocin from even your worst partner. Eddy Murphy does a bit in either Delirious or Raw about making a girl come real hard and then you get to say to her 'what have you done for me lately?'

Many of the couples around, not to be overly cynical, are actually just addictions. Not smack or crack or some shit, but your lazy garden variety fast food addiction, caffeine addiction.

It's why I kind of resent the advice 'dude you need to get laid' offered to people who are down in the dumps. Often this equates to 'just get drunk' (also often offered) or 'you know what will cheer you up? heroin' ridiculous, scandelous.

The thing is, that drugs work. Getting wasted will calm a lot of anxiety, taking heroin feels really great, and having sex will make you feel more in control of your life and less anxious about the people you are afraid of.

But to quote(ish) William Goldman 'one of the hollywood bullshit stories you can tell is "A Good Woman Fixes Everything"' and as he goes on to point out, in reality, there are plenty of men with good women that leave them still drinking and getting abusive.

I can't speak with any authority at all, but drugs are known to work, it's a chemical reaction. Exercise works, it hits the same receptors in the brain as morphine. Hugs work, sex works, all these things can do things to your brain that lift your mood. Unfortunately you can enjoy an intimate coupling with a man who you don't enjoy abusive verbal exchanges with regularly. A man can cuddle you as he whispers what a worthless piece of shit you are in your ear.

And those are just the extremes. You can get by for years on a ho-hum dose of dopamine with somebody who roles their eyes at you, or leaves you isolated at parties, or won't leave you alone at parties, or is never at fault for anything.

The thing is, you can only really know how good or bad a relationship is from the inside. Or can you? I'm currently being proven right in the Marxist hypothesis that 'if it looks like a disaster, walks like a disaster and sounds like a disaster, then it's probably a disaster.'

This poses the trouble we have with couples, a seperate topic altogether and one I know too little to write about. Maybe in 6 months time. Anyway, it's what to do. How to act with integrity when somebody is embroiled in a bad relationship.

Thoughts Fed

One of those valuable days where you feel transparent and can see through yourself as easily as others do.

I read this:

" If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day… More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
"

The Busy Trap

I'm guilty.

Another friend commented on a set of pictures I did about Jesus. Proving the value sometimes of ambiguous encoding of message. I'm not sure he got the joke I was trying to make, but read a different critique I hadn't constructed. But as the prolific anonymous once said 'All art is self-portraiture' so I take the critique personally. Jesus may be a dude, but that was my Jesus it came from me. The critique was that efforts to combat your demons may in fact 'amplify them by their absence' I'm not sure what it means to be honest, but there's definitely something to chew on in there.

We all project ourselves out there as an image, so it's nice when somebody points out some spots or even pubic hairs on the lens.

the drinking coconut

I had just finished... I dunno, something. Something had me in the city buying something or some appointment, maybe teaching. I dunno. My memory is pretty sterling most the time, but certain repetitious tasks blend memories together. So I can remember the entirety of the last conversation you and I had, but I may not necessarily remember if I brushed my teeth this morning or where I parked my bike.

Anyway, none of that is relevant. I was cruising down Victoria Parade, and I don't know what the word for it is, but this guy was listening to Tool while pasting up posters with a broom. And overhearing it filled me with joy, and I thought 'man that makes my fucking day' and contemplated posting a shout out that would never reach my intended audience on facebook.

Continue coasting down Victoria Parade though and you come to the bane of all traffic - Hoddle St. It's a slow painful intersection where essentially two freeways collide at a set of lights on the doorstep of Melbourne CBD. Seriously this city would work better if they just erected an East-West Berlin Wall type thing rather than whatever Hoddle St is supposed to achieve.

So I'm sitting at the lights, waiting. As one does. And then I hear this 'hey are you thirsty?' as a cyclist, it took me a while for my subconscious to process that the voice was addressing me. And I turned around.

There I see a white commodore or falcon type car, with my friend Andrew leaning out the drivers window with a hand extended, and in that hand is a drinking coconut. 'Take it, put it in your backpack and drink it when you get home.'

I have to take it. As soon as I grasp it he continues to execute the left hand turn he is in the middle of. And like that it is gone.

How delightfully random!

Or is it?

In one sense it appears random, because this stuff doesn't happen all the time. It required a friend spotting me in traffic, and I don't consistently ride home the same way at the same times, so that lowers the odds that anyone will spot me on one particular day. I don't know if Andrew spotted me while taking a drive on a regular route, but I presume he was also not following a routine. Thus we managed to intersect and he at least managed to spot me.

He also happened to have a drinking coconut spare.

So it's improbable. But then it kind of stops being 'random'.

Firstly, take Andrew himself. He is the kind of wonderous rarity that would hand a drinking coconut out a car window. If you ever get a chance to meet him, know that he is amazing, has an amazing energy and please, please, please I implore you... shake his hand. It's a must.

And then, he didn't spot any friend riding through traffic. He spotted me. He spotted me and decided I was worth the effort to track down and give up a drinking coconut for.

I don't think it's random. Or an accident. I have to confess I love Andrew, but I actually don't know him that well. We didn't talk much in school, I saw him rarely in the 12 intervening years and as of late last year I have only run into him 3-4 times. Yet something has changed and as I recognise an amazing energy in him, he seems to see something in me.

This coconut transaction is imbued with meaning, that's what makes it so fucken great to me. Our 3-4 conversations over the past year have produced a coconut.

My life is strange, and wonderful and I don't understand it. But it is increasingly being characterised by these strange acts of generosity. I don't know what it is. But I do know what it isn't.

It's not an accident.

Proof of Concept

The night before last, I completed my live exhibition. That's why I've gone up a notch.

The strange thing is, and the content creators privilege/curse is that it fell far short of what was envisioned.

But if I could succinctly describe my creative process it would be thusly: stripping back my vision into something that can actually be done.

I did something, it was maybe 30% of what I envisioned. It was still my most ambitious undertaking ever.

Here's the thing. I've never experienced fear before. Not just anxiety, but fear. A grounded fear of the unknown. It wasn't just ambitious, in terms of quantity of work produced divided by the time I had to produce it. It was the farthest I've ever strayed from my comfort zone.

Let me tell you about the discomfort. Let me tell you about the fear.

I heard the biggest obstacles to learning are emotional. This was totally the case. This year, my gut has been in fine form. My brain and mouth hasn't. When something feels wrong, I felt it in my gut. When I feel it in my gut, it generally goes wrong. Each time that's happened I've said nothing, so I don't know if it's a useless sense of foreboding, but it is at the very least a correct sense of foreboding.

I never had that with this project, or at least, the project overall. That's how I got as far as I did. That is to say, to do it. What I had the entire 8 months prepping for it was this gradually increasing current of fear. I think, and I bring it up that this is half of what procrastination consists of. And with this sort of shit, I think you need to be kind to yourself and realise that procrastination is part of the process too, as in procrastination is something I at least, find I have to get done. Sure it can be disrupted, but I actually feel like I'm being interrupted when somebody urges me to stop procrastinating.

The current of fear passing is the certain knowledge that you have to do something that you don't want to do. I can't explain it any better than that. For me, that was practice. The single hardest part of it, what is totally foreign to me, is knowing what I want to draw and instead of just working it out in pencil on the page having to do it again and again. After it was all worked out on a page.

The other half of procrastination is what I have discovered is called 'self-efficacy' perhaps better understood as creative confidence. So how it works in my case, is I sit down to practice, being afraid of how hard it is going to be, then I find it easier than I expected, and I don't practice as much as I thought I had to. And it's break time again.

What I've discovered, is that I approach art no different from how I've approached school. If my other exhibitions were assignments though, this was an exam, an exam for the rare subject where I wasn't confident I could bullshit my way through.

Because the thing was, that the practice could never be 'done' all it could do was build my confidence, but simultaneously by focusing my attention on what I was undertaking, it stressed me out.

But that stress was omnipresent. It worked it's way into my muscular skeletal system. It effected my immune system. It effected my sleep. One thought kept entering my head again and again 'so this is stress.' I've never honestly experienced it, in my life. Not for anything I wanted to achieve. Not even when I did that play that I neither really directed or produced. This was my mental everest.

When I studied business, which is why I'm an artist, this guy from Axa which I'm not even sure exists anymore said that if you aren't stressed, you aren't making the right decisions.

The thing was, for all the stress, for all the fear, for all the procrastination, I never felt in my gut that this was bad.

Now. Now I'm just tired, and relieved, though the stress comes back a bit thinking about how stressed I was. But mostly just tired.

The best kind of tired. If you can maintain a good amount of tension for 8 months and release it, it's a high like no other. And an exhaustion better than death.

I love you all.