John Sylvain

The Importance of Nothing

2010-09-15T07:27:00.000-07:00

The Infernal Ewok woke me up at 5:30 this morning for his morning constitutional. As usual, reason had no effect and emotional appeals were likewise ignored. A self-centered monster of willfulness with a piercing little bark, he gets me to do what I know I should but have no desire to do.

As a result I saw the dawn sky this morning. It reminded me of the cover of the Hotel California album and that got me thinking about a bunch of things.

These things are all jumbled up in my head but they all point toward space.

Making space and appreciating spareness in creativity.

Letting the silence be.

Allow the blank space to speak.

I really want to go on and on about this but I don't have to. My message is getting through to me even as I write it.

The point is that there's a connection between a well crafted song, a well written passage and a well lived life.

I wrote down what I think the connection is but then I erased it.

It goes without saying.

On the Excruciation of Bad Theater - Part 2

2010-09-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

It was gratifying to have someone ask me what show I was talking about in my last post. It's nice to know that someone's reading. This person (Allen Lulu) encouraged me to write every day, so I will try to.

I didn't want to mention the title of the show because the show was so friendly in it's awfulness, so sincere and appealing, that I grew to like the performers despite their complete lack of talent.

But the short run is over and I'm pretty sure they won't read this.

On Friday night, I went with Zander, Apollo and Yogi to Anaheim to see a Rock n Roll version of A Midsummer Nights Dream at an outdoor venue in a park. The ride down was nice. We played 20 questions and the boys really loved that. We got there in safely and in good time and found the park and the venue to be lovely.

Then we walked in the venue.

The show was a mercifully truncated version of A Midsummer Night's Dream with some fifties Rock n Roll songs thrown in. The band was a four piece (piano, guitar, bass and drums) and when we walked in, they were playing. They were pretty terrible. I didn't think it was possible to do a passionless version of Great Balls of Fire until I saw them do it. Then there was a speech from the Anaheim Performing Arts Center. I didn't think it was possible to talk me out of building new facilities for the artistic expression until I saw them do it.

Then the play started.

With a few exceptions, the acting was mostly terrible. The band was awful, as I said, but they shined in comparison to the singers. During several numbers a random collection of ballet dancers from the Anaheim ballet would come out and do balletic swing dance. This was atrocious. During one of these excruciating numbers Zander leaned over and apologized to me. It was his idea to go.

By that time, however, I was enjoying it. I realized I was watching a fiasco unfolding. It was as fascinating as a train wreck. The performers were all well intentioned people who were doing their best. They couldn't sing or act but they were giving it the old college try in a friendly, unpretentious way. The boys enjoyed it and it was free.

Then the fireworks started.

In the middle of the play we started to hear the boom of fireworks from Disneyland. The experience had gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. The lights started misfiring and the wireless microphones started acting up. The only thing that didn't go during the performance was the set. It wasn't a problem until a tree fell over during the curtain call.

By the end I was weeping tears of joy. Actually, not really but the production was a quick two hours and it didn't get too cold. We ate some buttery, salty popcorn after intermission. We had another kick ass game of 20 questions on the way home.

Fine.

Something about the whole experience wasn't as horrible as bad theater usually is. I think it was the lack of pretense and the casual nature of the venue. I felt like I could leave at any time if it too awful and Yogi had no problem asking me questions during the performance. I think I didn't feel trapped and punished.

And the lady who played Puck was good.

On the Excruciation of Bad Theater - Part 1

2010-09-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw a terrible show. It was so bad it was sublime. It approached perfection in it's awfulness.

But it wasn't a horrible experience, which was surprising given the fact that watching bad theater is a wretched ordeal - close to dental surgery - that explains why this red-headed stepchild of all the arts is always reported to be dying. It's not that theater is really dying. It's that bad theater is killing it's audience. Seeing bad theater is often a "well-I'll-never-do-that-again" kind of thing so bad plays reduce the audience of theater in general.

The wonderful thing about theater is that it's a living, breathing, communal experience. An ephemeral connection is made and a short-lived community is born out of the common emotions and ideas. It's not private but it's intimate. It's a shared experience that's also unique and personal. There's nothing better than a space filling with swells of laughter, applause or quiet tears. It can be an intense, passionate and mind-altering experience.

When theater fails it's a lot like bad sex. Embarrassment, resentment and recriminations follow. The thing with bad sex is that you can talk it over or leave the room when you realize it's bad. In theater the show must go on and it's not appropriate to talk during the show. It's often difficult to leave. As an audience member you have been cheated. You came to have a good experience, to be entertained or moved or enlightened. Instead you're trapped in a room with people who are doing something terrible, if not too you than at least toward you, and you have almost no recourse. You can't even ascertain if the rest of the audience feels the same way.

You're alone in hell and you have to wait until intermission at least before you can pee.

Last night was only like that for a short time, however. There were some mitigating factors that kept me from clawing my eyes out.

Yogi is awake. I will continue this later.

Drilling Into Gooey Blocks of Story

2010-09-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

A big part of storytelling, and for the purpose of this essay let's assume that all creation is storytelling, is revelation. I don't mean a revelation from god, I mean the way an author reveals the details of setting, character, theme and plot. The way the argument unfolds.

I always visualize a story as a four dimensional block, floating in idea space. The four dimensions might be time, characters, point of view and plot. To express the story you need to unravel this block into a linear line or maybe drill through it to uncover the details.

The point is that writing is two-dimensional. It's a line that moves in one direction from left to right. (There have been experiments with multiple lines like Jeffrey Jones' Night Coil or the footnotes of Infinite Jest or The Widow's Son, but for the most part simultaneous linearity is too confusing to effectively communicate much.) On the other hand, the true source of the story is holographic.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and other parallel works are great examples of what I'm talking about. Hamlet exists somewhere as an ideal block of information, emotion and experience. Shakespeare chose one way of presenting the material while Stoppard chose another. Telling the story from Gertrude's point of view or about Gertude would require a different route through the four dimensional block and would reveal different things. (Maybe very interesting and heartbreaking things. Has this been done?)

The choice of how the story unfolds or, to continue my poor metaphor, to choose the route through the holographic block of story, is the real work of writing. They say there are no new stories to be told and that may be true to a certain extent, but how those existing stories are told is still a wide open field.

A big block of uncooked story (I'm thinking that it's more like a lasagna than a block) has no suspense, sentiment, humor or excitement in it. It's a bunch of information. Those things come from the unfolding. Suspense and humor, for example, are based on timing. The timing of when information is presented. It's in the execution of the storytelling that truth, wisdom and laughter are revealed.

Final geek note:
A great example of how the unfolding/revelation of a story affects every part of it is the Star Wars saga. I think of the story in the order I saw it. Episode 4 came first, followed by 5, 6, 1, 2, 3 and the Clone Wars. My son and his whole generation will always think about the saga starting with The Phantom Menace. That's hard for me to imagine. First of all you have the issue of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones being pretty terrible movies. Then you have the big reveal in Empire being no big deal. "Luke, I am your father!" (yeah, so?). Finally the whole thing becomes about the tragedy and last minute redemption of Anakin Skywalker rather than, as I see it, the heroic journey of Luke.

Then you have the Clone Wars which is so great in itself and makes the final film (or the third film if you're younger than 15) so much better by piling in a bunch of backstory.

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Our New Dog

2010-08-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

We have a new dog named Minuit. That's french for midnight and it's pronounced (by us) Minwee. I won't go into the charming reasons my teetering-on-pretentious eight year old chose the name. Suffice it to say that Minuit is a boy dog with a strangely feminine name and demeanor. Small, mostly black, looks almost exactly like a four-legged Ewok.

This dog is determined to improve us.

First of all, he demands to be walked every morning at dawn. This is, at first, terribly annoying since I'm the one groaning out of bed to doing the walking at the crack of my ass. But every time I do it, I end up profoundly grateful to the cute little monster. The mornings are beautiful and a walk is a great way to start the day.

I could go on and on about the advantages but I won't.

Secondly, Minuit chews stuff. Only expensive, important stuff such as MacBook Pro power cords. The only way we can survive is to make sure that there's nothing valuable on the floor. I'm sure that your mothers taught you better than me but don't worry, Minuit is taking up the slack.

Thanks dog.

Humor as a breakdown of metalanguage or why farts are funny

2010-07-06T17:08:00.000-07:00

I just got an invitation to the 25th Anniversary of the Purple Crayon, an improv group I was a founding member of back at Yale (I also came up with the name...more on that in some other blog). The Purple Crayon is the source of some of my happiest memories and strongest relationships so I'm really looking forward to the event. There's something about instantaneous co-creation in front of a crowd that brings people together. Like being in a battle but much more fun.

That brings up this theory I came up with back at Yale to explain what humor really was. I came up with it because my fellow Crayon Ian Jacobs was trying to figure out a theory of humor. I don't remember what he came up with but I thought my idea was pretty good.

Here it is.

Humor is a breakdown of the rules of language.

In this context I mean language in the semiotic or anthropological sense as the system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users. English is a language, cinema is a language, walking down the street has a language to it. A system of rules and conventions that we're expected to follow.

Humor always involves a breakdown of a language where the rules and conventions are broken or subverted or called into question. A pun is a breakdown involving the sounds of a particular language (or several languages). A pratfall calls attention to the way we expect people to move through space by thwarting those expectations. Social comedy points out the rules and conventions of race, religion or class that we live with by breaking those rules.

We start laughing at the world when we're figuring out the rules, around six months old. Three year olds can find the weirdest things funny because they don't understand language very well. The fact that they don't understand jokes but get them anyway is, ironically, hilarious.

This is a pretty good theory, I think. I haven't found any exceptions. The problem is that while I haven't disproved it, it's not particularly useful. While all humor is a breakdown of language, not all breakdowns of language are humor. In fact most are not.

Having said that I have to say this:

Farting is hilarious. The sound is funny. The smell is funny. The social context is always funny even if you're alone. Farts breakdown a whole host of rules and conventions all at once.

Finally I have to say that while I came up with this idea on my own, I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it and certainly not the best. There's a bunch of stuff on the web about it and several books.

Memory

2010-07-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

I want to ask you all a favor. I want you to remember this. Pay careful attention and remember this experience. I mean the one you are having right now.

I have these very specific memories that are scattered through my life. I have this one memory that has stuck in my mind for years. When I was about 4 or 5, I asked my mother why the gas gauge in the car went up when the car started. Since it was using gas it should go down right? So my mother explained something to me but I know that I misunderstood her because she is not insane and this is what I remember her saying:

"Gasoline is like orange juice. The more you use the more you have."

Now don't get me wrong. This makes absolutely no sense in any way shape or form. But it is one of those experiences I vividly remember.

It took me ten years trying to make sense of this answer before I finally figured that I just heard it or remembered it wrong.

Gasoline is not like orange juice at all. But ever since then orange juice and gasoline have been connected in my mind. And neither Gasoline nor orange juice increases in quantity as you use it.

But what does? The more you use it the more you have.

Love.

Creativity.

Credit card debt.

Memory?

Now it seems to me that these slivers or crystals of memory are hugely important just because they are what I remember.

I mean if something happens to you and you don't remember it and it leaves no physical evidence it is exactly as if it didn't happen at all. There is no difference for you. From your frame of reference the things you do not remember did not happen.

For example, people ask me how did you sleep and I always say I have no idea. I was asleep.

And on the other hand those things you remember for a long time are almost more real. And I'm thinking they have more of an impact.

Lately I have been wondering how I became me and you became you. Like what things happened to you that made you the person that you are and made the person next to you the person that they are.

And it makes intellectual sense that as we grow up the totality of our experience shapes our personality but from the inside, thinking back, it really doesn't feel like that. It feels like these random moments of my life that I remember very vividly have created me. The funny thing is there is no reason why these moments should be preserved in amber while everything else is lost. And this is especially important to me now because I have a baby who is 4 months old. I'd like to help him be happy and confident and loving and all that good stuff but I know that it's those random moments that he remembers that will have the big impact.

It's kind of like John Lennon's saying "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." Like it's that one moment when you don't pick up your child rather than the countless times you do that leaves them with a slight inferiority complex for the rest of their life. Or it's the one night you come home early from work and go star gazing that leads to a lifelong love of astronomy. Meanwhile the hundreds of nights of reading him or her to sleep has no impact. It's the offhand garbled comment about gasoline and orange juice that is repeated 30 years later.

It's what you remember that makes a difference.

Now of course there are dreams and sub-consciousness and yadda yadda yadda but where the heck does that stuff live. How can you measure the impact of stuff that is only in your mind that your mind is not aware of? I mean who's gonna keep track of that if you don't? If you have a dream and you don't remember it what is that? Did it happen? Did it ever exist? Yes? No?

I mean what does it mean to have something happen?

How the heck did I get here? What the heck am I saying? Who wrote this? Who are you people?

These questions are not important.

The important question is am I going to remember this in a week or a year? Are you? If none of us remember this moment in a year did it really happen?

Let's all promise to remember this. Please everyone stand up and raise your right hand and repeat after me. "I promise to remember this moment for as long as I live."

Think it'll work?

Aw forget it.

January 21th, 2002

Good News, Bad News

2010-06-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that 9 miners got trapped in a flooded mine for 3 days. The good news is that they all got rescued! The good news is that the Stock market was up over 400 points today! The bad news is that it's down over 2000 points from a year ago. The good news is that the U.S.A won the cold war and we are effectively the world's only superpower. The bad news is that the U.S.A won the cold war and we are now the world's biggest target.

The bad news is that we are all going to die someday.

The good news is that we're alive today.

I love saying I have some good news and some bad news because it's like a mini story. It has pathos and conflict and tension with the promise of a big payoff at the end. A lot of time I say "I've got some good news and some bad news" even when I only have one or the other. Makes it more exciting.

But there is always good news and bad news no matter what. If life is especially sweet at some point in time, say like right now while you are all listening to me. I know you are sitting there in rapt bliss thinking that this is the best essay you have ever heard in your life. But there's always a flipside, there's always a shadow, there's always another shoe. In this case the bad news is that sometime about 5 minutes in the future this time of milk and honey will end and I will stop talking.

I know it's rough but that's the way life is.

On the other hand there is always a silver lining. If you can't stand a performance here at ten tops you can take solace in the fact that it will end. If you're whole life is a horrifying blur of emotional and physical pain at least you can look forward to the sweet release of death someday.

Perhaps I'm overstating my case. Or maybe understating it. Or maybe I don't have a case.

Here's the thing. When you become a parent, which I recently did, you live in a new world of extremes that, from what I understand, you never ever get out of. Being a father is really really great. My little boy brings me a huge boatload of joy every single day. I am sure that I am not unique in this. Parents always say this kind of sappy stuff and until you actually become one you don't know (or care really) what the heck they are talking about. But trust me okay. Kids are little happiness factories.

The bad news is…if you have any imagination at all you spend most of it thinking up various catastrophes that could, at any time, snatch every shred of joy from your life. I don't dwell on these things but they just naturally pop into my mind. For superstitious reasons I don't want to mention any of the dozens of horrifying scenarios that leap to mind at anyone time but if we all just take a moment and think I'm sure we can all get on the same page pretty quickly.

Ready, close your eyes. Got it? Okay lets move on.

So add to these admittedly unlikely nightmarish occurrences the nasty things that are almost certain to happen like ear infections, overpriced sneakers, terrorist nuclear attacks and puberty and you can see why parents live in a world of fear.

But see in that world of fear is an island of joy. And a big part of the reason that the joy is so sweet is that you can imagine the worst and you notice that it's not happening….at the moment.

And of course it's not just parents that feel this way. It's everyone. When you know how bad things can be you appreciate the good all the more. That's why immigrants often appreciate this country more than native born folk. They know what freedom actually is because they know what it isn't. For those of us who have been here all along liberty is like water to fishes. We don't notice. Nor do we notice plenty or justice or peace unless we suddenly don't have it.

And it's like that with everything. The really, really rich people that I've known, and I've know a few, are bored and unhappy because they don't have to do anything. Those of us who have had to work to make rent money or food money or sneaker money would be SO HAPPY if we didn't have to do anything. I recently had a really bad cold and when I got well it felt SO GOOD to feel normal again I almost was happy that I was sick.

Almost.

But it's really true, I think. We notice the good in relation to the bad and if there is no bad then we don't notice the good.

I don't wanna get all polyannish on you now. We don't notice the good because good is relatively normal and the good won't sneak into our cave and eat us like a bad bad sabertoothed tiger will. There's no evolutionary reward for noticing the good and besides it's kind of boring. I find bitching and moaning much more entertaining than looking on the bright side. Have you ever met anyone who just remarked on all the good stuff that was going on all the time.

Wow. Look. A roof over our heads. And electric lights. And a nicely painted stage. And soft seats. And I have five fingers on each hand. Including an opposable thumb. Look at that! Whodathunkit!

That kind of pap doesn't make you feel good. What makes you feel good is to think about all the terrible things that aren't happening. What makes you feel really good is not to think "Hey I'm alive!" but to think "Hey! I'm not dead!" Light without darkness is boring. Light without darkness is just noon. Light peeking through the darkness is beautiful. Light and darkness is sunset, and sunrise.

So the good news is that there is bad news or there will be or there has been. The bad news is that if there was no bad news we wouldn't appreciate the good news.

So go out there and look at the sky and breath the air and thank your lucky stars that you aren't in Afganistan or Bakersfield or floating in the liquid atmosphere of Jupiter. Just be happy you weren't born with a third eye or if you were be happy you weren't born with a fourth.

Just be happy because it could be worse. And if it couldn't be worse it has to get better.

Good News, Bad News
July 29th, 2002

Scary

2010-06-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

Scary
October 29th, 2001

I don't like Halloween.

I don't like it for a couple reasons. One I had this awesome Great Pumpkin costume in 1st Grade and I followed that up with a fantastic Headless Horseman costume in 2nd grade and everything since has been a let down. The second reason I don't like Halloween is that I am an actor. I take dressing up like a fool very seriously. I do it professionally…or at least I have on occasion. And it kind of bothers me to see every tom dick and harry doing it. Halloween is amateur night.

But honestly the real reason I don't like Halloween is that I don't like being scared. There are basically three kinds of costumes you see around Halloween. 1 is lame. Basically what I've been doing since 2nd grade. If I make any effort at all I pin a sign on my back that sez "Regular Guy" or something like that.

The second kind of costume is cute and funny which is fine until you're at a party and you have to talk to someone dressed as a bunny or a box of cookies or whatever and you just feel embarrassed. For them, for yourself, for the person walking by dressed as bug. It's degrading.

The third kind of costume is the scary kind. And in Los Angeles that can be seriously scary. You know how you're walking along and suddenly this guy with an Oscar winning head wound shambles in with a photo realistic pole stuck through his chest. Or somebody goes to town on their demon costume and they've got blood red cat's eye contacts and latex skin and fangs and they get all into the role so you're not real sure if maybe Satan has crashed the party for real and we're all going to hell tonight. It seems awfully unlikely but a lot of unlikely, awful things have been really happening so it kind of gives you pause.

But since it is nearly Halloween I wanted to share with you something really scary. The scariest thing I have ever seen. Something that gives me night sweats and goosebumps and whole nine yards.

About a month ago I was walking along near the Fox Plaza building in Century City. You know the Die Hard building? Its got this wall and then about 50 feet down from this wall is Olympic. Now this wall is about 4 feet wide and it almost goes up to Avenue of the Stars, which I was walking on, but there is this gap about 6 feet wide between the end of this wall and the Avenue of the Stars railing.

So I'm walking along Avenue of the stars and I see these 2 fourteen year olds on skateboards get up on this wall and then skate up to this gap and jump the gap, over the railing and onto oncoming traffic on Avenue of the Stars.

Now why did they do this? Because they are 14 year old male humans and that what teenage boys do. They risk their lives.

Now they made the jump and when they landed on Avenue of the Stars and fell on their asses in traffic. Cars slowed down and stopped for them so they didn't get killed. These kids high-fived each other and went on their way.

Why is that so scary? You have to know that I am a new father of a baby boy. My son Yogi is 2 months old now and healthy and happy…well healthy and hungry would be more accurate. But someday he's gonna be 14 and he's going to think he's invulnerable just like those kids and he's gonna do questionable things like jump 6 feet over certain death into oncoming traffic. I was that age once. That's what young men do. They put it all on the line and they live like there is no tomorrow with passion and arrogance and madness and joy. And that's why we worship them and write poems about them and invent BMX and skateboards and wish we could be like them and send them to war. It's a beautiful and terrible time.

But it still doesn't sound scary does it.

So here's the scary part. When my son Yogi was born I was there in the hospital room. It was a cesarean birth and it was five weeks early and Shelley and I were completely shocked that this was happening so I didn't know what to expect.

So the doctors dug around inside and pulled out our new baby and handed him to this guy named Brad who was manning the warming station. I gave Shelley a kiss and then I realized I could/slash/should go look at my new son over on the other side of the room.

When I got there Yogi wasn't breathing and he wasn't moving and he was skinny and wrinkled and blue. Brad was sucking mucous out of his mouth and nose and kind of nudging Yogi on the shoulder. But there was no response.

There was no response. No movement no nothing. This went on for what seemed like an unreasonably long time. Like 25 minutes. Long enough for me to start to hop back and forth on my feet and moan a little under my breath. Long enough for me to grab my head and look around the room in a wild eyed panic. Long enough for my heart to stop and my throat to close up. Long enough for me to start wondering if this was about to become the very, very worst day of my entire life. Long enough for me to wonder how I was going to get through this. Long enough to wonder how I was going to get Shelley through this….Long enough.

See that's what is scary. Death. Death is scary Death is SCARY DEATH is Scary Death….is….Fucking….Scary.

Teenage old boys are maybe the only people in the world who are not afraid of death. And THAT is scary.

But then Yogi started breathing and crying and he has been ever since. See all newborn babies are blue and it wasn't 25 minutes it was more like 15 seconds. And being a new father is wonderful and fantastic. And I love everything about him and I love him more and more each and every day.

But the thing is. The scary thing is. The stronger he gets and the bigger he gets and the more of a person he becomes, the longer that time in the hospital gets in my mind. When I think of what I almost lost and what I could lose I could really start screaming. And then I think of those 14 year old boys jumping off that wall….

BOOO!

Time

2010-06-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

Time
August 27th, 2001

It is said that if you want something done ask a busy person to do it. The reason this works is that people who are busy know how to get things done. They can fit things in. Anybody who has been unemployed and tried to write something knows that the contra-positive is also true.

See the contra-positive to "If A then B" is "If not B then not A."

This statement is true if the original position "If A then B" is true.

As opposed to "If not A then not B" (which doesn't necessarily follow) and "If B then A," which everyone can see is often not the case -- I mean how many times has B been TOTALLY true and A is just pure bullshit?

You know what I mean?

Neither do I. But I did get an A in Geometry in 10th grade.

The point is that if it is true that if you are busy you can get things done it must be therefore true that if you cannot get things done you are not busy.

That doesn't really apply to my point which is that its been my experience and the experience of certain friends that if you have PLENTY of free time you can't get JACK SHIT done but as soon as you get a job you start churning out stuff.

It has something to do with the Bernoulli effect I'm sure. See the Bernoulli effect is basically what makes planes fly. Yes that's right it's magic.

See Bernoulli was this brilliant Italian guy back in the Renaissance when everyone in Italy was brilliant. It must have been something in the water. Probably something nasty. But Bernoulli was trying to figure out how to get water from one place to another in Venice or Rome or Naples or something and he discovered that water moves more quickly around corners. So if you have some water in a pipe and it turns a corner the water will move more quickly.

This is why you can shoot people with a garden hose if you hold your thumb over the stream. Its also what makes planes fly because air is a fluid and as it goes over the curved top part of the wing it moves more quickly than the air going over the flat bottom part so that creates less pressure on the top of the wing and that creates lift. That's how a 747 can get off the ground.

Well that and the magic, invisible helper birds.

Fluids move more quickly around corners. And since thought is fluid it works more quickly if there are lots of curves and pressure. See it's easier to be creative if you have constraints -- if there are lots of curves.

I, for instance, wrote this that I am holding in my hand because I said I was going to. I put pressure on myself. I said I would stand and deliver at 10 tops every month. If I didn't have that pressure point, that corner, that curvy wing if you will allow me to painfully extend an ill used metaphor long past it's breaking point…..if I didn't have that push I would not be here today talking all this nonsense.

You know what I mean. If you are faced with deadlines and pressures and rocks and canyon walls you explode like the white water rapids with wave of energy and invention.

If life is tranquil and still you can be tranquil and still but there isn't much action happening and if your not careful you can get a layer of algae growing on you.

This is all coming because as of tomorrow Shelley's due date is 6 weeks away. There is so much I have to do in six weeks I can't believe it. But there is so much I have done in the past 7 months that I never thought I would get done it's just hard to fathom. It's like this Gigantic Deadline is heading my way and it makes everything else seem like falling down a mountain ravine, bouncing off rocks and leaping into the clear bright air, falling and misting and spraying and finally finally landing with a crashing splash into a cool placid lake.

And there I'll sit for a week or two…contemplating… breathing…feeling the pull of the next stream or river or waterfall but enjoying for a moment the fruits of my labor. Not doing anything because I am not a busy man.

And then the baby will cry and the ripples will start and the river will continue on its way. Altered in course. Branching and joining other streams. But always moving.

Baby

2010-06-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

Baby
September 24th, 2001

So about three weeks ago I was minding my own business and bam the world changed completely. Then exactly a week later it changed completely again.

So I thought and I thought and I thought about all the things I could say tonight. See I do this at every ten tops. I do a little thing. A verbal song and dance. So I knew I would do something but then suddenly it was the last Monday of the month and I hadn't put together a perfectly molded brilliant piece of prose that I could come and say and make you laugh and make you cry and change your whole conception of the way the world works and how the events of the last few weeks can be understood in a new way that will rearrange the molecules of your brain.

I was gonna do that but I didn't have the time. I only had time to put together this stream of conciousness thing that I am reading now. Disappointed? Think how I feel. I still got a bunch of stuff to say and I have no idea how I'm gonna say it. And I'm running out of time probably.

So here goes.

My wife and I woke up early on September 4th. We were going to work together which is very nice. We were both working at Paramount on this Star Trek Web Site thing and we had a lot of things to do so we got up at about 6:30 am and took a shower together.

It was nice.

I love my wife. Her name is Shelley. She's not here right now because….well we lost track of what day it was. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Or behind.

So anyway after the shower there was this sudden rush of pinkish water coming out of Shelley's nether regions. Like she suddenly peed on the floor except pink.

Gross? Yes. Freaky? Yes.

See Shelley was pregnant. So we called the doctor and looked in the books and Shelley lay down and the doctor called all sleepy and said (yawn) just call and make an appointment for later today (at a reasonable hour) and we said …uh…ok….and the books didn't say anything helpful and then another gush of pinkish water came out and we called back the doctor and she said (yawn) alright. Go to the hospital and get it checked out.

So we go to the hospital which is a block away and we go up to labor and delivery and we get a room.

I should say that the baby is not due until October 9th. I put together the crib the weekend before but that was about it. We don't have any diapers or clothes or baby wipes or anything.

So obviously we're not going to have a baby. Now. It's not time. We have things still to do. We have a month still.

And there are no contractions. This is not labor….this is some strange something or other. Nothing to worry about probably. We'll be fine. Just get a doctor to take a look.

And besides that there's no room at the hospital. All the regular rooms are taken so they put Shelley and me in a large closet storage area that happens to have a bed stored in it. This adds to the sense that this is not the real thing. And then nobody really is all that concerned about it. The baby is fine. Mom is fine. Other people are actually having babies so please don't worry about us. Just let us know what this strange discharge was and we'll just get out of your way.

So about 3 hours go by and a doctor has come in and left before a nurse says "Oh yeah, your water broke. There's no doubt about that." In fact I think it was so obvious to all the nurses and doctors that they never mentioned it to us.

We must know!

It's so obvious!

Ok so maybe this is something serious. Maybe this is the most serious day of my life. Maybe this is the beginning of the worst day of my life. Or maybe…

Well.

So they do this test of the amniotic fluid that is still in there and they have to send it off to San Diego to get it tested because apparently you can't get top notch testing done in this little Podunk corner of the third world. We won't have the results for 6 hours so we'll just be waiting around…..

So I go to work for a little bit. And I hear all kinds of stories. Apparently breaking water doesn't necessarily mean the baby is coming. In fact this one crazy guy at work said his ex-wives water broke and the baby didn't come for two weeks.

See if the babies lungs aren't developed they can keep it in there for a couple days or even weeks. But the chance for infection is increased so they'd keep Shelley in the hospital for a while…

So no matter what Shelley is staying in the hospital.

And that's what the San Diego test was about. Whether the lungs were mature. So I go back to the hospital and wait around with Shelley and her Mom. Her grandmother and cousin came up from San Diego to be with her. Her grandmother was a nurse and tends to take hospitals seriously. Not really a calming influence.

I want to ask them if they brought the test results with them because by now its nearly 7 at night and the test results are 2 hours overdue and although I am being the calm and reassuring loving husband I am gonna start beating up some hospital staff if I don't get some answers. I mean you feel so helpless and you don't know what the hell is going on.

Then our doctor came in. Not just any doctor but OUR DOCTOR. Dr Daly. Cornelia Daly. The woman we've been going to since Shelley got pregnant.

Since I got Shelley pregnant.

And she says in this amazingly chipper, friendly matter of fact way that she has that "Yep, the lungs are mature so were gonna do a C-section In about 15 minutes. Looks like you're gonna have a baby. OK? Alright. I'll be back in minute.

What do you say to that?

No thanks. Sorry we're not really prepared.

To be continued.

7 Minutes

2010-06-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

7 Minutes
Monday, July 30, 2001

7 minutes. It used to be ten. This used to be called 10 Minutes Tops but then Jennifer Hamill and Aldrich discovered that 10 minutes was really a little too much. You can endure anything for 7 minutes but that extra 3 minutes really can ruin your day.

We think of time as a completely objective thing. Like it's an absolute. But Einsteinian and Quantum models of the Universe and our own real experience agree on this. Time is a completely subjective phenomenon. In fact, although they have been trying for years, physicists have been unable to come up with a theoretically basis for times arrow. The equations work either backward or forward. In fact there are those who believe that there is really just one particle, or maybe two, that is moving backward and forward in time meeting itself a zillion times and embroidering the entire universe.

There is no reason why time goes forward except that that's how we experience it. And how we experience it changes profoundly as we have more experience with it. Time I mean.

For example: To a new born child, one day is 100% of its life. If we could remember that one day I think it would seem like it lasted for a year or more. Think about how long first grade seemed to last in your memory. When you are five years old, one year is 20% of your life. When you're 10 that same loop around the sun is only 10% of your life. A year of college will typically take up about 5% of your life up until that point. For me a year lasts about 2.8% of my life and its getting smaller all the time.

My friend's father showed him this demonstration after he completed high school and it terrified him. He showed it to me when I was about 19 and it terrified me then. It has turned out to be most accurate with an interesting exception.

It goes like this. Each finger is worth 15 years. Life goes like this….

Time flies when you stop paying attention.

Now 1988 was the second longest year of my life. 1988 was the first year for Annex Theater in Seattle. When I think about all the stuff that happened in that year it seems more like a decade. It was also the year I met the love of my life.

When I decided to start Sacred Fools I thought back on that year and how fantastic it was. And I realized it was because I had no idea what was going to happen or how it would work out. I was constantly jumping blindly off of cliffs and seeing where I would land. I decided that I wanted every year of my life to be like that one. So I started this crazy experiment.

So the longest year of my life was 1997 when we started sacred fools and found this place and moved in and did 5 shows and 20 one acts and 10 tops was invented and somehow I got married somewhere in there. It was great and spectacular. Because I kept jumping off cliffs and into the nameless abyss. Maybe it's a question of how many heartbeats you fit into a year.

See I think if you want to have a long life it doesn't matter how long it is in objective time. What's important is subjective time. How long does it feel? Like if you do the same damn thing every single day so they all blend together then you'll be 95 before you know it. And if you live to be 120 then who cares? Certainly not you.

So what I'm doing that's new and crazy this year is having a baby. Which brings me back to the whole objective subjective time thing. The thing you always have to remember when you're raising kids is that this day. This boring day. This same old same old day is brand new to them all the time…

So keep it brand new. Live each day like it's your very first day. Like its 100% of your life. Then your life will last forever or at least it'll feel that way.

Was that 7 minutes? Felt longer.

Names

2010-06-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up I had a dog named Lassie. She was a black mutt. We used to have another dog, her brother, who was named Laddie. See Laddie and Lassie. Makes sense now doesn't it?

Every time I would tell someone her name they would give me a look and I would hurriedly explain "…we used to have another dog named Laddie but he ran away."

I always felt like I had to explain.

I knew a kid in second grade named Danny and one day he came to school and told us all that he wanted to have a nickname and he wanted it to be Tunge and he would beat up anyone who called him Danny. So off course we called him Danny all day but by three weeks later I had completely forgotten that his name was Danny and everyone called him Tunge.

My name is John but when I was born my name was Henry. But my parents hated the name Henry so they were going to call me Sonny. See I was the 39th grandchild of my father's father. I had 38 cousins on my dad's side and 1 cousin on my mother's side. Guess which side was Catholic.

So my mother had two conflicting beliefs when it came to my name. On the one hand she felt that history was important. My grandfather and grandmother…actually my Memere and Pepere, had this huge pile of grandkids but NONE had been named after them. My Pepere's name was Henry Stanislaus Sylvain, as far as anyone knew. My Memere called him ari. Which is French Canadian for Henri. My parents decided they had an obligation to name me after my grandfather if I was a boy.

On the other hand, this is my mothers other hand I'm speaking of now, she thought that names were very important. Names give you who you are to a large extent. And my mother and my father both agreed that Henry was a terrible name.

Just for the record I don't think Henry is all that bad a name. My father (his name was Robert) had a sister named Gertrude and a brother named Gilford and they were the nicest of the 7 Sylvain siblings so I don't know why he thought Henry would be so bad.

But the point is that they were determined to name me Henry and they hated the name. So they decided they would call me something else like Junior or Bubba or something. My understanding is that they settled on Sonny.

Now if I went through my life as Sonny Sylvain instead of John Sylvain I would be a different person. How different is the really my point. I mean if I was Sonny Sylvain I wouldn't be me. I would be someone else. I would be Sonny Sylvain, noted Jazz trumpeter or Sonny Sylvain, long haul trucker or Sonny Sylvain, nude photographer.

When I had been Sonny Sylvain for a day or two my parents got a letter telling them that Pepere's real name was John Stanislaus Henry Sylvain. His wife of 35 years had not believed him so he had to pull out his birth certificate. According to my mother my father read the letter and then looked up with hope and joy on his face and said "John…that's a nice name!"

Names are fundamentally important. Adam's first job was to name all the animals. Only after he'd named them did he notice that none of them were really all that good company. Except for the dogs and in special cases the sheep. Scientists say that the invention of spoken language about 15,000 years ago gave Cro-Magnon man access to a powerful new way to look at and shape his world and it gave them a big advantage over the seemingly equally intelligent Neanderthal man. So of course Cro-Magnon proceeded to wipe Neanderthals from the face of the planet.

But our violent tendencies and our racial guilt for this apparent genocide is for another discussion. Or maybe not. Whatever. What is important now is that naming things is fundamental. When we name things we give them an abstract existence apart from themselves and names create meaning apart from the donatation. We live our lives now so far inside the web of meaning and submeaning that names give us we don't even notice it unless we really focus on it. It's like water for fishes. Or air for…us. Have you ever repeated a word until it seemed strange? Like strange.

Strange Strange Strange

Seems strange doesn't it?

How about finger? Finger Finger Everybody altogether. Finger Finger Finger Finger

It starts to sound weird but you can't call it something else unless you are speaking a different language. But at the same time we could all agree to call it something else, maybe tunge. But if you look up Finger in the dictionary you'll see a picture of a finger.

So names are important. The first thing we voted on at Sacred Fools was the name Sacred Fools. Where would we be now if we had chosen The Candy Store or Boogie Man Theater? Would we be here still. Would we all be sitting here watching failed boxer Sonny Sylvain explain how he coulda been a contender?

Which brings me to my son. His name is Yogi. Until he was about 4 days old I would explain his name to everyone I told, just like I used to explain my dog's name. "His name is Robert Yogi Wenk Sylvain but we call him Yogi. See Yogi is a family name. My mother in laws maiden name and his great grandfather's name was Robert Yogi and my father's name is Robert Sylvain and we like the name Yogi but if he hates it he can change it to Robert later on if he wants…."

After a few days I realized that his name was Yogi and no explanation was necessary or possible. Shelley and I had named him and he had grown into his name until there was no difference between the name and him. Like I am John Sylvain and Sonny Sylvain is someone else who is not me. Yogi is Yogi. Yogi Sylvain. It is who he is. It's perfect for him. If you don't like it you can call him Sonny or Tunge or Finger or Robert but his name is Yogi Sylvain and that's who he is. And I can prove it. If you look up www.yogisylvain.com on the internet you'll see a picture of him.

Names
March 25th, 2002

Defining Dad

2010-06-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

Defining Dad
June 25th, 2001

I'm on the verge of a huge change. I'm going to become all-powerful and completely vulnerable, all knowing and a total fool. I'm going to become a dad. In October. Yesterday is the last Father's Day that will go by that I won't feel slighted because no one called me.

I'm gonna be a dad.

So I've been thinking about this thing. We don't know the gender so I switch back and forth between imagining a son and imagining a daughter. Which is weird. Everything changes in subtle ways based on which sex I pick. Like my future snaps from light pink to light blue and back again.

I've been thinking about how to be a dad. How I'm gonna be a dad. And I've been imagining the whole thing. And at the same time I've been watching myself think about being a dad. Like I come up with a mental picture of how I want it to be and then I look at the mental picture and I think "What moron drew that picture?".

See when I think about how I'm gonna be a dad I completely contradict myself. Like I'm gonna spend all my time with my kid and I'm gonna spend all my time making lots of money so he or she will never want for anything and I'm gonna spend all my time following my dreams because I'm not gonna be one of those people who changes his lifestyle completely when they have kids.

And I'm gonna keep my life simple. Have lot's of free time.

And I'm gonna encourage my daughter or son to do sports and I'm gonna encourage my son or daughter to study the sciences and I'm gonna encourage my child to be arty but I'm gonna let them find their own way and support them in everything they do and not pressure them but make sure they always excel in everything….if they want. But I won't be one of those Dads that expects too much.

And I'll be firm and soft and hard and gentle and strict and forgiving and consistant and flexible and funky and stogie and cool and warm and hot and cold and big and little and up and down.

Simple.

And I look at these pictures in my head and I realize that what I'm imagining is all about solving the problems of my own childhood. Like I'm all concerned about making sure my kid doesn't have a sucky time in Junior High. Like that's possible. And I'm doing a lot of thinking about how my kid is gonna not be overweight but is gonna have a healthy self image. It's all about imagining how my kid is going to get to live my life without making the mistakes that I made.

And that's completely impossible!

It won't be my life, it'll be his or hers or whatever.

Then I think about my father, and his father before him.

My grandfather was born in 1901 by the banks of the Saint Lawrence river in the woods. There were no cars or airplanes. No electricity or phones. Just trees to chop down and crops to plant and harvest and winters to survive.

He married my grandmother because her house was across the river and was the only other house for miles.

My father was born in 1933, the second youngest of 7 in a Canadian French catholic family. In the middle of the great depression the family would do anything to survive. Picking potatoes in northern Maine or blueberries in Connecticutt. Finally my grandfather got a good, steady job in the Scott Paper Mill in Winslow Maine and my dad grew up there. FDR was president until he was 13 years old. There were no televisions or computers or internet or cel phones. There was no pornography and no sex. At least in Maine. At least according to my father.

So the world has changed a lot since then. But my dad raised me as best he could. Trying not make the mistakes his father had made, who was trying not to make the mistakes his father had made.

And that's what I was planning on doing.

But that's the mistake that they all made. I mean how do you raise a kid nowadays? Can somebody tell me? How can I prepare my child for the world? How can I be a good dad?

I mean check this out. Since I was born we've got cable TV in 1974, Personal Computers, Macintosh around 1984, World Wide Web in 1993, Cell Phones whenever, Palm Pilot last year or something.

My wife is due in October of this year. When my child is my age it will be the year 2036. Will we be on Mars? Will we all have automatic nanobots roaming through our bodies making us live forever? Will we have Video Phones jacked into our brains? Will there be any oxygen left or will we buy it at the store the way we buy water now?

What should I do to protect and provide and prepare this child, who will be the hope of my hopes and the dream of my life? At least that's what their telling me. And I'm beginning to get a vague idea what that means

I guess the only answer is to love the darn thing as hard as I can and just do my best. No matter how much I screw up I can't get fired and no matter how good a job I do I'm not gonna get a raise.

And maybe, 35 years from now, my child will call me up after missing the first 34, like I did yesterday and say. Hey dad. Happy Father's day. I love you.

Playing Well Together - Horn Sections and Other Metaphors

2010-02-18T23:36:00.000-08:00

The Shakers played last Tuesday at The Joint. It was a blast. I recently turned some corner in my keyboard playing where I can find my way through the songs easier. I have plenty of time now where in the past I was having a hard time keeping up.

Afterwards there was this terrific Latin flavored R&B group with a horn section.

I love horn sections.

The thing about horns is that they can only play one note at a time. (This is often plenty, don't get me wrong.) A horn section is three or more individuals working very closely together to provide riffs and runs and wonderful sounds.

As a keyboardist I can play a bunch of notes at the some time. I don't need anyone else dancing next to me to play a chord. But I can't do what a horn section can do. I don't really think any one person can.

Writing and Reading

2009-04-09T09:56:00.003-07:00

I've had a very hectic month and I haven't blogged during that time. I thought about it a lot but I didn't do it. There's obviously a big difference between thought and action but when it comes to writing the difference is worth examining because its very interesting.

Right now I am sitting quietly and inventing these words. There's a difference from rumination in that I'm slowing down and focusing but its very closely related. Writing is very theraputic and mind altering I think because it changes the way you think as you do it but it's also very much like private thought.

But it has this public aspect.

You're reading this. I don't know when and I don't know where. I also don't know who you are (which something that changes with the medium and that alters the message...). But essentially you are now engaged in a private activity in which you're focusing on these words and this idea which is now affecting your thoughts and consciousness.

It seems to me that reading and writing are distinct from thought and action. They are a combination of both but they are really neither. Reading and writing are something else. When you think about it a strangely intimate means of communication.

Of course it doesn't really feel intimate does it? So obviously that's not the right word. What I am saying or writing here comes out of my thoughts directly to the screen and then, via the internet, directly into your head.

But its not intimate. I can't see you. But it is intimate in that we now have a connection. But its not in that I don't know you at all.

Intimate in one direction?

No.

Not private....

What is it?

A Penny for your thoughts

2009-03-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

Finally got a back up drive and backed up our music, photos and movies. I had that feeling - you know the one - 'I should back this stuff up' - the feeling you get just before your computer fails and you lose everything. Thing is I had that feeling a year ago and have been living in a state of fearful anticipation ever since.

Luckily and despite all the various technological permutations of Murphy's law nothing bad happened to my irreplaceable data in the meantime.

So I got a 1.0 TB drive from Amazon for 100 bucks.

Yeah that's right.

1 Terabyte for 1 hundred dollars.
1000 Gigs for 1000 dimes.

100 MB per penny.

I remember spending more than a hundred dollars on 60 megabytes. It doesn't seem that long ago.

I went to college with a manual typewriter. I remember when my friend Tony got a Brother Typewriter that could remember the last 8 letters you typed. That was super special. It meant you could correct typos as you went. 8 letters is approximately 8 bytes.

When we were young there were no answering machines. If you weren't home the phone would just ring. And there were only 3 networks and two UHF stations that showed the Brady Bunch, Gilligan Island and Hogans Heroes on a continuous loop.

My father tells me that he didn't have television when he was growing up but I don't believe it.

What will things look like in ten years? In twenty?

There are those that think we are headed toward a singularity. A point where computers will be able to design the next level of computers and that the ensuing progress will instantaneously leap out of human control and then out of human comprehension.

On the other hand people don't really change that much. I don't think people are any different than they were when I was a kid. Maybe I've become an old idiot who can't recognized change when it's happening all around but my thought is that these tools are super advanced but they are really just tools and they are limited by the hairless apes that use them. We use massive computing power to create incredible interactive environments for Grand Theft Auto and Madden 09. Incredible special effects don't help bad movies be good (well okay, a little bit) and I don't see how twittering is gonna raise us to the next level of human evolution.

But of course technology makes a huge difference in our experience of the world. It's foolish for me to argue that. I guess I'm wondering what the difference really is.

I can listen to music while working out without it skipping.
I can easily find information and directions.
I can communicate with old friend.
I can reach people no matter where I am or where they are.
I can watch movies and tv shows a million different ways almost as quickly as I can think about wanting to do it.
I can play games

Is there something big I'm missing? Please let me know how technology is changing your life or the world around you.

Check these out
http://www.kurzweilai.net/
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/history.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/02/technology_timeline.html

There is one huge thing that could be impacted in a huge way by technology.

Education.

More on that later.

Too Much Stuff

2009-02-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

First of all there's this.

1. A few years ago I stopped worrying about keeping up with the latest in pop music because I realized that there was tons of stuff that I knew I loved that I hadn't listened to enough. There were James Brown songs I hadn't even heard of. There was John Coltrane and Mozart and the Beatles and the Fastbacks to explore. I figured that I had a limited time on Earth to enjoy the 1300+ hours of music I already owned (mostly on purpose) what was the upside to being stressed about missing out on the next big thing?

2. Thanks to TIVO, Netflicks, the Library and a distressing lack of time to waste I no longer watch anything on television that isn't brilliant.

3. A few years ago I discovered that people were donating nearly new, stylish clothing to Goodwill. I recently admired a Tommy Bahama shirt at the mall and then nearly choked when I saw that it cost $95. One day latter I bought nearly the same shirt, with pricetags, at Goodwill for $3.

4. In college I took Econ 101 and learned that in order for an economy to expand growth needs to accelerate. People need to buy more and more.

Put all these together and you get what we have. We have an economy that was driven by people buying more and more things and we reached a point where it became obvious to even the most oblivious (me) that there were already plenty of things...too much really...and there's no reason to keep buying stuff.

Thus we have a recession.

Oh wait, there's also the unbridled greed and stupidity in the Financial sector. That helped.

Awards

2009-02-23T17:22:00.000-08:00

So I watched the Oscars last night and I enjoyed them quite a bit. I wanted to share something funny about award shows. See we have a couple of them here in Los Angeles for theater. Notably the Ovations and the LA Weekly Awards. Neither one is on TV of course but they try to approximate the Oscars or the Tonys and they're a nice celebration of local theater.

I'm up for a lighting award this year at the LA Weekly Awards. Hopefully I can parlay that into a lucrative career lighting shows for small theaters around the world (lots of money in small thearter...;-)

Here's the thing about these award presentations. They hand our nominations - usually about 5 per category - then at the ceremony announce one winner. This creates a sense of excitement and anticipation for the event and get the nominees there with their friends.

But

Each award announcement means that 4 out 5 people are not winners. They're losers. By the end of the night nearly everyone in the audience is disappointed for one reason or another.

Funny.

Good thing it's an honor just to be nominated.

Big Changes?

2009-02-20T18:58:00.000-08:00

It's been strange to observe the entertainment industries responding to the advance of technology with various degrees of self righteous paralysis. The weird thing is that these industries - music, film, television, video - are all very new and were originally born out of technological change and cultural shifts.

It's strange that these large media companies have been so resistant to change. The music industry is a shambling zombie of an object lesson but TV and Film still seems resistant to the internet and many to many communication.

But then we seem to think that whatever is happening now will always be. Things can't change THAT much.

That's one of the problems with the neocons. They came up with some theories in the 80s and then applied them 20 years later. They assumed that oil was and had to always be the only energy source and they assumed that the world would always love the US no matter what.

Oh and they assumed that we were a freedom loving democracy just cuz we were. Not because of what we did and didn't do.

Maybe that a problem on the other side. Most people, (including myself) don't understand how fragile democracy is. In history and in the world today democracy is the exception and not the norm. Dictatorships and oligarchies are much more efficient. Plutocracy and kleptocracy seems more likely. When this nation was started there were naysayers who pointed out that democracies only last a couple centuries (Greece and the Netherlands being the examples they cited). After about 200 years the people realize that they have the keys to the treasury and they grab all the money without any consideration for the future.

No new taxes anyone?

Finally I just heard this on the radio. Economic growth is a brand new phenomenon. Only about 200 years old. We don't know how it really works. The normal state of humankind, in time and in the present, is abject poverty.

Scary.

Actually I believe that we are in the midst of a painful realignment but that democracy and the middle class can survive.

But I might just be thinking that things can't change THAT much.....

Saying Goodbye

2009-02-20T18:19:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on 9/9/99

When I was younger so much younger than today.

I came up with the idea that every time you say goodbye it's like a little death. Like part of you dies. You'll never see that person in the same way again. And then when you say enough goodbyes they kind of accumulate and then you die.

Now that I'm older I think that that's a big crock of shit. First of all dying is very different from saying goodbye and now I know that most people that I say goodbye too will turn up again sometime and we'll probably like each other better when were older and we've forgotten why we were so pissed off at each other. It's happened with just about everybody I knew from Seattle....

Now that's not true. That's just flip. It really sucks saying goodbye to someone who you've shared your life with cuz everything changes. I mean everything is changing. Have you ever seen three hurricanes on one weather map before? Is that a common occurrence? We just had them Dennis, Cindy and somebody else whose name I can't quite remember.

If you go to a hurricane party and you're just a tropical storm, can you still get laid?

So the end times are upon us. You know a couple of weeks ago the world was supposed to end. On August 13th or 16th depending on which of Nostrodamous' Quatrains you believe. The Eclipse was the first sign, then the comet dust which causes the meteor shower in the Plebeians or what ever they're called.

The sun was supposed to blow up or shower us with radioactive rays.

That didn't happen. Then the computerized shit is supposed to hit the fan on September 9th because its 9/9/99 and that means something to old computers.

If you go to a computer party and you've got a really small hard drive can you still get laid?

I mean if you are a computer.

So the point is that the end of the world keeps on not happening. Maybe it won't happen. Maybe we'll just coast along like this until we pass the Mayan deadline in 2013 or what ever and in like 2525, if man is still alive, we'll step out of our full immersion cyber porn suits for a minute and say "Hey, looks like we made it. Better start taking the long view."

See that's what I think is wrong. Because of the Apocalyptic thinking of the last 50 years we have all been taking the short view. I certainly thought I'd be dead by now, that's why I'm still doing free theater. Maybe once we get passed all the deadlines we will start thinking long term again like we used to in the old days.

Or maybe the world has ended but we didn't notice. What if we're like the character...wait who hasn't seen 6th Sense? We'll its real good. Maybe we're like a ghost that doesn't know its dead. All of us.

Or maybe the powerful Thunder God of the Ancient Mesopotamians doesn't have enough juice to wipe us out but he's trying his best. Maybe we're too advanced to be wiped out. We're like antibiotic resistant TB or like Super Roaches.

But the point is that Jennifer is leaving. She's one of the few people I have ever met who intimidates me. The way she thinks, her talent. I'm really intimidated. I never got to know Jen Hamill as much as I would have wanted to. I think because I'm intimidated. Also she doesn't frequent smoky bars. That's really how I get to know people. Hanging out in smoky bars. That's why I started this theater you know, to meet more people I could hang out with in smoky bars. Most people don't do that as much as I'd like. Thank god for Rik Keller.

But I wish Jennifer Hamill wasn't going away. She is one of the very best in the world.

One of the very best.

People I mean. She is constantly blowing me away. I mean The Seagull. Did you see that? Man.

Jennifer is one of those people who sneak up on you. Like it took me about a year to realize that she is the sexiest person I know. Except for my wife...and Rik Keller...but I digress.

Its funny, I went over to Jennifer's apartment for some reason, I think it was a reading, just after I met her. Her apartment reminded me of many Seattle apartments in the way it was decorated. Very creative. Kitchy. It was a type in my mind and I kind of thought to myself "well this woman certainly lived in Seattle. She picked up a certain style there that I didn't know was a style." Now I know that whatever style I found familiar was probably picked up by people in Seattle from Jennifer Hamill. An original. I mean that's what she is.

So the world is ending. And Jennifer Hamill is leaving. And these two things will always be linked in my mind. Because you see, I've had a tough summer. A lot of bad things happened. And the way things are going it seems like things are getting better. But maybe it's just the beginning of everything getting worse. So on this day I will remember. Today Jennifer Hamill did her last Ten Tops. It was a great night and after that everything just got better and better. Or maybe Jen leaving will be in the middle of the list of things that went wrong before all the lights went out forever.

In either case, I hope to hell I get to see you again. Thank you for being part of this wacky caravan for a while. We'll miss you. I already do.

Immobilized By Choice

2009-02-18T10:32:00.000-08:00

Apparently a problem. Frozen by too many options....happening to me right now.

Blogging may be affected by a pinkie injury.

Life is funny.

Counting Culture

2009-02-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day!

Last night I saw Resignation Day at Sacred Fools. it's a well acted, well produced play about Terry Southern, the counter-cultural icon who wrote Easy Rider, Dr. Stangelove, Barbarella and lots of other very cool stuff.

So then I was thinking about Valentine's Day and other holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and how they have this sort of main, obvious, 'mainstream' meaning and this opposite undercurrent of dissatisfaction and resentment of the main meaning. For example Valentine's Day is about romantic love. The mainstream meaning is that this is the day we celebrate romantic love and give gifts to our significant other signifying their significance. The main counter current is that its a drag to be single on this day when coupledom is rubbed in everyone's face. Another counter current is that guys have to scramble at the last minute to appear as if they've planned some romantic gesture for their wife or girlfriend for weeks.

The counter currents are what the folks on the comedy shows and radio shows are talking about. The counter currents are the interesting spice.

Now having seen Resignation Day it occurred to me that I assume that prior to the rise of the counterculture in the sixties American culture was mostly monolithic. Valentine's Day was about what it was supposed to be about and the rules about how to act were very clear and nearly everyone followed them. Sure there were beatniks and rebels who said caustic things about the rigid and the hypocritical but you didn't see that stuff in the magazines or on the radio.

Now we have those threads woven into the status quo because the rebellion of the sixties was absorbed into the culture (so now Iggy Pop's ode to heroin is used for cruiseline commercials and we don't bat an eye)

Now these anti-establishment sentiments have been around since Hammurabi but it took the Baby Boom to make it part of the culture. As a twenty something I was pretty much against the established order. I thought me an my friends would invent our own. As a forty something parent I wish that our culture was tamer. That my son grew up in a safer world with less sex and violence everywhere. So my thought is that before the bowlingball-in-the-python generation (the Boomers) all hit their teens and twenties at the same time the grown-ups maintained some control. Thus the monolithic culture that I think of pre "Meet The Beatles."

Father Knew Best.

That was pretty well overturned in the sixties and seventies. Once capitalism figured out how to make money off rebellion, counterculture became an unexamined part of the culture.

So we are living in the extended adolescence of the Post War Generation. Always questioning authority.

Well thank god.

(I'm not sure about this. Does it make sense?)

Sorta Almost Famous

2009-02-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

So here's how it happened. I wanted to write more so I started Blogging here regularly. I wanted people to read what I wrote and so I started promoting it. Then I started updating facebook and twitter and following other blogs and tweeters and so on....

Then I started looking into what else was out there....

Then I realized that I could spend my whole day working on getting my words out and absorbing the words of others via all this social media. It's keeping up with friends...
and friends of friends...
and co-workers....
and former collegues..
and people I don't remember meeting...
and strangers...
and everyone....

And it kinda seems like work.

It's fun to know on a surface level what all these people are doing but keeping up takes up a lot of time. What I end up with is as much of a connection as I have with celebrities. I don't know who's gonna read this so I'm not gonna be completely forthright and open. That caution might mark me as a Gen X-er rather than a Y or Z or AA or whatever. The point is I see what people are doing and thinking but that doesn't bring us closer together. At least not any closer than I feel to David Letterman or Bruce Springsteen or people I've worked for.

This is obvious and probably not worth saying. Or maybe it is. I don't know. The point is that its like all of us are following each other and updating and stuff and it's like we're all famous to each other. Connected in that way. Not as friends but as celebrity/fan. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of some of my close friends. I'm a huge fan of my brother Rob and my sister Kate and my wife. I'm probably a big fan of you if you're reading this.

Congratulations!

Andy Warhol said that "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Then he said that "In fifteen minutes everyone will be famous."

Here's my update:
Everyone is famous to fifteen people.

(Of course I hoped that I was the first person to come up with that but it turns out to be a meme that's at least 18 years old.)

But I think its more accurate to say that in 15 hours you can be famous to 1500 people.

What is the opposite of consumerism?

2009-02-12T08:07:00.000-08:00

Today I am going to the Library to borrow some books. I used to go to library all the time back when the economy was in a similar downturn. Of course that was in 1982 and I was in High School. For years i didn't take stuff out of the library because it felt like a scam. Like I was scamming the library.

Fool.

Now that the incredibly bloated and unsupportable economy is deflating like a balloon (complete with farting noise) I'll be forced to stop doing foolish things with my money and time. I've noticed for a long time that consuming entertainment and distraction always kept me from creating entertainment. Artists don't watch much TV as a general rule.

If you take TV and movies off the schedule and also take off shopping (cuz there ain't no money) that leaves more time to exercise, meditate, talk to people, read and write.

Sounds good, donut?

There was a national moment almost 30 years ago when we were presented with a stark choice.

President Jimmy Carter basically said that consuming more and more stuff was not sustainable and not good for the spiritual health of the country. Ronald Reagan said we could have whatever we wanted. We (and by we I mean people who are over 58 now who voted then...not me) chose the easier route back then and now we're facing the consequences of that choice. It's not a straight up political choice but really a moral choice. It's pretty obvious that a big part of our current economic problem stems from financial institutions choosing short term profit over prudent risk management. A big part of our foreign policy problems spring from a lack of investment in sustainable energy sources since the energy crisis 35 years ago. (Imagine where we'd be if we'd continued a prudent national investment in alt fuel R and D during all that time.)

The funny thing is that a lot of people I talk to see this recession/depression as a good thing for our national soul. I'm looking at bleak choices and I think its could be a good thing.

(Of course I live in Los Angeles where our homeless population lives on the beach and mostly doesn't freeze to death at night.)

Go to the library. Take the bus. Cut off the cable. Play scrabble with friends and family. Share what you have and ask for help when you need it.

The Mediated Life

2009-02-11T08:37:00.001-08:00

I went to the Grammys with my wife this Sunday. (we know someone who works for the Grammy foundation...thats how.)

One remarkable thing we noticed is that we were often the only people who were actually paying full attention to the performance. All around us people had their cell phones out and were texting, recording, snapping pictures and talking to friends. "OMG can u c me on TV?" has replaced "Oh my god, I can't believe I'm here."

At our wedding we had a friend do our photos and we didn't have a videographer. One of the things that bugs me is when a wedding is transformed from a joyous occasion into a photo shoot or movie of what a joyous occasion might look like if the photographer and videographer weren't ordering everyone around. For a long time the recording of an experience has threatened to obscure the experience.

With this new social mediated world the digital sharing of the experience threatens to obscure the experience.

You can spend your whole life interacting with people without ever touching them or doing anything.

Thanks for reading this. Now give me a call and lets meet for coffee...or come over and play some music or basketball or chess or chutes and ladders.

C U!

Security Versus Freedom

2009-02-09T12:16:00.000-08:00

"Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither."
Benjamin Franklin

I don't think relative security and relative freedom are mutually exclusive but its hard to argue that it wouldn't be easier to fight crime if we could just round up anyone who looked like they might commit a crime and locked them up. Certainly the assumption of innnocence and other human rights are a pain in the butt for law enforcement. But it seem self-evident that in the long term the rule of law and a sense of personal security and fairness results in a more stable society.

The politics and ethics and morality of all this is certainly worth thinking about but it occured to me that this whole security/safety versus freedom balance comes up a lot in child rearing. I think here in LA we assume that the city is too dangerous to let kids out of our sight. When I was growing up in New Hampshire I walked to school from first grade on and at 10 I was taking the subway into Boston to explore on my own.

I think if I suggested that my son do that now I would be thrown in jail.

I have to go put Yogi to bed now so I will leave this as food for discussion.

Storytelling

2009-02-06T23:35:00.000-08:00

I'm writing a story right now, a sci fi novel for young readers and young adults that my son and I are collaborating on.

I'm writing the story in the third-person limited omniscient mode (at least so far) so that everything is seen though the lens of the main characters experience. Of course this is how we live our lives. We tell our story to ourselves and to others to make sense of what happens to us and to give ourselves the (perhaps) illusion of personal continuity.

We are the heros of our own lives.

What really boggles my mind is that EVERYONE is the hero of their own lives. 6 Billion people.

That is a lot of stories.

I wonder if some people aren't the heros of their own lives. Are there people who think of themselves as the sidekick or the love interest or the comic foil.

Anyone out there know they are actually the antagonist of someone else's story? (in the classic Northrop Frye sense).

I wonder if people who aren't bombarded with stories (like we are in the US) tell themselves a simpler kind of story. Back when the old shaman told one story a week did people tell more realistic stories about themselves? I know my grandparents were really simple folk with simple goals: Survive, have kids that survive, die and go to heaven. Once you handle those first two things get complicated. I know I don't worry about surviving (as much as I should) and I don't worry about the afterlife because I'm pretty darn sure I'm never going to die.

I wonder what's gonna happen next?

New Years Revolution

2009-02-05T11:54:00.000-08:00

It's a new year and a new trip around the solar system. The earth is tilting back toward the sun (from our point of view in the Northern Hemisphere anyway) and it's time to take stock and try to make changes in the way we do things. For me that means continuing a personal revolution that started over a year ago when I realized that my life needed some deep reshaping.

Since that time a lot of things have changed quite a bit but the question remains how do you fundamentally change your life?

That brings up the question what affects your life? How do you define your life?

Let's say we define the experience of life as three things. Environment, Action and Thought. Environment covers a lot of things all at once but I think we can say that it is everything that you can't control including the weather, the economy, other people, traffic, culture, politics, media and anything else outside of your body really. Perhaps it includes things inside your body as well like germs, age and genes because it really is the world you live in. Actions include speech and movement. If you were being observed by camera crew what they recorded would be your actions. Thought is all the stuff you control that the camera crew cannot see including your emotions, prayers and inner dialogues.

It seems obvious that you can't really control your Environment except in so much as you can control your location via action so lets just take that off the table. Lets say you can only change your actions and your thoughts.

Now there are actions that are the result of environment like sneezing or pulling your hand away from something hot or leaving the office because you've been fired that are very difficult to change without controlling the environment. Also there are thoughts that seem to be outside of conscious control. These are the thoughts that fall into a big category of responses to past environments. Your childhood defenses that still affect current action. Yaknowwhatimean?

If you don't I recommend that you do.

So lets take all that off the table for now. All the actions and thoughts caused by uncontrolled reflexes.

What's left?

In most people almost nothing.

So to make change you have to expand what is actually under your control. To do that you have to get a handle on what is actually not under conscious control. You have to explore what is reflexive thinking. I would suggest that reflexive thinking is all based on decisions we made as children to survive perceived traumatic events or injuries. We have anxiety around red heads, for example, because a red headed bully made fun of us in 2nd grade.

(The familial relationships have been changed to protect the guilty). Bad example but you get the picture.

So change seems to require some self examination and may require outside assistance.

Ok so thats why you haven't stuck to your resolutions and why this took more than a month to post.

Friday

2008-04-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

If you study anthropology even just a tiny bit (as I have...very tiny bit) you realize how much of the way we see the world is dictated by our culture and our language. In Anthropology 101 (which I mostly slept through...snoring loudly) you learn one of the first and most basic things anthropologists do is map out the way that cultures describe and name kin relationships. For example if every male who is 10 years older than you in a village is called "uncle" whether they are related by blood directly or not then that both defuses the importance of what we call "uncles" (brothers of you mother or father) and intensifies the familial connection to the rest of the village. Your experience of that person is altered by your culture and your language.

The same thing is true of almost anything. I started this blog post about a month ago and for the life of me I can't remember why I named it "friday" but I've decided that it's because of the effect of language on time. See an important experience that is structured by our language and culture is our experience of time. Apparently Native American cultures have a different way of interacting with time than Europeans. Circular time versus linear time. This is probably bullshit but for the sake of argument and fun lets just assume that it's true. If you conceive of time as a circle rather than a line you would view life in a fundamentally way (it would seem).

But since everyone in our culture works like we are moving forward along a timeline let's not mess with that. Too many new age philosophers have expounded the idea that a circular view is more spiritual and natural and healthy for me to find the question interesting.

The really interesting thing is to suggest that we change the length of the week to something more digital. Let's do a 10 day week! Lets work for 6 days and take 4 days off!

How would that change things?

Well first of all we be working 60% of the time rather than 71% so that would be good. Second of all we'd have much longer weekends.

How about we work 70% of the time but split it up with a day in the middle. So its

workday
workday
workday
off day
workday
workday
workday
workday
offday
offday

Discuss.

Oh and why are the days of the week named for Norse gods? How random is that?

Renew, Reuse, Recycle

2008-04-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

My wife's cousin is visiting with his 18 month old son so our house has human beings of the following ages in it.

1.5
6.5
38
42
43
63
87

We also have a 10 year old dog.

One of the wonderful things about watching a toddler interact with the world is that they are experiencing nearly everything for the first time. To say they look at world with a sense of wonder would not really be accurate because they live in a world where everything is new so novelty is not novel. Therefore they don't really go "wow" as much as live in a world where anything can be interesting. Sen (that's the little boy's name) found the squeaky child gate in the kitchen facinating. He loved to move it back and forth and listen to the noise.

It's wonderful to remember that there is the potential for wonder all around all the time. Meditation is simply the practice of focusing the mind on the present moment without prejudice (or new judgements...would that be postjudice?) or following some silent line of thought or fantasy. This is not an easy thing to do - surprisingly hard in fact - but anyone who has been able to do it for even a few seconds knows that it brings a sense of serenity and joy that is remarkable.

One way to capture this on a moment by moment basis is to look at things in a new way. Changing your angle is often enough. Tilt your head to the side or look at things upside down. Get out of the chair and get under the desk for a few moments. Go outside and look straight up or lie down and stare at the grass from just a few inches away.

I'm gonna go do that now.

Bye.

John Tests Blog It

2008-04-17T17:32:00.001-07:00

So I wrote this brilliant post for my Impossible Things blog and when I sent it out it vanished.

Grrrr

Reading is Telepathy

2007-09-11T05:34:00.000-07:00

Or more accurately writing is telepathy. The transmission of ideas and emotions and impressions from mind to mind without spoken words. It seems to me that the relationship between the writer and the reader is, in many cases, profoundly intimate - especially for the reader. A reader allows the writer into his mind. The relationship is not one-sided of course. The writer doesn't know where or when the conversation will take place and the reader can end the conversation at any time. The writer controls the content of the conversation.

But its not a conversation. It's a unique interaction. One of the things that happens is that a reader is differentiated from his physical community by having this experience of a individual, mind to mind, transfer of information. This is one of the most powerful by-products of the Gutenberg Revolution - the transformation of an illiterate, agrarian population into nations of differentiated individuals who could read the Bible or the works of Plato and have their own relationships with those texts and come to their own conclusions.

Before the printing press (more accurately - before books became widely available because of the printing press) nearly everyone got their information and their ideas (and their interpretation of those ideas) from a few leaders who read to them in churches and city squares. Everyone had the same experience and, it could be argued, no one had an inner life that was distinct from his peasant neighbors.

Martin Luther could not have been successful without a printing press. The Renaissance could not have happened without hundreds of thousands of readers coming to their own conclusions about science, religion, art and philosophy and then writing about it. The American, French and Industrial Revolutions were all made possible by printed books. (Remember, reading is required for Reformation, Renaissance and Revolution)

This begs the question of what social, cultural and political effects the hypermedia revolution will have. But that is a question I will consider another time.

Changing the Status Quo

2007-09-10T05:34:00.000-07:00

Status Quo means things as they are or the existing condition or state of affairs. The often stated goal of changing the status quo is a problematic goal because what ever the change is it becomes the status quo no matter what.

The present has certain paradoxical properties. It is actually filled with magic if we pay attention to it through mindfulness and meditation but in most interactions with the present this magic is completely obscured by the fact that the present is always right in front of us.

I read a great fable about the present in Life 101. The story is basically that God wanted to give mankind a gift but he wanted it to be hidden in a place where everyone could find it but only if they looked. The angels were assigned the task of finding this place and they eventually decided to hide this gift in the present because no one would think to look there. God decided to further throw people off the scent by actually naming the present (meaning the gift) the present (meaning the right now).

Back when the Rolling Stone Magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary fifteen years ago it had a bunch of interviews with people like Dylan and Springsteen and so forth. One of the themes coming out of these interviews was that "we tried to change the world in the 60s but we didn't." This is, of course, ridiculous. American culture was completely altered by the events of the sixties. In fact almost everything since has been a reaction to those profound changes. I would say that 1965-1975 were more culturally affecting than 1935-1945 (which have more resonance geopolitically).

But what obscures the vision of these folks about the 60s is that the status quo did not go away, it just altered. We did not become a culture of free love and no materialism but we did become a culture where overt racism and sexism became socially unacceptable and moral relativism gained a huge foothold in the culture. They did not wake up one day without the aches and pains of actually living which, I think, affects their judgement when it comes to what they actually changed.

So change is never as romantic or as wonderful as it seems like its going to be because we drag ourselves and the present into the future we imagined and it becomes the present still.

And the present, unless you take time to look at it, doesn't seem all that great.
But if you sit down, preferably in full lotus position, and just take a long, relaxed, focused, unbiased look at the moment you are in, you'll find it's the best place to be.

Distractions

2007-09-06T06:08:00.000-07:00

I am making a practice of getting up early, 4 or 5 o'clock, to write and do other creative things. The purpose is to reduce the lower quality hours spent watching television in the evening and to increase the productive hours spent creating and expressing myself.

So this morning I played video games for an hour this morning.

Brilliant, I sure fooled me.

My goal is to spend more time creating and less time being distracted and entertained and playing games for an hour is not consistant with that.

'nuff said....moving on.

A couplathree things coming together.

2007-08-31T05:24:00.000-07:00

There are a few things swirling around in my head and I don't know if I have the time or the...what's a good word...context? To put them all together....

So here's a new thought instead, sparked by my difficulty. I have these dispirate thoughts:

The concept of being more effective in a smaller framework-limited time, space and concept breeds results.
The most powerful emotion on Earth? Love? Fear? Joy? Indegestion?
What am I writing about? Is it useful? Is it inspirational? Does it matter? Don't worry if it's not good enough, for anyone else to hear...just sing, sing a song.

All good topics which I should explore but not related in a linear way. And this is linear - writing - beginning, middle, end.

But that's not how people think is it? We think on multiple levels on multiple topics in multiple ways. And that's just our internal life. Our experience of life is a multidimensional storm of experiences and information and senses and chemical reactions and memories and associations and random flashes of electrical energy and weird quantum effects and automatic responses, emotions, farts and itches.

A brochure is more like it. Or a web page. With hyperlinks and text, pictures and video and all these various voices and inputs the Web is more like our experience than an essay.

So I wonder if there is an artform that can express this mulitmedia experience. It seems like Rememberance of Things Past approximates it as well as anything actually.

Ah well.

Turning the Aircraft Carrier

2007-08-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

So I want to change my life dramatically. That's my goal. Change myself and change my life completely. There are some good reasons for wanting to change, for example as of Monday night I weighed 301 pounds and on top of that I am not doing what I want with my life. Even more disturbing are some things that I will not share that have threatened to destroy my life. I have support to handle these things but suffice it to say I have motivation to make some serious changes.

So something happened exactly 90 days ago (I won't say exactly what, that is too personal) that knocked the crown of denial off my head. Suddenly I could see how unbelievably messed up I was and how I was screwing up my life. I joined Overeaters Anonymous and another support group and started going to a therapist. With the help and support of my amazing wife I have begun to transform myself and my life and lately I have put into place some structures to cause real change. Shelley and I have started meditating every morning and I have been getting up at 4 in the morning to write. Yesterday I started a restricted food plan that my OA sponsor suggested.

All of this leaves me exhausted, hungry and cranky.

But also filled with strength, hope, joy and excitement. It kind of doesn't matter if these change bring about the results I want. What is powerful for me is that I am in action. Making a difference. Doing what I have literally dreamed of doing for years. I have a sense of purpose and clarity that has been missing for years.

They say that change is painful. In the past when I heard that I often imagined a close minded racist who had to come to terms with his prejudice in some Afterschool Special about tolerance. What the pain of change really looks like is bleary, grumpy, hungry me getting up to write this post even though I would much rather be in bed.

In order to really make a difference, to take action, you have to do what is uncomfortable. What that looks like is to not want to do something but to do it anyway.

And I mean really, really not wanting to do it...
Like it seems like it would be healthier not to do it...
Like maybe this whole thing is a mistake and I should go back to the drawing board...
Like a group of reasonable people would agree that getting up this early and going on with this little sleep is a bad idea...
Like what am I nuts to do this...?

But do it anyway.

That's where change happens: in the realm of the unreasonable.That's where genius lives (BTW that's also where crazy lives but you pays yer money and you takes yer chances).

Anyway, I did it anyway and I'm damn glad I did.

"In order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow - and that is likely to hurt."
'Posthumous Pieces' by Wei Wu Wei

Change your socks and change the world

2007-08-29T04:45:00.000-07:00

How long does it take to completely transform the world? Was the world changed the millisecond that the reaction began at the Trinity Test site? Or was it changed when Einstein wrote his famous letter to Roosevelt, or when Roosevelt read it. Or was it changed when young Albert sat in a meadow and said to himself "I wonder if we assume that light is actually constant and that there is no objective observer, what would that look like."

But of course none of these moments changed the world on their own. They are significant because of subsequent action, right?

But wait, none of the subsequent actions would have happened if it wasn't for these moments of inspiration, communication and nuclear reaction.

(That sounds good - inspiration, communication and reaction - are those the essential actions? Does reaction cover brute work? Probably not. Does perspiration cover that? Not really but it sounds good.)

(O h! Her e's an idea)

So the essential moment is irreducible and irreplaceable. It can truly be said that the world can be changed in an instant but usually you can't tell. Perhaps because the world is constantly changing with every instant. It occurs to me that since thought is the invisible initiator of action that thought is altering the fabric of the universe on an ongoing basis. We live in an observer cr eat ed universe so the judgements and associations and inspirations and inventions that spring to the millions of observing minds are altering reality on an ongoing basis. If you thinks that's nuts try this thought experiment as you drive somewhere. Turn off the radio and look at the cars as you drive. Imagine that all the red cars are filled with your friends and all the blue cars are filled with your enemies. Does that change the way the world looks? Sure. Does it change the way the world is? For you it does and then your actions make that that real.

But the point that I want to make is that you can, in fact, change your world and your life with an instantaneous and decisive act of invention or inspiration.

I am going to act on this hypothesis right now. I am going to completely change my world with an act of audacious creativity, altering myself on a cellular level by self-invention. In this moment I am changing the world completely.

Just thought I'd let you know.

My Big Fat Greek Illusion

2007-08-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that the most profound and dangerous belief we have about life is that we have one.

To say we believe it is not quite accurate. It's more like its our belief system...or the container in which our belief system resides...or the context of everything.

Let's say that I'm a bag of salty water with a few vitamins and minerals and organic chemicals floating around in it. This is true, objectively. Why the heck do I have a story? Why on earth would this bag of salt water have a beginning, middle and end? If I did have a beginning, middle and end what kind of ridiculous egotist would expect that it make sense and have internal logic? That'd be crazy.

I hold these truths to be self evident: that some bags of salty water are incredibly self important for no good reason dispite the evidence of their wet, salty senses.

But now I'm sounding like a nihilist. Which I'm not. My point is that we believe that we are living a story that has a beginning and middle and an end and that this story should make sense. In fact we are not. For example: the end is nearly always nearer than we think and history suggests that it won't make sense to us when it happens. It doesn't happen like this "ah, I see, I'm dying. That makes sense that I should die now" right?

It follows from this point (an excellent one if I do say so myself) that no sense can really be made of this story and a story that makes no sense is not much of a story. In fact it isn't one. It's not even really a bad poem.

But we will keep making up stories and looking for meaning. We have to. Just try to read a sentence that doesn't have an.

End.

From the level of our DNA, it seems, we need to make up stories. Our DNA probably came up with the idea to keep itself propigating through time once intelligence developed enough so that it threatened the survival of the species.

Intelligence doesn't have to be to sophisticated, by the way, to threaten the younger generations. Doesn't it seem like self deluded people are worse at taking care of themselves and their kids than monkeys are?

Or cats?

Or bees?

Or worms?

To be self deluded you have to have a self and you have to be able to delude that self with some bullshit. In other words you have to be smart enough to come up with a lie that you are dumb enough to believe.

That is some mean trick.

Monkeys can't do that I bet but we do it all the time. I've been doing it for years.

"Ah," you say, "but that's storytelling isn't it. I thought you said DNA invented storytelling to preserve the species."

"Ah," I say, "You caught me. There is no sense to be made. Except maybe DNA is as self deluding as that guy who eats too much because he thinks he deserves a break."

(A nice bit of sophistry there, don't you think? Man what a rabbit hole this turned out to be. Certainly a rich mine of intensely interesting stuff. I will try to unravel more of it later.)

Okay so here's the big Illusion that I wanted to allude to. My illusion allusion if you will.

The following things are unexamined assumptions that I think we all make about our lives. (Maybe enlightened Zen masters are exempt from this.)

We think our lives should make sense. We think the story of our lives should be a good story with good character development, plot and consistent theming. We really want a good twist at the end that ties up everything in nice neat bow.

Looking at our lives we start coming up with good plot points. As part of that we think we will do certain things (or certain things will happen to us) to make a good story. These are things like get married, have a few kids, clean up the garage...

In order to have these plot points be part of the story they have to happen before we die and therefore we believe we won't die before we get a chance to do the things that will make it all make sense.

We (secretly) know at the same time that there is a very good chance that the plot points we have in mind won't actually make our lives make sense. We suspect that we haven't come up with the best plot points.

We also suspect that the plot points we have in mind only work if they come near the end. (it doesn't work to tell your asshole boss what you really think of him just before you die in a spectacular car crash if the car crash doesn't come and you have to go to work the next day).

We also suspect that maybe there is a better way to end the story that we haven't figured out yet.

This makes us fear these actions....and put them off.

So given that all this is bullshit we should really just do it as Nike says. it won't make sense anyway and the end is going to come befo

Ya know?

I was thinking of a series of dreams
Where nothing comes up to the top
Everything stays down where it's wounded
And comes to a permanent stop
Wasn't thinking of anything specific
Like in a dream, when someone wakes up and screams
Nothing too very scientific

Just thinking of a series of dreams
Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there's no exit in any direction
'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes
Wasn't making any great connection
Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme
Nothing that would pass inspection
Just thinking of a series of dreams

Dreams where the umbrella is folded
Into the path you are hurled
And the cards are no good that you're holding
Unless they're from another world
In one, numbers were burning
In another, I witnessed a crime
In one, I was running, and in another
All I seemed to be doing was climb
Wasn't looking for any special assistance
Not going to any great extremes
I'd already gone the distance
Just thinking of a series of dreams

Bob Dylan

What the heck is it?

2007-05-17T16:32:00.000-07:00

What is creativity?

Wikipedia says:

"Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.

From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new."

Wiktionary says

"The quality or ability to create or invent something; originality. "

Dictionary.com says

>"–noun

the state or quality of being creative.

the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination: the need for creativity in modern industry; creativity in the performing arts.

the process by which one utilizes creative ability: Extensive reading stimulated his creativity.

[Origin: 1870–75; creative + -ity] "

To be creative is to have the power or ablility to create. To create means to cause something to be that wouldn't be there before.

Like for instance a sigh or a fart or a fingernail.

Now most will argue that the something created must have value and originality to qualify whatever you're doing as creativity but isn't that kind of subjective value judgement the realm of the art historian not the artist.

The artist farts and the critic says it smells terrible, the art historian puts it in context and tells the world whether it was an important fart.

Lesson 217: Don't worry if it's not good enough for anyone else to hear, just sing, sing a song. (check this out as well)

I'll come back to this theme of fear-restrained self-expression and its discontents in the future but for now I want to explore the more pragmatic aspects of creativity. (Or, honestly, I hope to end up in some expected, esoteric place after starting in a prosaic place, sort of like Wittengstein.)

The thing about creativity is that it gets elevated to some kind of magical power. In fact the goal of creativity is simple, to create something new and useful. Now given that we are creating all the time whether we know it or not, who is to judge whether something is new or useful?

You.

Other people.

(Which brings us back to the fart analogy...I didn't get very far did I.)

Well maybe I can salvage something new and useful.

Whether something is new and/useful is a matter of judgement and thats a matter of context, both personal and cultural.

But that doesn't really past the smell test does it? Creativity is more a matter of attitude and activity than the outcome. Can we imagine a creative jam session that doesn't actually produce anything new or useful yet feels creatively productive.? Yes absolutely. Is it possible to imagine a jam that produces something new and useful that was not creative? Possibly.

So creation seems like its an activity, the quality of which can be judged subjectively and (relatively) objectively based on the feeling and on the outcome.

The point being, really, what are we waiting for?

Perspiration

2007-05-15T22:05:00.000-07:00

"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." -Thomas Edison

So the next step of course is to take all the next steps necessary.

The beginning may be the hardest part but the rest of it is even harder.

Beginnings

2007-05-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

The first thing about creativity is the beginning. The beginning (like this beginning for me) is actually the hardest part. The challenge is really to just begin but in the beginning the biggest stop is imagining the entire process with out actually being in it.

See thats the scariest part. Not the actual doing but the anticipation of the doing. The sense that you must begin the right way or else you will be doomed to failure. In fact you are guarrenteed to start in a way that leads to another way. It won't be right from the beginning.
Once you are in it you say oh yeah, this is creation!

Before you begin, you're really thinking: "oh I need to have already created something good." This means you have failed before you have begun in your own head.

The desire to be brilliant often snuffs out brilliance before it's even born.