For each character at each moment ask the question: what is this person afraid of? Their fears are like a fire beneath them that impels them to action. I suppose it isn't entirely based on a negative? According to Schopenhaeur it is. And I think him ultimately correct...

So just stick the fear in them (and perhaps some carrots in front of them) and watch them go. Through understanding the fears of each they are all real and interesting. Not just to the reader, but to the writer of course. It is perhaps the understanding of their fears that makes the writing it's most worthwhile. Trying to understand the different ways in which we each deal with our various fears.

And so each morning as they wake, what impels them to bother getting out of bed?

And it all falls apart as soon as you have a character who's fears you don't know yet whom you still have performing actions. Then you've just got random meaningless shit going on and why bother?
--
Watched What Happened to Jack Kerouac? Totally changed my opinion of Kerouac. I did think him the main character from On The Road. He wasn't, nor was that some shining ideal to him. It was something that just interested himi (and it was only one of many many books he wrote which were wildly different from each other). Keroauc(sp) was an intensely anti-Dean Moriarity person. He was perpetually nervous and perhaps a bit aspergers, though I don't like the label. He did though have a friend like Dean Moriarity that in some way fascinated him. To me it only makes sense when I actually see in my mind the relatively young Kerouac speak.

Must say it's a bit depressing in that one can write and write and write and it just doesn't come through. Then you hear them speak for 5 minutes and bamm! it makes sense. (At least until near the end when he drank himself to death. Then him speaking imparted nothing of much use.) Makes writing seem a futile exercise. Although it's not always like that.

...and I must say you absolutely don't get it from his writing plus seeing pictures of what he looked like: http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-701&va=jack+kerouac&sz=all
In fact that takes you even farther away from the reality of who this guy was. The idea of some macho cool guy that we get from On The Road is only heightened by seeing pictures of Keroauc such that one assumes that was some kind of ideal he was surely trying to emulate.

Pictures (of people) generally speaking it seems to me are a lie. They do more to take us away from the truth of people than bring us closer to it. Sometimes it's best not to attempt to explain a thing, because a partial explanation is almost certain to take us further away from the truth than we are if we're just completely in the dark.

If on the other hand, you can see the way a person moves...
---
From the movie also: What a prick William Buckley is. I don't see how anyone could hear/see him speak for any of his even typical 5 seconds of pretentiousness and not feel disgusted. How did the rightwingers not see it?

I think they liked that he came across as intelligent. Which being the party of the dumbasses has probably always been a sore spot for them. Now they've no one at all who can manage it, they've just got dumbasses like O'Reilly and so they've settled on smearing the left as elitist, etc. Something that they just could not have done while having such a nauseatingly pretentious prick like Buckley on TV.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. ~Ambrose Bierce

-

The swing between boredom and pain (fear more so than pain really), from tick tock to chop chop. Now I make that swing once again. Not so much chop chop now. A lot of boredom, nihilism. Looking at this world and being beyond disappointed. We might as well just chop chop chop all night long. We don't know how to do much else really.

When the chop chop was heavy I was really into going out occasionally with S, with D. Now I'm not. Now I just think that I've really nothing in common with these people other than sexual parts that fit together. And so perhaps it would be better if I didn't go out with them. What in the world ever was I thinking before? That being gregarious was some kind of good thing? Now with the chop chop not so looming over me I can look a bit more closely and see 'hanging out' with such people a bit better for what it is: a waste of time at best.

S though works 6 days a week and is struggling to survive. The chop chop is heavier for her and also she's younger. Hasn't realized how pointless it all is. In fact she may even be a virgin despite being 28. And I think she's adopted some nauseating positivity act to try to end that. It's sad that she's not found a man yet. I do find her very attractive. All the more reasons to stay away.

Really, no reason, not even close to enough in common, to warrant me having anything to do with anyone at all that I know who lives in the same state as me.

The alternative then, at first appears quite depressing. I've no children to distract me, to focus my life on. It's me and my wife. Whom, actually also I don't really have much in common with.

And so nihistically I ask: what is life? Other than merely surviving what are we doing?

Not much of anything really.

It seems life is so short though. A mere blink of the eye and it's past. And people spend the first 25 or so years just trying to get their survival secured. And then by about 40 they're all but finished. Nothing much to live for but whatever children they've got.

For me what can I do with my free time? Meaningless stuff.

And what I've got to do, I suppose, is narrow my focus so that I don't pay quite as much attention to how meaningless it is.

So then: Write. Which I seem to be getting better at. Compose. Read. Get around to playing some video games. Make stuff. Etc. Right now shall work on alphabetizing my library. (Fiction, nonfiction, odds and ends...) Then will upload my Vancouver pictures. Eat some stew. (Back to using the old crock pot.) Try to find some sleep in there before work tonight. I bet The Man Without Qualities by Musil will make me fall asleep. Etc, till I eventually die. And that's it. Other than merely surviving, that's it. That's all this life will hold for me. The main game is finding a way to continue bothering. Which, I think, consists of having a certain myopia. But at the same time I do want to not be too myopic, though it hurts me to not be so. Because I want to hold on to some extent always to the viewpoint where I've stepped back and see the bigger picture. No matter how awful it is.

War Machine Food

Throughout history when any two groups of humans have met the main factor in determining which group prevailed in the violence which almost always occured was the food that they ate. It was primarily a matter of luck in living near a food source that grew in the wild which could be domesticated and grown in such a manner that the ratio of calories to work hours was as high as possible. The main foods which accomplished this were wheat and rice. They originally grew in the wild in Asia and the Fertile Crescent. In North America corn was still tiny and not bred to be huge until relatively recently.

Wheat was able to expand to east and west, to relatively similar climates. The potatoes of South America couldn't so easily expand to the equator and then up into colder climes.

Basically there just wasn't much to work with in North America, in terms of a food that had a high ratio of calories to work hours. The best they managed was sunflowers actually.

In Africa also the options were not as good.

Same idea also held in terms of animals. African animals just weren't easily domesticated. Rhinos and cheetahs? They even tried actually to domesticate cheetahs but failed. There were no horses (zebras can't be domesticated). Now cows. Etc. Same in North America. A buffalo isn't quite as easy to work with as a cow...

Anyway, these cultures which had wheat and rice were able to specialize tasks. Fewer farmers, more beuracrats(sp), and professional soldiers.

Specialization in and of itself is a somewhat 'evil' thing. Furthermore this wheat, it's not actually all that healthy for you. The ratio of nutrients to calories in dark bread for example is roughly half that of what you get from a potato.

But so cultures like the Romans fed their peoples wheat. A crappy diet which probably lowered their life expectancy. But meant they could have a full time force of soldiers who just constantly went around attacking other peoples.

Wheat, especially, is a shitty food. Excuse me for talking about what is and isn't 'natural' but how less natural can you get than this grain which you have to grind up because it's completely impossible to otherwise digest?

One of the neat things that our wheat diet gives us, along with cancer from the resulting lack of nutrients is messed up bowels, as it sticks like glue. Hemorroids(sp), colon cancer... Hemorroids is particularly comical in that it affects a pretty sizable percentage of the population but it's largely a secret. And a primary cause is wheat products. Which are so overwhelmingly prevalent that few people have managed to remove them all and thus notice the role they play.

They also generally make people look like shit. They're fat, dumpy. And from the malnutrition their faces are pale. The food sits in their stomachs relatively like stones causing them to have less energy and generally sit around watching TV.

But they kill good. And it's efficient. Quality of life down the drain. But look who won?

All around us, it's the wheat world. Highly efficient, boring unvaried food, decreased life expectancy and feeling like shit. Other than meat, if ever there were an 'evil' food, it's wheat.

The Celts. They grew a ton of different foods. So many foods they regularly grew which are now lost to us. They had no chance against the Romans of course. Although they were more than a foot taller thanks in part to eating food that could actually properly nourish your body, they did not have a massive professional soldier class.

Joel Fuhrman advocates a diet which tries to maximize nutrient to calorie ratio. He points out that wheat has a bad ratio and starches in general do and should thus be minimized. John McDougal on the other hand (both advocate vegan diets as those are actually the healthiest(sp) way to eat) advocates far more starches. Why does he? Because everywhere he went in the real world he found only people that ate a lot of starches and in his genius he surmised that without all those starches you apparently would just sit around and starve to death or.. at least not have sufficient enery to bother reproducing.. (He actually argued this point with Fuhrman and that was why he thought Fuhrman was wrong.) Among other things he clearly hadn't read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. The reason we see only cultures that eat a ton of starches is because the growing of such 'efficient' foods meant more people could be devoted to killing. And so a more sane way of living was eventually murdered off.

In how we interact with one another and also in how we eat.

Veganism

There is an old story about Abraham Lincoln. Back when he was a lawyer and with a few fellows had to constantly travel from town to town he once came upon some baby birds. Their nest had fallen out of the tree it was in. Lincoln made the group stop and others to help him put the baby birds back into the nest and the nest back up in a tree. His fellows made fun of him for his "sentimentality". Lincoln simply said he could not have slept that night knowing he had left those baby birds to die on the ground.

His roommate at the time, a young teacher called Görlitz, later recalled that Van Gogh ate frugally, and preferred not to eat meat.[21][22]..."...he would not eat meat, only a little morsel on Sundays, and then only after being urged by our landlady for a long time. Four potatoes with a suspicion of gravy and a mouthful of vegetables constituted his whole dinner"—

"As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:

Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore."

Eating Meat, Jonathan Safran Foer, pg 36.

In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to [meat] in regard to both mechanical and mental performance". He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel".[97]

Three or four ways to suffering:
1. The lack of a sufficient over I (super ego) to stand back and pay attention and judge your actions and whether or not they adhere to whatever moral laws you've made for yourself.
2. How much forethought, how far into the future you were looking when your 'I' (ego) established it's personal moral laws. Less forethought means less seemingly altruistic behavior and thus more causing harm towards others.
3. How good or bad you are at discernment. DO you demonize everyone around you?
4. Once you perceive someone is performing an action which causes 'unnecessary suffering' do you try to use force to get them to change their ways?

To me eating meat is symbolic that this world is pretty much hopeless. While there is much suffering that it is complicated to fix, eating meat is very straightforward and yet, still, people just don't care.

I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer this last week. It is primarily about the evils of factory farming although touches on the rest. Driving home from the airport with my wife I was thinking about how a sizable percentage of animals are skinned while still conscious and even have their legs, etc cut off while still conscious. Was thinking about this and feeling depressed and furthermore much more depressed that I live in a world where all of this is obvious enough to everyone but they just don't care.

I mentioned this fact about factory farming to my wife, about how they often don't successfully even render the animal unconscious before they start skinning, etc it.

Some of what she does in response:
Claims its awful time to bring it up. Why right now?

But no matter what time I bring it up it's an awful time. If she's in a good mood, why would I ruin it by bringing such a thing up? If she's in a bad mood, then I'd just be a sadist to bring up such a thing. So it's gone for years. It's always a bad time.

This though ties into the fact that indeed for ever thinking about such things period, yes I'm am some kind of sadist/masochist. Why would I ever think about something so negative?

This is the positivity cult. My wife is a member. Perhaps we're all members to some extent.

I try to point out how incredibly negative it actually is, to try to avoid ever thinking about anything negative. That it means you believe that nothing can ever be done about any negative thing and instead it's best just to pretend that such things don't exist.

It may be some kind of wisdom to take such an attitude to some extent. (Please lord grant me the courage to...) But going too far with such an attitude is incredibly negative. To instead at times face the horrors around us and try to be better, at least try to not contribute to them is courageous...

Then it's bad for one's health. How can she think that when her husband has been a very near vegan for 6 years and is pretty healthy? She thinks I'm a freak of nature. But still she could research the matter online very quickly. Or believe I'm being honest when I cite the literature at least....

Then, no really it's just about me trying to control people. I want to control her. I point out that this is demonizing me. Actually when two people disagree about something there's a decent chance one of them is wrong and the other is right. Why shouldn't they discuss the matter and give the reasoning, the facts behind their opinion?

To the best of my knowledge I've never caused a single person to become vegan or vegetarian. It does depress me. I work in a hospital even, a place where you might think people would care more about the suffering of others... Even my wife is completely closeminded, simply refuses to think about the subject at all. It does symbolize to me how hopeless the human race is, as what could be more obvious? Incredible suffering to those whom can't defend themselves, while also even hurting ourselves in the process and still almost everyone does it.

Demonizers, Force, Indifference.

You see what you think is indifference and demonize the person. And think the demon can only be controlled with force. They in turn see you the same and blah de bleh. (Seeing someone as a demonizer doesn't necessarily make you in turn one. Nor does the usage of the word...)

Anyway, this worked I suppose. This blog at least, if nothing else. Just need to find the power cord to my old laptop...

New house. Beautiful. (...no... it's not a sort of panglossianism...) There's something about the one room with the fake fireplace and the slanted high ceiling. That it's slanted may even be essential. Also feel less confined. Also fire. It is real fire. Something about sitting... lounging on a massive couch in front of a fire with no ceiling so close to one's head.

It's like the perfect room, somehow. It's an L shape. Three open rooms going 37 feet to the left. 30 feet to the right. 16 feet above. The fireplace on mid left and wondows on mid right facing a massive oval couch. 12 feet in diameter.

Outside yesterday in the yard: ten deer. There is a mom and her two children here everyday. Wasn't sure they'd find the corn in the grass. They really did. There was also a massive owl sitting in the grass one day. I'd never seen an owl in this area before. Was it eating corn? I'd thought them carnivores.

Off to Vancouver in a couple days. What to do there?

Health is very good. Back to grease the groove ("synaptic facillitation"). Sleeping decent. Some variant of it was always the best.

Those three concepts (demonizers, force, indifference..) they're one way to look at it. One way to (loosely) divide it. They work well.

Looking for massive pictures to hang on a few large walls. Not happy with what I've found. The 15th century is the best so far. Bosch still, actually. And I didn't realize how damm popular The Garden of Earthly Delights was.

Finishing up shelves for room. (Staining vertical surfaces didn't work well.) Probably done tomorrow. What to build next? Maybe something musical.

Still want some VST with alternate tone capabilities that can do more/sound better than homegrown piano. Maybe Z3TA.

I want better sounds in general.

I guess I've been really busy lately.

...as I reread Robin Hobb it's clearer than ever before. I won't be stumbling blindly through the wilderness quite so bad now. Still see the potential for taking big wrong turns though. It might be best to just reread a couple of her books over and over and over again. Hopefully noticing more and more. The seeming imperfections. And the greater problems that attempting to "fix" them would cause.

This desktop is in a 7 by 7 foot room which was meant to serve as a very large closet. The main room it's off of has the massive book shelves I'm building. This little room has no window. I shall probably just use it for music usually. Laptop downstairs is the best room. I slept on the massive half oval couch today from 9AM to 5PM. I've noticed the light matters not to me at all. Windows open with sun shining in. Doesn't bother me at all.

Finally, a thing which I find it seems must remain unspoken. For to speak it seems to shatter it. But left unspoken I fear I'll forget it. But the latter worries me much less.

A giving up. A melancholy. And ultimately an overall substantial increase in happiness.

the study found that Americans' discussion networks have shrunk by about one-third since 1985 and have become less diverse because they contain fewer non-family members.

That is a really significant fact. Absurdly though the study appears to be trying to trying to claim that:

Contrary to popular belief, technology is not leading to social isolation and Americans who use the Internet and mobile phones have larger and more diverse social networks, according to a new study.

"All the evidence points in one direction," said Keith Hampton, lead author of the report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released Wednesday. "People's social worlds are enhanced by new communication technologies.

"It is a mistake to believe that Internet use and mobile phones plunge people into a spiral of isolation," said Hampton, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The pretext for this claim being:

It found that on average, the size of people's discussion networks is 12 percent larger among mobile phone users, nine percent larger for those who share photos online, and nine percent bigger for those who use instant messaging.

The diversity of people's core networks tends to be 25 percent larger for mobile phone users, 15 percent larger for basic Internet users, and even larger for frequent Internet users, those who use instant messaging, and those who share digital photos online.

Which actually appears only to show that extroverted people are also using newer technologies to continue (to some degree) being extroverted while less extroverted people are (of course) using such technologies less so. This would appear to be basically a tautology. Extroverted people are extroverted. Not remotely proof that new technologies aren't leading to increasing isolation.

Meanwhile in the last 25 years 'discussion networks' have shrunk by one third.

All and all the article reminds me of Brawndo.

Seemingly an incredibly stupid article. But again with this one disconcerting sentence in it:

the study found that Americans' discussion networks have shrunk by about one-third since 1985 and have become less diverse because they contain fewer non-family members.

Which is surely doubleplusungood. Surely a huge change in our society. And yet barely even noticed. Instead we have a cheery article which reminds me of Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided. Where the 'negative' people are often just fired.

Paintings can conjure up alternate worlds maybe a little better than pictures usually manage. Want to keep this picture in mind as I make a story.



Partially cut off here (which ruins it). I like these two early pictures of his better than his famous stuff.

---

Rereading Robin Hobb's Ship of Magic. Every single good character is experiencing a considerable degree of suffering. How is it not miserable to read?

http://www.meganlindholm.com/2009/08/19/procrastination/

My previous post about my somewhat passive aggressive coworker. Her books are largely that sort of thing. With a tiny bit of magic thrown in.

Lately I've been having this new feeling of amazement. Usually it only really lasts for a few seconds. But the echoes of its memory go on for quite a while. It is about this feeling of what happiness there could be in this world. Of what happiness potentially there is in me. Of how so very easily things could be so wonderful.

But they're not.

And why? Why oh why?

Because people keep on doing ugly things to one another. Because they keep being indifferent to one another.

And I focus in on specific examples from my own life. Examples of people who've done me so wrong. Who never apologize. Just leave behind forever the ugly memory of what they've done. Never right the wrong and just leave the knife in forever. And for no good reason at all.

And so, I see a beautiful world in my mind. It's so close. And yet will never be. Because these people choose instead to act in such an ugly manner.

..And I just feel this amazement about it.

Why?

Why in the world would they choose to make the world like this?

But, don't get me wrong. It's mostly a positive feeling actually. Because I see that beautiful world. I see what could be.

And I do my part. It maybe isn't worth much. But I continue to do what I can. And try to figure out how to be more efficient in my efforts.

Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control. "Reality sucks," a computer scientist with a master's degree who can find only short-term, benefit-free contract jobs told me. But you can't change reality, at least not in any easy and obvious way. You could join a social movement working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more humane corporate policies, but those efforts might take a lifetime. For now, you can only change your perception of reality, from negative and bitter to positive and accepting. This was the corporate world's great gift to it's laid-ff employees and the overworked survivors--positive thinking.

Companies brought in motivational speakers for an ever growing number of corporate meetings. Whatever else goes on at these meetings--the presentation of awards, the introduction of new executives--the "entertainment" is usually provided by motivational speakers. As Vicki Sullivan, who follows the market for such speakers, said, corporations are the "sugar daddies" of the motivational speaking industry. "At some point," she told me in an interview, employers realized it was not enough to expose people to familar positive-thinking nostrums like "Don't read newspapers or talk to negative people." Instead she said, "What they've learned is that you have to go beyond that, as change happens faster and faster. You have to use motivational speakers to help people hang in there."

...The burgeoning genre of business self-help books provided another way to get white-collar workers to adapt to downsizing. Of these, the classic of downsizing propaganda was Who Moved My Cheese?, which has sold ten million copies, in no small part due to companies that bought it in bulk for their employees. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that it would fall into the hands of many reluctant readers, it's a tiny volume, only ninety-four pages of large print, offering the kind of fable appropriate to a children's book. Two little maze-dwelling, cheese-eating people named Hem and Haw--for the human tendency to think and reflect--arrive at their "Cheese Station" one day to find that the cheese is gone. The "Littlepeople" waste time ranting and raving "at the injustice of it all," as the book's title suggests. But there are also two mice in the maze, who scurry off without hesitation to locate an alternative cheese source, because, being rodents, they "kept life simple. They didn't overanalyze or overcomplicate things."

Finally the little humans learn from the mice that they may have to adapt to a new cheese. Haw uses what amounts to the law of attraction to find it: he starts to "paint a picture in his mind... in great realistic detail, [of himself] sitting in the middle of a pile of all his favorite cheeses--from Cheddar to Brie!" Instead of resenting the loss of his old cheese, he realizes, more positively, that "change could lead to something better" and is soon snacking on a "delicious" new cheese. Lesson for victims of layoffs: the dangerous human tendencies to "overanalyze" and complian must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.

...By and large, America's white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, "I've gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional." Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the "cheese" was always moving. They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview--a belief system, almost a religion--that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds.

Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich. pg 116