A Wave of Reason ... with a splash of irrationality

This is the soundtrack for my life these days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PT90dAA49Q&NR=1. Watch it. That's all I can say about it. It will change your life if you let it. I mean, it will work in concert with a bunch of other things to produce an actual change in your life if you are willing to put in the necessary commitment. That's actually my favorite thing about my current life in Japan. I love my job. I love my students and I love the growing and blossoming daily interactions that I am able to have with them. I love my friends, I love bowling, I love playing tennis on Thursday evenings. I love onsens. I love a bunch of stuff about life right now, but more than anything I love the opportunity that Japan has provided me to re-write myself as I would like to see myself re-written.

What exactly does that mean? When you find yourself in a place you've always known, it is very easy, extraordinarily easy, to surrender to what you've always been; however, when you find yourself in a place that's almost entirely new, then you notice that the cords that bind you to your past suddenly have acquired a new sense of slack. In that wiggle-room between who you think you are and who you think you can be there is plenty of space to make moves that need making.

And yet that's neither here, nor there, even as it just so happens to be everywhere. For a long time I've been looking for something. I remember sitting in Dick Mastellar's office, trying to discuss a Hemingway novel with him. He wanted me to look at just how artfully Hemingway had constructed a world or despair and defeat, and I wanted my reading material to provide me with a world of hope and victory, regardless of how crudely it happened to be rendered. I'm sure he was very frustrated with me, because anyone who has actually studied English Literature knows that such a world is really nowhere to be found.

Which doesn't mean that such a world doesn't exist.

For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a writer. Then I gave it up. Now the sinusoidal phases of the universe are on the upswing and I wonder again if I don't have something worth writing locked up in this brain of mine. In truth, it's beyond wondering, because I think I may have found that thing I was looking for and slowly in the deep, milky recesses of my brain coalesces a something that is not the icy shore of a lake in war-torn Europe. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but it might just be a bottle and it might just bear flame.

A Wordsmith is Reborn

It's a new year which strikes me as a convenient time to make this a new blog. No mission statements but I've rediscovered something I lost and I feel the need to wave it across the sky like a flag of flame because if that's what I want it to be then that's what it is.

If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.

I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.

But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.

Old Questions, Old Answers

Recently I’ve been possessed anew of an old question. In some ways it’s the question that all other human questions must reduce to, or at least should reduce to, because when the world snaps into focus it is ultimately the only thing that fills your field of vision. In classic American terms, what’s the good life and how do we live it? What do we have to do to get the most out of life? It’s such an often repeated phrase, ‘get the most out of life,’ recycled through the increasingly unreliable and various organs of cultural transmission so many times that it seems to have been infected or at least slimed over with a film of bullshit, but just because the question has been co-opted countless times to sell Oxy-Clean and nose jobs and Ab-Gliders doesn’t mean that the question itself has been corrupted..

What’s the good life and how do we live it? The reason it works as such an effective advertising strategy is because it's the question we're all looking for an answer to. It seems like QVC and Toys'R'Us don't have the right answers, but there are right one’s, there have to be, and if Hollister and Tommy Hilfiger have exploited the question for profit, a long line of thinkers leading back into the primordial mist affirm that it’s worth asking. I think a crucial component of the answers we’re actually looking for proceed from the simple question ‘why?’.

I’m proposing, of course, nothing complicated here. I’m rephrasing old questions in old terms, presenting nothing new and offering nothing revolutionary. How do we live a good life? Seek the foundations upon which life rests, and then when you understand why, maybe you can go from just life to something good. It's not terribly complicated, but I think in formulating my world view up to now I’ve neglected things that seemed simple because somehow I got the idea that they weren’t enough. No enough either in the sense that they weren’t sufficient or that they weren’t trendy enough, that the answers we’re all looking for are strung up in layers of neon tugged into hieroglyphs into postmodern oracular smoke, that a seemingly complicated world needs an equally complicated codex to read it. That a simple answer is a boring answer, a blasé answer. And yet, maybe there’s a little string we could pull somewhere that’ll bring the whole thing down, and maybe that’s pretty cool. Maybe there isn’t, and maybe it isn’t, but just maybe we can figure out what we’re supposed to be doing here.

The questions are old, the proposed answer is simple (or at least the algorithm for exploring it is), but there is nothing to reject in things that we have seen before or in things we can grasp. I am alive, sooner or later I’m going to die, I want to live in the best way I can. How do I do that? The most important, most pressing question we’ve got. And the most potent answer I can think of to that question is a simple injunction to think about why. About why things are the way they are. About why we do the things we do, why we want the things we want, why we react to things the way we do, why this is this way and why that is that. If you get that, then you can manipulate the matrix. If you don’t, then you’re drowning in it, casting around for the sort of life-preservers that keep you in the water with the same efficacy that they keep you afloat.

I try to live life to the fullest, I want to get the most out of life, I want to live every day like it’s my last, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve reached a strange impasse where the most important resolutions we can make have also become the most empty. It’s crucial to make the resolution, but the resolution itself, alone, without anything to back it up, is worthless. Why? Think about it I guess.

Sometimes You Need to Put it Somewhere

Some ass named John Barth once said that nothing ever lasts longer than a mood, and maybe I'm bipolar but I think that of any line of anything I've ever read this has resonated with me more than any. Nothing lasts longer than a mood and we flash from one to the next on the rise and fall of crashing and soaring and plummeting and flat lining chemical reactions in our heads, and for a while I couldn't handle that but who gives a fuck, we are what we are and what we are can't change that, doesn't change that, and if somewhere there are enzymes catalyzing the rush of whateveryouwantocallem's through our veins like so much water through so many canyons, if it's these little chemical process pulling the pulleys and booms behind the scenes of what we think of as our selves, what's to lament about that? I am a massive machine that's nothing more than molecular ups and downs but those molecular ups and downs are all that I am and why not fold them in rather than force them out?

Nothing lasts longer than a mood they say, which means that nothing lasts after the adrenaline fades away, resolution rides on receding streams of dopamine and we are (are we), as it were, at the whim of our brain chemistry, but sometimes, when a mood is real good, you need to put it somewhere. Somewhere you can get to.

Brain Chemistry. It moves the pulleys and booms but, can I tell it where to move them? A silly question, or perhaps the central question. Someone else said I'm never the same person when I go to sleep as when I wake up, as when I wake up, but when I go to sleep a figure of flame do I have to wake up a thing of stone? Can you bottle fire? Can you keep it? Can you put it somewhere secret and safe for the night and open it up in the dim, sputtering critically flawed 9mm film of the early morning and have it come rushing out, the only spear you ever need to meet the day, the only shield you ever need against whatever tribulations the world might send your way? Can you make a mood last forever? There are times when I'm as the ebb and flow of a steely gray sea; slow, incessant, largely irredeemable, a sullen stagnation with too much momentum to gain any. But there is a flame inside me to scorch that world in streaks of whatever it is for which light seems to be the readiest and most overused metaphor. I'mma find turn that shit into ink and write it on my bones.

Roger Federer is the sweetest dude in the world

I love this man.

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/aus10/news/story?id=4876370

Because Why Not

I just read that last post I wrote, and it's really good, I'm the shit. So, I find myself motivated to do it again. The question, however, is what does one write about when one's life is largely devoted to scrounging the internet for Mariners' news, thinking up new and creative ways of butchering Chone Figgins' name (just now I thought of CHUUUUUNE FLUGGINS!!!! and I wish I were a season ticket holder (who lived in Seattle) because I have at least 81 others that I would love to put on signs and try to get an interview with Mike Blowers or something. The impending absence of Beltre means that there will be a void opening up in the crazy fan section at Safeco once filled by The-Beltre-Guy, and I would love to be that replacement. The-Chone-Figgins-Guy. That could be me. Or should I say The-SHWAAAAAAYNE-SHWAGGINS-Guy?), watching infuriatingly melodramatic Japanese sitcoms on the internet, and occasionally scouting out Marshall's facebook page for pics of his girlfriend? Not much, that's for sure. Which is why I have just decided to write whatever it is I'm going to write in a language most of you probably can't read anyway. Because why not. It will also spare you the pain of reading it.

　　さあ、どうしようかなぁ。日本語ででも、書きたいことはあまりないじゃん。ええと、たぶん、なんだろう、あっそうだ！　あれか？あれにするか？はい、ということで、あれについて語らせていただきます。すごいな、あれ。まあ、やっぱり、やめた。実はこんな内容のまったくない話は続けられないな、実力足りないし。というか、エネレギたりないだろう。いや、つまらなすぎるから。　いずれにしても、さっさと本題に入るか？でも、本題って、まだ決まってない。わかった、わかった、スピッツについて話そう。スピッツは、どういうことというと、私の大好きなバンドです。そうそう、こんなにつまらないことをみんなに聞かせちゃいます。どうかお許しをいただけますよう、お願いいたします。本当に日本人がこれを読んだら、やばいかも、自分でも何を言っているかはさっぱりわからないから。まあ、そんなはずがないので、安心しましょうか。ごめん、話がちょっと飛んじゃったね。だけど、スピッツだ！すごい気に入ってる、最近。この前BEST　HITSみたいなアルバムを買って、まじで絶え間なく聞き続けている、ずっと。夢にも出っている。もう、ちょっと、やめたいなと思っているところだけど、絶対無理。現を抜かしている。やめようにも、すぐ体が震えだして、髪が抜け始めるとかかなぁと、心配しているから、まあ、しばらくでもこのペースで持続。どうせ結局、飽きちゃうからね。たぶん。　何でそんな気に入っているかいというと、　ぴったり九十年代の音楽の雰囲気にはまるから。たぶん初めてでも、日本語まったくわからなくても、聞いたら、すぐ”こいつ、九十年代のものだ！”とわかっちゃうと思うよ、間違いなく。なんでだろうな。何で聞いたらすぐTHIRD　EYE　BLINDのことが思い浮かぶのかな？不思議だな。だけど、幻でもない。確かな現象だ。音というか、雰囲気というか、どこかが、”これは九十年代に作られたものだ”と宣言しているように聞こえる、この馬鹿私に。えっ、やばいな、自分の言葉本が当にわからなくなちゃった。日本語的に文章があっているかどうかこいつを見てもらえる人はどっかにいるかな。ま、いいや。　ここらへんで、締めるか？もう、ずいぶん長くなってきたし、思わずに。はい、ありがとう、バイバイ。

Wow, that was ridiculous. Don't be impressed, though, it's very likely that none of that makes any sense. I mean, maybe it sort of does, but maybe I was just mashing keys together. I think it makes sense. Doesn't actually matter.　It was fun. Ok, well, it's nine forty and I haven't eaten yet. I've got some old lettuce in my fridge, maybe I'll go make a salad.

When the Past Bubbles Up

Because sometimes out of the dross of the present it does. Mysteriously. Who knows what it is that dislodges a long forgotten face, landscape, or abstract but verifiably temporal emotion out from the massive, sedimentary shelves of our memories, but sometimes a word, a glance, a shaft of light summons memory from the deepest mausoleums of our minds and reanimates them before us, alive, full of blood, and none the worse for time and distance. Sometimes it's hard to remember who you used to be, sometimes you feel like you've changed so much that you shouldn't even recognize your memories as your own, but then a breeze will strike your face from a particularly resonant direction and you'll find yourself standing on the sidewalk of a twenty-three year old life as a momentary eleven year old, not bothering to wonder how you can reconcile the briefcase in your hand (sike, I don't use a briefcase) with the long forgotten porch of a treehouse you feel yourself standing on. It's a bizarre experience, but it's also enough to remind you that who you always were is who you always will be, even if only in sporadic and unpredictable spurts and splashes.

When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.

That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.