the flow

Don't have a ton to add today but gotta get something in here, to stay in the flow as the title suggests. Just started listening to the Serial podcast, has got me thinking about accurate and persistent record-keeping when it comes to my personal life.

Jake's here, still feeling pretty out of it. He's going in and out of sleep right now, looks pretty flushed with fever still. Hoping he breaks it within a day or two so we can burn the city down as planned while he's here. We got Thai Patio for lunch today, I worked this morning and was done by about 3pm. We walked over there, ate, got some toilet paper on the way home.

We got intercepted by a guy with an iPad taking donations for kids in poverty—I'm an easy target for people trying to sell things on the street or peddle ideas, I feel, and so ended up donating. After talking to the guy for a while though, I was glad I did. It was kind of shocking to me how little money it took from me to apparently make such a huge difference in another person's life; I'm apparently going to get receipt and pictures of the kid that I helped, or at least a note from him that will be translated from whatever his native language is so I can see what his reaction to it was. He thanked me profusely but now that I'm looking back on my day, that was probably the most meaningful thing I did. I thanked him too but I think he took it as just a pleasantry.

I'm feeling better about flexing the writing muscles lately. I also was able to get in a five minute meditation today as well between going out to eat, while my brother was taking a shower, so I've got that streak still going as well. But I was thinking in light of what I wrote the other day about depression and meaning.

Some of those questions I was addressing are still relevant; no blog post I write will ever wrap them up nicely. Still, I'm glad I wrote about what I did now because it's made me hone in a little bit.

I had a thought come to me today, just now really, what I would say if someone asked me what I wanted to do with my life, or what kind of effect I want to have. I would say that I want to be remembered or at least "felt" by every person I come in contact with—meaning a conversation at least, of course.

I think that as you move through life, you swing into other people's fields and orbits and can sometimes see how their gravity has changed by your presence or effect. In the modern and information-saturated era we live in, Descartes "think therefore I am" postulate seems kind of outdated and unreliable as a way to prove one's own worth and existence. I've always been more interested in connection, and one could use that other logic to take a pretty solipsistic tack. I could think by myself in a dark cave somewhere and convince myself that "I exist" by that logic, but my gut tells me that existing doesn't really mean anything in that context.

While a lot of it starts with being present to the moment you're in, I think being true to the emotions you're feeling is what really crystalizes your "existence" so to speak, it's a kind of antidote to existential crisis. You have to make moments in your life, you're being pulled along a string but you can torque or yaw the string in different directions along the way I guess.

Linking into that post I wrote about sandcastles as well, I've long struggled with the idea not of "why create" but "why create more." But as I think about it now, I think it's because you could rephrase Descartes' old aphorism for our present moment as: I create, therefore I am.

That's always been true as well, but especially now when thinking has much less weight in a world where vast catalogues of thought are available without any effort expended. Creation is much riskier than thought.

In the same way, around others and in new places and spaces, shooting from the heart is the best way to shake other people at a tectonic level; whether that's for good or for bad, I honestly don't care. If I pushed someone into becoming a villain down the line, I would be ok with that if it were a result of something I did. You have to behave in a way that the world can react to, otherwise what are you doing?

Good and bad isn't really the point; it's not even really a factor in life at an elemental level. Not to get too Nietzscheian here, but I think morality and mediocrity are pretty closely related in a lot of ways. Ethics are different than morals, and like the last post I wrote, I don't think it's all that productive—"creative"—to postulate and muse about ethical principles.

Ethics are discovered through action, just as wisdom is discovered through experience. Sitting on the sidelines making deep observations that sound profound can not be called wisdom, because it doesn't arise from felt and lived experience. It's unintentionally corrupted, and sharing it with others can be dangerous if you're not savvy to the element of self-deception in what's being passed on.

Anyway—I like creating and being creative in its own right, but I feel doubly armed by the fact that I can use creativity to combat existential quandaries. Until next time,

Ryan

list-making; paper chains and sandcastles

Today is a busy today because my brother is flying in to visit at around 8pm, and I've got to go pick him up from LAX.  I have a laundry list of things to get done before then, but I've been making laundry lists of things to do for the past week or so and thought I would write something about it.

I remember when I started this blog it was kind of as a personal improvement-tracking place, though it had a decidedly dark aspect to it that I'm trying to get away from a bit now... speaking of which I might re-do the design and layout stuff if I get a chance to reflect a newer, better headspace.

But anyway, although I've become exactly like my father, I'm completely addicted to making lists now.

If you make lists, you start to realize the potential of your mind as well as its limitations. Everyday, each of comes up with slews of good ideas that just get lost in the noise of the day. There are so many distractions all around us, such an onslaught of information coming at us all the time that it's hard (damn near impossible really) to keep a clear head.

Meditation is an option, but so far I'm terrible at honing that into a real practice that is showing significant benefits for me yet. I simply don't have the discipline for it developed yet, though I'm trying to push myself into a practice. Even doing it once or twice does help, there's a certain stillness that comes to the mind; in fact, feeling angry or frustrated after you've had a quiet meditation feels very profane, and gives you a working sense-memory of the emotional distance needed to detach from those negative emotions in the moment... all good things.

With these lists, every time some jolt of inspiration comes I can codify it so that it's permanently out of the aether. I've noticed the other huge advantages of writing everything down are twofold:

• Once an idea or 'list item' is out of your head, it frees up mental scratch space my working memory; I can completely release my imagination from processing that task. Once it's on paper, it's been accounted for.
• Secondly, the state of my list (or lists) becomes kind of a direct reflection of my mental health at any given moment.

The second one is really huge, although it's not something that's as easily controlled at the first thing. Just because I see my handwriting is sloppy, there's stuff scribbled out, notes in the margins, etc—sure, that's a reflection of how scattered my mind is, but it's not a solution to it.

The solution to that is all the stuff that requires heavier lifting—namely heavy lifting, exercise, diet, meditation, reading good books to keep the brain alive, and the like.

All of this stuff though reminded me of a post I made a while ago about intention. I got to rethinking about that especially after hearing something that my boss Anna David said in a podcast interview semi-recently:

"Depression hates a moving target."

That might be an aphorism to some of you, but to me I'd never mulled the concept over like that. It helps to think of anxiety and depression as snipers in the bush though, to give them a concept that separates them from yourself.

When I was in the pits of depression and anxiety recently (when I was still living on the beach before moving to Los Feliz), I had really bad writer's block as a result. But this was like megaton-level writer's block, not just not knowing what to write.

I was basically disemboweling myself as to why I'd even chosen to write at all. I started launching an inner moral screed against myself for writing, trying to write, asking deeper level questions about the relative value of various career paths; I'd been leaning closer and closer to writing as a selfish, solipsistic pursuit. Obviously that's not a great conclusion to draw when you want to be a writer (or you think you want to be a writer, sometimes those two positions get confused when you're depressed).

So I decided to apply that same logical, deconstructing mind to the problems my depressive mind was posing as to why I shouldn't write. I tore out a piece of paper and started writing it out like a philosophical essay, an exploration of the ethics/pragmatics of writing. I started with all my objections in an itemized list—I think there were about eight distinct arguments in there.

But once it was on paper, I saw that these were points that could be refuted. I only refuted one of them that day in writing, but that was enough to get the ball rolling again

I don't think I still have everything I wrote that day, nor am I particularly interested in "solving out" the whole document, mostly because my deeper self knows the arguments my depressive mind is making are flimsy; I only need one of them to be broken to have fairly deep faith that the others are equally deceptive and false.

As Common once said, "It don't take a whole day to recognize sunshine."

Final thing on intention—I heard someone else talk recently about momentum in kind of an abstract way, as it applied to "taking action." Taking action and "right action" are pretty big concepts in a lot of different pragmatic philosophies and religions like stoicism, Buddhism, existentialism and so on.

But without getting mired in what constitutes right action—that would be a complete folly at this point in my life—I heard someone say it simply recently: "action begets action." Likewise with inaction.

In the pits of depression, there's this tricky slippage of meaning that goes into throwing "taking action" into question. I'm going to briefly try to pin down that philosophical slippage of meaning here, just for anyone who's interested (and for myself, to drive the knife in the fucker's heart once and for all).

While it's unclear how depression gestates in a person (or as an alternative explanation, what other plane of existence it visits us from), what is somewhat clearer are its methods of action on our psyche and spirit.

The first is a questioning of our basic, foundational assumptions. Is life worth living? Should I even "do" anything? Does anybody need to do anything? Are we meant to be here? Does life have meaning?

Each of these questions are definitely meaningful, no reason to throw them out. But what's tricky is that ONE of these questions requires a looooot of philosophical footwork to get a logical grip on. The depressive mind .would rather string them all together to ensnare us. Fortunately for us, it's a paper chain.

Let's go through some of these questions to get an idea of how to get around this stuff; we can use depression's own philosophical stance against it with a little bit of finagling.

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? — This is almost a meaningless question, which is ironic in that it seems to imply that life itself is meaningless (which it may be, but we'll get to that). "Life" is the thing in question here; we're all living it, and note how's it linked in the language we use to talk about it. We live life; "to live" is an action, "life" is just an abstract object.

When we talk about "life" without including that lived aspect, we take ourselves out of it. That's the beginning of the abjection and alienation depression is so fond of.

But more importantly, you simply can't talk about "life" existing WITHOUT it being "lived" by a "liver," so to speak (and I'm not referring to the human organ that processes poison here, though now that seems a particularly apt metaphor for something).

The second philosophical scaffold into oblivion here is "worth." Because "worth" is a value judgment. Is life worth living... compared to what? Not living?

Actually yes, that's right. That's what depression points us toward. But it's ok; if you're reading this, we can get through this in a fairly satisfying way, I think. Anyway—

The tricky "slippage" part of this is kind of its illogic when you look at it, and I choose to use this (or at least frame it mentally) as evidence that depression is not a part of what I consider "me," at all. It's an "inner demon" in the truest sense; it comes from elsewhere. Here's why:

All the information we get to formulate value judgments, information we could use to answer what the "worth" of a lived life, necessarily comes from a lived life. So the question is totally fucking irrelevant. Or rather, to reframe it: maybe life's central worth is the pursuit of the above question. And how do you pursue such a question? You live life, and determine what moments are worthy of... whatever. Remembrance, feeling, joy, whatever gets you off.

But then depression comes at you with the next link in the paper chain to stop you there:

DOES LIFE HAVE MEANING? — Again, this is a tricky re-approach of the last question, and it's a question that the big guys have asked and written about much more intelligently and at length that I'm about to do here (see Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, et al).

This is a question where you can clearly see how depression, the entity, has your mind in the psychic equivalent of an arm bar. It short-circuits us because you can't use your mind to answer a question like that. Or the last one.

Imagine if someone said, "Yes, it's being happy (i.e., serving yourself)." How selfish does that sound to a depressed mind? There's also: "Yes, it's serving others." But what about yourself? How can you serve others when you're miserable? Plus it also seems largely reductive—this seems kind of important, yeah, but its not the whole enchilada.

So we've now tried out the psycho-philosophical positions of "me" and "you" and closed them both out—meaning doesn't inherently reside there. There's the third option of: "Yes, its serving God," which is sure to be the most contentious of all.

God is dead. Especially to the depressive mind. In our modern age, we're tired of hearing about God on a cloud, giving with one hand while He takes with the other. But let's revisit that third option of "serving God" and what that could or does mean.

Keep in mind that what follows here is not a religious argument; it's a linguistic argument. And it's not a linguistic argument for the existence of a god or God, it's more of a linguistic paradox; a black-hole you might be able to pass through into the wonderful world of meaning again.

What does "god" really mean? Even if we don't believe in a god or God, we can take the concept apart as it's widely understood and then try to find some kind of analogue to it in reality. After all, it would be nice if there were truly an all-loving, all-giving God who looks out for us, who feeds us as we feed back into him. But we know it doesn't really work like that. But still, let's look:

God is omnipotent; he can do anything. An analog to that is the concept of "possibility."

God is omniscient; he knows everything. An analog to that is a "force of nature," which is decidedly less abstract than the first one. Think gravity or electricity; they "know" when and where they need to be applied anywhere in the universe, often simultaneously in different places.

God is omnipresent; he is everywhere. No analog needed here—think of "stuff" or "things." "Everything."

When you back-form that, it's starts to look a little less fraught with moral weight and more just a description of the state of affairs we're in. In my view, putting that triumvirate together we get kind of an apt description of consciousness and how it works. But without losing the thread here:

Basically, those who believe life is meaningful tend to believe that there's something essential at the heart of it, at the heart of everything. It's a Platonic viewpoint, and it tends to imply something approximating what we call "god."

If you believe that, cool, just navigate the structure of meaning around that into the sweet spot and you should be good to go in terms of giving your life meaning.

If you don't believe that, you have to not believe that, fully. Most people get lost between the two poles; that's kind of what depression feels like.

"I believe that I have to make my own meaning in life, but if life doesn't have its own inherent meaning, that means life is meaningless, and that means any meaning I make is inherently meaningless."

Here's the thing: logically, yes, that's true. But there's more to life than logic. Where are we getting these assertions from? All we can really conclude from that above statement is that we don't know. We can't be certain life has inherent meaning. From our viewpoint, it seems likely that it doesn't.

What we can be more certain of is what we find meaningful; though it's hard in depression. Depression forces us into essentialism, but essentialism misses all the good things in life.

Honestly, the best stuff to read for those truly, truly mired in this and who won't be convinced of anything else is some existentialist stuff. I find Kierkegaard personally the most relevant, but to each his own. I'll just give my little parable here and call it good:

Think of a sandcastle. When you were a kid, you would make sandcastles. Why? Because sand could be formed into castles, and they looked cool. They offered aesthetic value. They offered personal value, that we had formed something "alive" out of something inert. And we did so with full knowledge that a kid would come step on it. Or that the tide would come in and wash it away.

But the destruction of a sandcastle is a part of the joy of a sandcastle. We only ever got mad if our sandcastles got wrecked while we were still in the middle of making them. That's where true frustration and regret comes from. No kid sits on the shore puzzling over what the point of making a sandcastle is if it's just going to be destroyed; in fact, it's going to be awesome to see what it can withhold when the wave comes, how long it takes to get destroyed and what that looks like. There's still a fascination there that's in balance with the joy of creation; it's a yin-yang thing.

So what are you going to do? The wave comes for all of us, castle or no.

So go make your fucking sandcastle.

new musings

I've gotten into the habit of drinking whiskey now as part of my writerly routine, tonight especially, so forgive me if what follows is unclear. I don't have a really structured plan of what to write about today but I want to record something. Maybe let's start with some questions:

For a long time I've thought about what it is to be masculine and what it is to be feminine; if that premise scares you away, stay with me for a minute here. I think it's a more intriguing thought than it appears to be on the surface.

Obviously gender is a construct, anyone who's been to college (and likely many who haven't) can attest to that. What I'm talking about goes deeper than that, I think. I watched a seminar on YouTube tonight that kind of re-sparked my interest in this subject—I remember having a conversation with my friend Will when he was dating Aja (another friend), and while they were both intrigued by what I was saying, I still got the feeling that they were just humoring me more than anything else.

Anyway—clearly, there are men and women; I hesitate to call that the "default" for fear of heteronormativity (as I completely recognize that people can be born in between that binary), but a better word fails to come to me right now. I mean no offense; this is more or less unarguably the biological default, but more on the implications of that (or lack thereof) in a moment.

Maybe I've been talking to my Dad too much, but I feel a pretty strong belief in his esoteric idea of "polarity" as it pertains to nature. It manifests in many different ways; magnetism, grammar, gravity, etc. But it also applies to "gender," though that feels like cheapening a universal force with a term that carries a lot less semantic weight.

Basically, polarity exists; gender is a manifestation of it, all social-construction arguments aside. Here's the second question:

Is there a way that things "are"? Or is how things are just a product of individual perception? I.e., is there a reality to observe, or do we collaborate on it?

There's an interpretive fork that arises here—if there is a way things are, it seems (in my mind) to carry with it a way that things should be (and I don't mean that in any "pray the gay away" kind of way). If there's not, then there's not, and we get to choose everything.

I don't consider myself religious anymore, but I find it interesting that a lot of the deep human problems we face just completely fail to be solved with rational thought. All the things that make our lives matter are just stardust orbiting a black hole, in my thinking; the hole-of-meaning applies a kind of gravitational pull to all the bullshit in our lives. It orders it in a system that we can begin to comprehend (or at least one that we can model).

But the interesting part is those spiritual level dilemmas always persist. When you're with another person, you want to meet the people that make you feel full. You want to have experiences that make you feel validated, at home, alive. So what do you do when those experiences elude you?

Lately things have been really good for me actually, but it's a question that persists because it's a problem that can rear its head at any moment.

I guess my thoughts are these: that gut level absence exists, and I think it implies an absence of something more metaphysical. There's no logical explanation to back that assertion up, but I still believe that's true.

By a similar logic, I think that polarity does exist when it comes to gender; men and women can be more masculine or feminine, depending on their soul's fingerprint, so to speak. That's not a value judgment, it's just a force of nature.

I don't really know where I'm going with all this haha. Just had to get something down tonight. Talk to you all soon.
Peace,

Ryan

cracking the door open

Hello again, hypothetical audience!

I honestly never thought I would write in this blog again. But, after going back through all my writing (even my older blog, black coffee and red eyes—peruse at your own psychological peril)... I can't lie, I feel a little proud of myself. Imagine that.

Last time I wrote here was in September 2011, a post about living in the present that still resonates with me today. I may have accidentally written a handful of navel-gazey observations and philosophical postulates that actually became productive.

To re-cap and re-organize into a loose mission statement, mostly for myself (some of this might be rephrased or cleaned up):

There's no epistemologically defensible position from which to resent another person.

Everyone makes mistakes in life, and those mistakes will sometimes burn bridges with other people. That's only because your weaknesses outweigh their patience to deal with them at any given moment, and the scenario is as much a chance for the other person to examine their impatience as it is for you to examine your weakness.

Sometimes others will point out patterns in your mistakes that you hadn't noticed, and create an identity out of it that they'll project onto you; even worse, you'll take their innocent and potentially helpful observation and turn it into a negative identity for yourself. Never accept this identity from yourself, or from other people.

Align your behavior with your values as consistently as possible, and grant yourself that your mistakes don't define who you are. 

A mistake is an accident that moves from a place of impure intention—we all know what our real values and intentions are, and this is our true self. It's the true self you should seek to identify in others, looking past their weaknesses.

Find people who appreciate you, and who you appreciate. And give more love more than is reasonable or necessary.

I think I've done a relatively good job at living up to these points, even if my spirits aren't always as high as I'd like to them be. Or if my thoughts are muddier than they once were rather than just seeming that way, the infuriating irony of which being that as time passes and my brain ages, I'll never know the difference.

Anyway—it all sounds like me, like me at my most lucid. And that was one of the realizations I came to today while I was re-reading all of my old thoughts and blog entries that led me here.

As I look back, I realize that I only partially recognize the person who wrote a lot of those blogs.

Before, I often wrestled with the idea of the inner voice as opposed to the captured inner voice. If I could think faster than I could write, somehow the written voice felt inauthentic; the inner voice automatically won the battle of "who would represent me," but the point becomes more and more oblique the more it's deconstructed.

Language tends to break down at a basic pronominal level when you start to get into the really interesting parts of life.

I remember my Grandma found my older blog where I was basically chronicling my life at it's most mundane, just my inner ramblings and my disastrous nights out. Lots of self-destructive behavior and thoughts, bitterness, and so on.

I was surprised when she told me that she was really thrilled by it all. That's to be expected from your Grandma, usually, but if you knew her you'd know why it surprised me. She said that it gave her a chance to know me as her grandson, in a way that she wouldn't have been allowed to otherwise. It got me thinking more about writing, but a side note here—

I talked to my Grandma again only a week ago or so. I take that back, it was on Thanksgiving, and I'd been cooking all day while Monisha was at work. I'd been going back and forth with depression, but kind of decided at the beginning of that day to make the day about me and about celebrating for celebrating, not for whatever parameters I had preset for the holiday.

It was a blast. I had some whiskey, made stuffing, buttermilk cheddar biscuits, green bean casserole and other things—a lot of it was bachelor cooking fare, but I was still proud. Regardless, just that decision to make the day about myself opened up some space in my heart is the best way to put it. I thought about Grandma alone in Oxford, not snowed in at that point but might as well have been. She'd just lost her life partner of so many years, aside of what my feelings were about the man and what he did to my mother; hell, what he did to her, too. She was a part of him, and he'd been gone now for as many months as I'd been across the country.

So I called her. The conversation went haltingly at first, as expected, but it gradually opened up. I think I made the call mostly to verify that my Grandma had her own independent feelings, to disrupt the narrative I'd had about her and my Grandpa for so long. After we talked I knew I'd been wrong for a while. Or at least, I recognized that it was possible that I'd been wrong.

We talked about life, literature, travel. She told me about how hard the year had been for her. One of the hardest in her whole life, which really meant something. It touched me that I'd lived through a year that my Grandma described as one of the hardest ever, knowing what she's been through.

There's no changing her now, her experiences have made her who she is. We came to a couple polite impasses, but still it was a good conversation. Anyway—

To get back on track, that conversation I think made me want to retread some of my old writing and see if it was any good. I found that some of my earliest writing that I thought was the worst and most constipated was in some ways a lot better than what I'd been writing lately.

I think it's more a question of influence. I don't think I had many distinct influences when I started writing, I just felt like my life was important enough to merit keeping track of. Or maybe I just wanted to keep track of it in the hopes that something useful would come up that I could use down the line. I've never been one to keep a journal, but I found it valuable looking back through it. It's weird that you have to think of your future self to motivate your present self to keep a journal.

But anyway, I looked back through this blog too. In both cases, I found that I didn't really relate to their narrators, even though both were at different points in the past. It calls into relief the idea that who I once was is not who I am now. We are many people over our lifetimes; we are vast, we contain multitudes.

Anyway, I think I do need a place where I can keep track of my daily thoughts without explicitly advertising them anywhere. I know better now to use any googlable terms like full names of family members (which is really what derailed it, mom and Dennis either calling me about finding it or bringing it up during a fight—can't remember).

There's a lot of contemptible things in my old thoughts and writings, but there's also some redeemable qualities shining through. I recognized even four or so years ago the need for more discipline than I have, even today (though I've gotten better). So I'm going to bring it back.

I'll keep blogging. I have a more formal, presentable blog that I hope others will peruse (and that I'll more actively advertise), but I'll have a way for interested parties to find their way into the dingy basement of my mind if they so choose. That's what this blog will be.

So stay tuned, guys.

Ryan