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Author: Jairo

My Grandma

My Grandma

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Encarnacion Lara 1935 – 08/04/23

My grandma passed away as I was watching Meg 2. It feels as ridiculous to say as it does to type. How could two disparate events be connected in time so permanently? My memories of my grandmother are now forever linked to memories of Jason Statham murdering prehistoric ocean monsters. My grandmother a real, living person of flesh and blood and a movie so haphazardly thrown together it barely even qualifies as having plot.

I stepped into the theatre knowing she was sick. We had known for a long time in fact. Over the last year as I saw her at gatherings or just random occasions she got thinner and thinner. At some point she began using a walker to get around being unable to keep balance on her own. It’s strange seeing a relative slowly lose their vitality, each time you see them you are made aware of the impending doom awaiting them, and each time you slowly come to terms with what’s heading their way. That’s just me of course, my mother probably sees it much differently having put a lot of effort and energy into worrying about her mother the last year of her life. She took the time to take her out to lunch or dinner here and there and when they were feeling extra rebellious they would go to the casino which my grandma really loved. She didn’t live with my mom though, she lived with my aunt not but 20 minutes away having permanently moved to Palmdale from El Salvador so she could live closer to (most) of her children and grandchildren and get better medical attention (which is honestly debatable but that’s a whole other blog post).

I would not say I was very close to her though. For the last decade or so she remained mostly a fixture at parties and birthdays. She was eternally sitting on the couch or using the restroom or sipping coffee or soup. But she would watch and observe, giving curt nods or responses when someone approached her. She was not what you would imagine a typical grandmother is like. She was not doting or fussy, and not chatty or opinionated. She was stoic and taciturn and forever serious. The interactions I would have with her would play like a series of questions and answers, a matter of facts and niceties and not much else. She wasn’t cold or belittling though, just reserved. Honestly this is where I felt the most kinship with her since I am the same way in social situations and we made excellent couch buddies just sitting there in silence and watching the goings on of those around us. My sister made a great point to me that the odd moment where someone could make her break out into laughter or a smile really left an impression on you, and that’s probably what I’ll miss the most.

I don’t take issue with her for being that way either, she’s a survivor of the Salvadoran civil war, and my mom has plenty of stories of having to run through the jungle to hide from helicopter fire or being shut in their house together to avoid soldiers on both sides of the conflict from taking issue. I cannot imagine the horror of living through a war, literally it’s not possible…I’m a peacetime schlub, and I hope I am never able to. Yet the repercussions of that conflict reverberate through my entire family, psychologically and physically and I don’t think anyone can handle that much distress and come out okay on the other side but yet here they all were establishing a foothold in a hostile country, putting the next generation through school, and finally culminating in allowing me to sit in a coffee shop and write alternatively dumb and cerebral blog posts without having to worry about my basic needs or threats to life and limb (other than self sabotage of course). For that I am, and must be, eternally grateful to my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and the vague wider cast of close family friends that built their house of cards life in the US back in the 80s.

With the death of my grandmother I am left bereft of grandparents. That whole generation save a couple of great aunts and uncles has departed this realm and with them goes a whole way of life to which my connection is severed. My trip to El Salvador last year really opened my eyes to a lot of the stories and relationships that have followed me and my family my whole life but writing about it became overwhelming, so I’ll come back to that some day. But case in point is that with every year I grow more and more distant to those roots and me and some of my cousins seem to be the only ones interested in preserving at least some of the pieces of those twisted, withered roots. I guess the lingering question is why does it matter? Placing my existence in context has revealed itself to be more or less my raison d’etre and there is so. much. context. Technically, every preceding event that has ever occurred has lead to this, to me. Undoubtedly some things are more important than others though and that’s the Jairo based ontological excavation that I have undertaken.

So my grandmother’s death is both symbolic and personal. That’s redundant though as nearly everything that occurs is symbolic, especially to a literary eye. I wonder if she ever struggled with these questions of existence, of purpose, of living. Did she suffer from ennui, depression, or just malcontent? I’m not sure. I never asked her and she never talked about it to me and I’m dubious ever even mentioned it at all. I don’t want to say that if I had more time or if I had known I would have tried to ask her about all of this, or about herself. Even if I had known she was leaving the earth in a day I don’t think I would have sat down to talk to her like this. To me it would feel disingenuous and disrespectful, a person should be allowed to take their secrets and their being to the grave if they wish. If she never felt the need to discuss it then who would I, or anyone, be to ask her about it. She lives on as she wants to be remembered and that memory is something I won’t begrudge.

Grandma didn’t die in Palmdale though, she went back to the motherland, El Salvador to pass away. I don’t know whether she did this on purpose, all I know is the timeline of events is suspect. My aunt says she wanted to fly back and visit and a week later she went from being just generally sick to taking a turn for the worse. The doctors there gave her a prognosis of death and that’s where the chaos began. My mom of course had to fly out there as fast as she could accompanied by most of my aunts and uncles eventually. My grandmother lasted five days in a state of fasting, eating very little to nothing, at first suffering painfully from her ailments but soon after being administered a sedative out of mercy. My last conversation with her was a brief video chat on whats app in which she was cognizant of me and nodded as I told her I loved her and I wish she got better, taciturn until the end. Eventually she passed away surrounded by her children and some extended family that lived in El Salvador. My mom watched as she gave her last breath. I don’t know if this is the perfect death or the worst but that’s how it happened.

Was it right as Statham launched an exploding harpoon into the head of a Megalodon? Or when he picked up a helicopter blade and impaled an Alpha Megalodon? I’ll never know and that’s a mystery I don’t care to solve. I like to think that it was her choice to go back home and pass away, that it was totally in her control which is a very rare opportunity afforded to anyone in this life. She was buried the very next day as is tradition in El Salvador in a service attended by friends, family, and loved ones.

My Spiritual Pilgrimage in Japan

My Spiritual Pilgrimage in Japan

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(Originally wrote the below for my caption on IG but it had the GALL to tell me it was too many words so I added even more words and photos and turned it into a blog post. Excuse some repeats if you’ve read both)
I’m two days in from my trip to Japan and I’m still thinking about the Japanese free jazz concert I went to where Masayo Koketsu recited the bodhisattva Amoghapāśa’s mantra of light to attain revelation over sultry piano and percussion before launching into saxophone improvisation. Is this the Japanese equivalent of a Christian rock band? I’m not sure, but I think it was divine intervention since one day previous I was admiring the statue of Kokuuzo Bosasu in Todai-Ji (IG photo 1 and 2). His name means “boundless space treasury” which reflects that his wisdom is so great that it must be infinite and is prayed to in part for excellence on tests and education. They say if you recite his mantra 10000 times you will gain understanding of all the teachings in the buddhist canon. He sits to the left of a giant statue of the Buddha Vairocana, The Great Illuminator, a cosmic and primordial buddha that is sometimes interpreted as the spiritual blueprint of which all buddhas are made and return to (reminds me of the Tao). I took a photo of this vast edifice but the scale just doesn’t do it justice, just go see it for yourself! I donated 2000 yen to write my name on a roof tile that will get added to the temple as part of a restoration process. I left a piece of myself behind and this tactile exchange of self represents the metaphysical exchange where I took a little from Japan and gave a little of myself and to me that’s what traveling for is all about.

But I saw LOTS of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Heavenly Kings, and Divine Generals as I obsessively sought out temples to visit while I traveled Japan. None impressed me more than the Great Buddha of Kamakura (IG photo 3) which I accidentally stumbled into on my pilgrimage to find the resting place of legendary film director Akira Kurosawa whose grave is a modest tribute to such a legendary force in both eastern and western film.

I felt almost like I was trespassing on sacred ground, I wasn’t though since it is a publicly accessible site behind a buddhist temple…not trying to incur any spiritual wrath here. I paid my respects and left. On my way to the site I saw directions to a “buddha” statue so me and my friend Evan who had joined me that day took upon ourselves to explore.

After walking for about 20 minutes we came upon Kōtoku-in, over which which the magnificent Great Buddha presided. It sits completely outdoors like a meditative giant, 5 feet shorter than the Vairocana buddha I saw at Todai-Ji but the picturesque backdrop really makes it feel more epic in scale. The Great Buddha of Kamakura is a representation of Amitābha, who after many achievements over countless lives attained buddha hood and decided to create a separate realm which remained pure and free of the corruptive forces that exist in our realms. If you call upon him at your death you can be reborn into his pure land where you will live in peace and be able to attain enlightenment much easier. It seems to me like a precursor to our Western concept of Heaven, but then again those ideas are littered throughout the whole of human history.

But if we’re talking about Buddhist temples, Kiyomizu-dera (IG photo 4) is one of the most impressive sights in Kyoto. One night we were at a rooftop bar having highballs and I noticed this radiant beam of light penetrating the darkness out of the mountains and the next night I was out there with my friends seeking it out. It houses a statue of the Buddhist deities Daikokuten and Kannon, who bring wealth and save humans from difficulties respectively. Daikokuten is what’s known as a syncretic deity. His roots are in the buddhist representation of the hindu god Shiva, which has been mixed with the Japanese shinto god Ōkuninushi creating a whole new entity that is worshipped throughout temples to this day.

The aspect of Daikokuten at Kiyomizu-dera.

Kannon is also an important deity in Japanese buddhism and I saw representations of him the most. Usually with many arms and a different tool in each hand. He is a deity of compassion and the aspect at Kiyomizu-dera specifically is prayed to for prevention of suffering. Below him sits the Otowa Waterfall. Here they have ladles where you can wash your hands and drink pristine mountain water in an effort to make your wishes come true. I took a deep drink of the water here and continued to navigate the impressive temple.

The view of the temple from below the buddha, at the waterfalls.

Buddhism is not the only way to gain favor in Japan though since it is an import from India via China and Korea. There are also Shinto shrines devoted to native Japanese gods and spirits. Again in Kyoto I climbed Mt Inari by way of the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine devoted to Inari Okami, the god of (IG photo 5), at first with a staggering amount of tourists but then as I climbed further up the mountain they were less and less and I got to enjoy the assortment of Fox spirit statues and local desserts made by the residents in a more relaxed environment. Here I bought what a monk described as sacred sake only found on that mountain. Throughout the hike there are almost 10000 Torii gates, which traditionally represent the gateway from the mundane to the sacred. So you can say that as I passed under each one, the intensity and potency of the sake was only enhanced. Alas it would never make it back to the States, as me and my friends who did not participate in my thousandfold blessings shared it in a Ryokan not two days later. Yet in sharing the sake I think we all have charged our spiritual meters to max, at least that’s what I’d like to think.

Later in Osaka I visited Sumiyoshi Taisha which enshrines the gods of the sea and sailing. There is a spot behind the main shrines where it is said that the empress Jingu encountered the spirits first and decided to build the shrine. On that spot is an altar of small pebbles most of which are unmarked but some of them have one of these: “five” 五, “large” 大, or “power” 力. If you find all three you receive the five blessings of the spirits: health, wisdom, wealth, happiness, and longevity (IG photo 6). I almost left without collecting the pebbles, but damnit must one not do everything in their power to live a good life? I still have the pebbles in the decorative pouch in my room, choosing to keep them instead of leaving them tied up at the altar as is customary.

Of course no survey of Japanese iconography is complete without the macdaddy of them all GODZILLA and although he had no offering box I still venerated at his altar (IG photo 7). Godzilla traditionally represents the nuclear devastation the US wrought on WWII but I think it has turned into a symbol reminding us of the futility of our everyday lives compared to the titanic march of nature and time. At least that’s my reading of the latest movie Shin Godzilla, but with over 38 films in the canon it’s hard to pin him down to just one reading. There is no doubt that he is a cultural force in Tokyo though, as his grim face towers over one of the main avenues in the Shinjuku district. The first time I saw him there we were visiting an old expat high school friend. I asked him if we could visit the giant head and he said he wasn’t sure and he had never heard of people doing that so we left without trying. I found at that you could in fact go up there but we left Tokyo soon after. On our itinerary, however, we had one last night there before we traveled back to the states just for these kinds of last minute missions. I made it my goal to go up to that hotel and witness the statue for myself. Of course my tenacity was rewarded with the sight before you. A full scale representation of Godzilla from from Godzilla vs Mothra (1992) and also at the height which he would be in real life. Perhaps this was the shrine I treasured the most of the whole trip.

Godzilla from street level

To wrap this up, this a photo sharing service or something right, I have so many photos of the beautiful cherry blossoms that were in full bloom for our whole trip but I like this one (IG photo 8 ) from the zen Buddhist temple, Tenryu-ji, in Arashiyama which was the city where I saw people dressed the most in traditional clothing. The temple had an exquisitely maintained garden which I’m told has been preserved almost in its original state for centuries. The temple also houses this intimidating depiction of Bodhidharma who is known as the buddhist monk to begin teaching zen buddhism to the Shaolin Monks at the Shaolin Temple in China, creating a direct connection to the origins of Shaolin Kung-Fu. Since Zen Buddhism came to Japan via China, he is also revered at this temple. Another interesting legend states that he once sat and stared at a wall for 9 years in seated meditation. One version of the story states that after all that time his legs atrophied and became useless, hence Daruma dolls which are modeled after him have no legs.

Shrine to Bodhidharma at Tenryu-ji.

Obviously the totality of Japan’s religious and spiritual identity cannot be summed up in one trip, nor perhaps even in a lifetime of trips, and drawing any conclusions about it is like visiting a couple different states here in the US and forming a national opinion based on them. Yet there are similarities and patterns I can see. Compassion, enlightenment, meditation (mindfulness), respect and honor are all highly valued at the various shrines and and temples I visited whether couched in the forms of deities, spirits, emperors or buddhas.

Suffering Exists

Suffering Exists

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I’ve talked about suffering before but lately I’ve been reading up on Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings. That’s the Buddha, not to be confused with a buddha. His lessons can probably be summarized as suffering exists, and suffering can be overcome. Today I wont be waxing on about him though, that will come in a few weeks, I’m here to talk about physical suffering. More specifically suffering for 14 hours on a bicycle.

Maybe it’s not fair to say I was suffering for 14 hours because I certainly started off feeling elated, undercut with just a touch of dread maybe. Certainly, even in the midst of the worst pain I felt spurts of joy as well. Delirious, pure joy such as the one described by the buddha as the second jhāna of Right Concentration:

Furthermore, with the stilling of directed thoughts & evaluations, he enters and remains in the second jhana: rapture and pleasure born of composure, unification of awareness free from directed thought and evaluation — internal assurance. He permeates and pervades, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of composure. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born of composure.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-samadhi/jhana.html

On these long rides it’s hard not to consider them a form of meditation, yet I’ve never really experienced the banishing of thought on my bike until this day.

…

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The Death Of Jairo Lopez

The Death Of Jairo Lopez

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Or Puss In Boots: The Last death

Jairo Lopez is a man, men are mortal, Jairo is mortal. When I write that name I am referring to myself but it’s not me, it’s the version of me that slots into your mind when you hear that name. If you’ve never heard it before then an impression is already beginning to form. That impression can become complex and informed by real experiences but it will always be just an elaborately built network of associations you make of me. There are perhaps hundreds of Jairos living in the minds of all my friends and family each of them a little different, imperfect copies of me that come into conflict with each other as perspectives change. These shadow clones are not mortal, they are eternal in the way that ideas can exist forever. I carry in me the ideas of all the friends and family I’ve lost over the years, holding them arrested and transfixed in time as I knew them. They perform in scenes of my memories, ambiguous actors in dubious plays with the same start and the same finish but always different in between. I may pass on these productions to others who may not know the original versions, a hasty rendition of a badly transcribed opera. They may retell it to others still, each time it jumps from person to person the actors in the plays become less true to their creators until only ripples of emotions and colors are left. The imaginary people and memories are distilled to the very essence of sensory perception, crushed into the miasma from which our very thoughts spring and in which the selfhood sits.

In this way we are not mortal, we cannot truly die. As our physical bodies return to the Earth so do our spirits live on in the collective human conscious via those we have touched. If we all exist as a conjunction of mind, body and spirit then upon our death each of these realms are released, disentangled from being. The body persists through the soil, the spirit lives in the hearts of others, but what becomes then of the mind? It ceases to exist…it’s the true death and no one can experience it but me for my mind is uniquely and unequivocally mine. Or rather, my mind is me, it gives me the ability to be a self in opposition to the other and it is unknowable to you.

My body seems to want to keep reminding me of that impending death. This time it was a gall stone, one I was carrying unknowingly but which demanded its presence known to me via an incredible pain in my upper right abdomen. In a flashback to the events from my birthday three months previous, once again I was stuck in a public bathroom writhing in pain. This time there was an overwhelming sense of pain, which triggered the symptoms from before: nausea, lightheadedness, difficulty of breath. Public bathrooms are such wonderful things, truly you never know what you could be walking into at one. I don’t know why I felt more comfortable suffering in the silence of a stall while my friends waited outside, presumably starting to wonder if something had gone wrong as the minutes ticked by. Indeed they walked in at some point to ask if I was okay. But how do I explain the iceberg of feeling and symptoms I had experienced in the span of the last hour or so? The deluge emotions and thoughts passing by my brain as I bargained with primordial forces to absolve of me of the little demon pushing his way through my insides. How could I explain the reconfiguring of my limbs and stomach to ease pain if even slightly, standing up and sitting down again when I thought I would lose consciousness and fall to the floor? So I told them I had a stomach ache but was okay.

I couldn’t monologue at them all that I felt as I was still going through it. Even in the present I was projecting myself in the future talking about the very events I was going through. This is a technique (or coping mechanism?) I picked up from some of the long distance cycling I do. Disassociate from the present you and think about how future you will look back on the events you are going through. Perhaps this comes from a strong desire for the present to be the past, if only time could pass faster through a sheer act of will. Most notably when I projected my thoughts forward some version of me, now relaxed and past the event, was discussing perhaps with you dear reader about what happened that night in the bathroom stall, ipso facto I wasn’t dead. I didn’t believe I would die and yet are we all not one terrible accident away from death? But there’s a difference between being killed and dying.

Eventually the intensity of the pain passed through like a storm. As it faded I thought about how objectively I should have dashed to the emergency room because I knew this was not a normal pain regardless of the rationalizing thoughts I began to have. Again my mind tries to play tricks on me, after the pain is gone already it begins to erase the internal promises I had made to myself and to soften the freshly minted memories into a nostalgic film instead of a blueprint of my doom. I resolved to at the very least see my doctor the next day. Which in our current healthcare system is a bigger undertaking than I knew. I couldn’t see my doctor but I saw a doctor and phenomenologically speaking that’s the same so screw it. I felt fine but the next day I was told to go to the ER because I had signs of liver damage. My own liver betrayed me, so this is how it would be I thought, there is no mind over matter, only mind in spite of matter.

The hospital kept me for 4 days. I had to watch my tightly scheduled and varied days fall part into one haze of cable TV and liquid meals. Each time I had to cancel a meet up I felt a pang of loss for a moment I would never be able to live. It’s a small price to pay to make sure I could stay alive but that’s 4 days diverted like a railroad from good times city to bad times central. I’m not the first to make this comparison but it felt like a prison, sure I was free to leave at any point, but I didn’t want to keel over after my first slice of pizza back home. So I sat there as my world shrank down from the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles into a single room in Harbor City. As my agency dwindled, my problems and obsessions also narrowed in scope. If you have not realized how used to living life in the abstract we are then stay at a hospital for a couple days. I read this example in Irrational Man by Barrett: when you think of 2+2 do you stop and take the time to prove the 2,913 subtheorems that allow us to come to the answer 4? No, someone else has done that for us so we are free to go trotting about telling people 2+2=4 like medieval math gods. Being in the hospital was like removing these abstractions from my everyday life. The best parts of the days where the meals, and I would make sure to keep the phone next to my bed so I could order exactly what I wanted from the cafeteria. And OH! that bloody phone, a cruel joke played upon me by Fortuna. Unbeknownst to me the phone I had did not ring, so for the first two days I was not able to make a choice, all they gave me was the most milquetoast meal available. Being robbed of these choices was of course where the feeling of imprisonment came from. My days involved meticulously planning when I would stand up from bed and use the restroom so I didn’t have to drag my IV and medical pole behind me. I would strategically read my book at regular intervals so I didn’t get bored of the TV or the book too quickly. At night when sleep would come I welcomed it as I knew it was the single fastest way to pass the time. Just weeks ago I was exploring the cradle of my family in El Salvador, poring over ancient Mayan ruins, and zip lining across volcanic jungles and now I was here warring with a telephone and planning when to stand up and pace my room. Outside this prison I never have to stop and think about these things, in fact each moment I can spend reading my book or catching a tv show is a breath of fresh air in a fast paced life. That is the power of abstraction.

My doctors informed I developed an infection in my blood probably caused by the passing of the gallstone. In an existential jape I was symptomless, apparently they caught it early enough that I suffered no ill effects. Are you still sick if you don’t feel sick? Even with the knowledge that I had the infection I didn’t feel any better about being in the hospital. Perhaps if I had just a tiny fever, enough to whet that drive for self pity I could have withstood the experience a lot more easily. I started a round of antibiotics which I ended up having to take home in the form of a long term intravenous line in my arm, with a snaking plastic thread laid deep in my veins. I had an access panel, like a Cronenbergian version of the tin man needing direct access to his inner fluids. You know what they say, you can take the man out of the hospital but you can’t take the hospital out of the man. It was all very inconveniencing but the sobering thought I kept having was that 100 years ago I’d be laid out on my back literally dying of a fever from an infection I could have never prevented caused by simple stone from a near obsolete organ blocking my bile ducts. Again the abstraction of modern life rears its ugly head, without antibiotics I would be withering away without a hope or a prayer in sight of getting better. It would be a violent, disgusting end no doubt as the bacteria in my blood slowly started to destroy all my organs one by one. Yet in our blessedly modern society, I was complaining that I never had a symptom at all. I thought about how many times I would be dead by 1800s society standards. That one time I had cellulitis in my leg, that second time it happened a year later, that one time after the car accident, this new gallstone incident.
Four times over I’d be dead, perhaps we should all keep an internal count lest we believe that thought terminating cliche: YOLO.

During my reading in the hospital I came across a passage from The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. The passage clearly resonated with me in the way that only a perfectly aligned moment in time can, so I ordered it and read it within the week. Ivan lives the perfect, complete life at least by the standards he has been taught. One day he bumps into the side of a table while decorating a room. An innocuous bump that somehow ends up gradually killing him. Needless to say my reading of this involved Ivan passing a particularly troublesome gallstone. He experiences physical pain at first but over time he starts to be tormented by his mental anguish until they become entangled and inseparable, the death of his body becomes the death of him. The pain in his side represents his inevitable death but it also serves as a beacon of illumination that cuts through the falsities of his life. He tries to go about business as usual, performing all the rituals that brought him joy and comfort before but the constant nagging pain does not let him slip back into complacency and he realizes that these things never actually brought him happiness at all they were only useful in allowing him to never confront his death and so to never confront his life.

As he begins to accept that he will die, the complete bullshit of every day existence angers him and he sees the masks all his friends and family wear. He feels as if he’s sitting next to this unknowable, eternal void that everyone around him refuses to see and which compared against the pettiness of their rituals do not matter. Playing Bridge with his friends was his favorite activity and as he realized he will die he stops caring for it. This is contrasted with the the fact that at his funeral his closest friend decides he wants to go catch a game of Bridge since the service ended early enough. Your friend’s death is not your own. What does it take to shake everyone out of the abstraction of ritualistic life? Coming close to your own death changes you, and although we know of it, when we meet it perhaps then is when we actually begin our lives. When you stare into that eternal, unthinkable void what will stare back? Ivan wondered if he had lived a good life, and he cannot admit that he did not because if he did it would require him to die a death of the spirit and reorient his entire existence.

Which at last brings me to Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (spoilers ahead I guess?). How could I know that when I dragged my little brothers to the theatre on Christmas morning I would be treated to such a deceptively Tolstoyan film about a cartoon cat. Puss In Boots is on his last life, a respectable 9 compared to my measly 5, when he meets death. He’s died in the same way that I have died, deaths that have been abstracted away not by modern medicine in his case but by fairy tale logic. At last he comes face to face with true death, literally in the form of a wolf. Unlike Ivan Ilyich he recedes into a false life where he is in a purgatory of rituals and adopts a mask in the form of a beard. This mundane existence is a death-in-life which compared to his previous lives is a shadow of his existence. Yet before he met death, he lived a life-in-death, never stopping to have real purpose or meaning because without knowing he would or could die he lived only in service to his legend, the idea of a Puss In Boots not his authentic self. He finally shakes himself out of his depression and latches on to the notion that he can regain his former existence by getting more “lives”. We know that he can’t ever do that though because after knowing death, he is irrevocably changed as becomes apparent in how he interacts with the characters going forward. He meets his former self at first metaphorically in the echos how he affected his former partner Kitty Softpaws and then later on more literally as all his previous incarnations are present to convince him to abandon his newfound morals. The change in him is clear as he does not recognize his present self in his former actions and he realizes he can never un-know this. The only thing he can do is stop fearing death and dedicate himself to a purposeful meaningful existence. Like Ivan Ilyich, he dies a spiritual last death so that he can begin life anew. Of course I see myself in the cat, trying to ease the burden of existence by continuing to perform in the theatre of Jairo’s life. While I don’t exactly feel like I have lived rudderlessly it’s a reminder that there’s nothing wrong with taking stock of life, taking a quick peek at the void to measure up against what you’ve been doing lately. The truth will always come out in that moment when you ask yourself, have I lived a good life?

32: The Birthday Dispatch

32: The Birthday Dispatch

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Boldly walking out the door in Lancaster. Apparently, an incredible tempting of fate.

I was born today 32 years ago. But before I go into the thoughts, mood and growth of the previous year I want to tell you how my day went. I always take my birthday off, there’s no force on planet earth that will convince me that I should ignore this day. If you know me then you know I hardly lack reasons or excuses to celebrate and yet in practice today is the most socially acceptable day in which I can wax poetic about myself and indulge in the obsessions that have driven me this year and all years. So like every year I was poised to have a self serving adventure through my laundry list of peculiarities. I watched Halloween Ends on Friday, did cheese tasting on Saturday, had the family party on Sunday and today (Monday) would be for my own brand of entertainment. I was all set to watch Tar, a film about the worlds greatest conductor and composer (a fictional one or else this movie would be called Williams). As you know I love music compositions, classical, film, or even video game related. So this movie was a great film to kick off the events of today.

I was sitting at the Alamo, which is one my favorite theatres to visit in the heart of DTLA because of their reverence for the act of watching a film in addition to the film itself. But of course I also go for the ever rotating selections of food, spirits and beers. Yet today I was sandwiched between two film goers enjoying a pizza and fries respectively. But to my nose it smelled like the olfactory dimension of a junk yard full of rotting corpses (to keep these metaphors topical). I knew something was wrong as my stomach began to churn and a cold clamminess swept over my body. The munching sounds my neighbors were making were calling into question my own reliance on my ears as sources of pleasure, and the damned smell haunted me every minute that the film played, needless to say I could not pay attention. Finally as the waves of nausea seized me I scurried to the restroom and sat upon the throne of shame.

I couldn’t help but connect the dots to the novel I had just finished reading, amusingly entitled Nausea. In it the protagonist feels a feeling he can only describe as nausea as he dissociates with the essence of things around him, entering into a realm where the universe is contingent, threatening to change at any second. I found it hard to philosophize over the feeling that seized me (at the time) but I can definitely say that in the blink of an eye my being was fractured into the various parts that make up my sense of identity. My body asserted itself as the dominating force of my existence, and my mind was left to try and rationalize what was happening. And it did, very quickly I knew I had some sort of food poisoning, and I mentally flipped through the decadent courses of birthday feasting I had done over the past two days and couldn’t pinpoint the culprit. Of course that was merely an exercise in passing the time as my body seized all my senses, forcing me to retreat inwards as I lay doubled over in pain in the physical realm. Its hard to believe in the mantra of the athlete, mind over body, at a moment like this for there was nothing I could do to cease the black dread that coursed through my innermost chambers.

Was this what 32 promised to be? It was as if my body pulled in the leash I was on, reminding me that I am a prisoner in this fleshy vessel and lest I forget, it is a slave to time and the condition of aging. Somewhere in between the mind and the body lay my spirit, quietly crying out in the desperation of knowing the problem but being able to do nothing except let it run its course. Though the rational, scientific reason for my ailment was food poisoning, spiritually I felt that I was paying the price for the Dionysian way I chose to celebrate the weekend. Both reasons are true simultaneously in the way that that your favorite movie can be the best thing ever and also complete trash.

I eventually employed the oldest trick in the book, the one I use to bicycle up GMR or up to Mt Wilson, I tried to ignore the pain. That’s a two way street though because if you’re not looking at the monster, you don’t know what it will do next. As I lay there trying my hardest to cross into the astral plane I felt the final lurches, the sudden cotton mouth, the radiating goosebumps where I knew my end lay. I got on the floor, hugged the toilet and waited. If it only it were that all my problems could be solved by simply expelling them with extreme prejudice from inside of me. The social anxiety that comes from being in a room full of strangers? Hurl it into a trashcan on a way into a party. The fear of death? Leave in the restroom of the nearest funeral parlor. The despair that your favorite breakfast burrito place has irrevocably changed its burrito? Loosely wrap it up in yellow parchment paper and toss it into a gutter.

A cold sweat gripped me and where before I wasn’t able to even stand without feeling the gravitational pull of the earth drag me down, I was made whole again as the inner dimensions of my self corrected course. I couldn’t go back into the movie after this episode, the whole world had changed. As I walked the streets of Los Angeles I realized that my favorite indulgence, that which I would have reveled in today: the delicious phenomenology of eating a pastry, of sipping a cocktail, of drinking a coffee had been robbed from me as my stomach made painfully aware as I tried to drink water on my way out of the theatre. In this state of un-jaironicity I was forced to accept that mind over matter is not true, but perhaps this was an omen to follow other pursuits.

The streets of downtown reminded me that the city is not a luxurious place. The luxury sits atop it, floating over the apartments of the middle class and the poor. Like a well made cappuccino: the rich, white foam floats above the coffee, and the grounds which have had their very essence removed in service of the drink have been unceremoniously tossed aside. If you are so unlucky as to find some inside the cup, at the bottom of the drink, who among us is hearty enough to enjoy them as the basic building blocks of your coffee. More than likely you spit them out and leave them on the sidewalk with the grime, and the dirt of those who the city is built upon.

Which brings me at last to my recap of 31, it’s the year I rediscovered my voice which lay dormant, and nestled in a web of films, books, and music hoping that the sheer volume and variety of them would impart some knowledge of my self to the universe. The more I read the less likely I knew this would be and even though these words exist in an imperfect format, one perhaps even more vulnerable to the ravages of time than good old paper, let no one say that I did not try to at least write some of my thoughts down to be handed down through the generations to those who wish to know an insane amount of useless trivia. I have found a titillating fountain of writing in the works of great western and eastern philosophers and those who wish to know what truly shapes the world and our times should start there. Learn about the introduction of the rational into the collective human consciousness, it’s never ending battle with faith, and at last its rejection in favor if the irrational at least when it comes to the question of “Who Am I?”. There’s nothing rational about being a person, we each exist as a separate and distinct entity, our mere act of living corrupting any overarching hypothesis for the explanation of mankind. Here I am sipping on a cocktail in defiance of my earlier bodily episode, knowing full well that I might re-trigger the stomach pains, but I (the philosophical I)exists first and I make the rules when it comes to how I shall suffer.

Okay but it’s called the Armageddon and it’s awesome.

Eddie Munson reminded me of what pure love of metal is, perhaps it’s not a lifestyle as I always believed, perhaps it’s a philosophy or perhaps it’s a religion. The individual’s battle against the tyrannies of the universe, the proclivity to unearth the skeletons under the bed, the altar of worship: the stack of amps, the darkly lit stage, the ritual sacrifice of sweat and energy. There’s much to be written about and my brain can only remain focused for so long before chasing the next croissant on my bicycle down a badly paved road on a hot day. Yet the smattering of traveling I’ve done this year made me aware that the wealth of context, history, and information out there will outlast and outlive any one person’s attempt at stitching together the whole of human existence. So in light of the impossible my goal is to do the improbable and stitch together the whole of mine own existence every hour of every day for as long as I can. Maybe 32 is an age where I am increasingly in service to my body but perhaps I can sharpen the mind, and the resiliency of the spirit as well.

IL Bidone

IL Bidone

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I had a dream a couple weeks ago that I can’t remember save for one detail. The titular theme from Fellini’s movie Il Bidone played at some point over whatever crisis I was facing in my dream. I have vague memory of rolling my eyes at the circumstance I found myself in. I felt something like a quiet exasperation, as if I was being made the punchline of the film playing out in my mind. Il Bidone is about this group of conmen and hucksters who very often cross the line from morally ambiguous to downright cruel. They pose as church members and city officials to scam people, usually farmers, out of their life savings and never look back. Yet, realizing that these are not lifelong careers some of the younger protagonists exit the life one by one as they set their sights on more stable enterprises. Except Augusto who cannot stop playing the role of swindler because he is addicted to the life, or perhaps more accurately, he’s not playing at it because he was born a con artist and will die one. Eventually Augusto in his immense audacity tries to con the very conmen he’s with out of the money they just stole by pretending to have a burgeoning conscience. The audience knows that he needs a lot of money to give to his estranged daughter so she can go to college, yet it remains ambiguous whether this was his hail Mary effort to get it for her, or whether he just would have kept it. The audience is left questioning his motives as he is left to die on the side of cliff, left there by his colleagues in thievery.

So why would these themes invade my dreaming mind. We’ve all heard of impostor syndrome, the feeling that you don’t belong and that you will be discovered for the phony that you are at same time as you are receiving what you feel to be unjust praise. It’s the other side of the coin to assuming roles in our daily lives, the acute awareness that we are not who we are pretending to be. To me this is a sign of a disconnection between the standards we hold ourselves to and the standards of others. As humans we shift in and out of various states constantly experiencing ourselves as the object of others’ gaze as Sartre would put it. This wrestling with the perception of you by others can lead to a tunnel vision: trying to be the perfect waiter to your customers, the perfect son to you parents, the perfect athlete to your coach. Yet since we are not objects but multidimensional beings setting our measure of success to perfection has already assured we fail, at least in our own eyes. So the feelings of inadequacy are our own creation, and I would banish them by simply admitting: Yeah I could be better but you know what, I’m already pretty damn good.

Yet if we take impostor syndrome one step further, are we con artists? That’s the real fear, that we are inadvertently tricking everyone into metaphorically giving us their life savings by placing their trust in us. If we decide that yes we are impostors and that we’re not gonna stop then we have crossed an ethical boundary which we can’t come back from. This border area between the ethical and unethical is where we wrestle internally with ourselves. Most of us would try to lower expectations, deflect praise, and admit failure readily in an effort to further distance ourselves from that borderline. Yet am I Augusto? Am I in for a penny, in for a pound? Self-advocacy can feel as if I’m walking around dressed up as a priest telling the people around me about how awesome the church is and how just with a little bit of money we can make the much needed repairs to the house of God. Then I take their money, ditch the priest robes in a garbage can and use it to buy Slayer records. Maybe the invisible line is between humility and pride. Being humble gives us the chance to accept praise while hedging expectations, being proud can be seen as boastful, unjust and sinful. Yet in the modern society we live in, being loud is often the path to recognition. Maybe that’s why the Il Bidone theme is so fun, because sometimes you gotta play into the con but not so much that we are left for dead on the side of the road.

Mauled By Tour De Big Bear

Mauled By Tour De Big Bear

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I recently rewatched JAWS for no other reason than it’s a great movie to watch in the summer if you’re not planning on going swimming in the ocean. Imagine my surprise when I proceeded to watch Jordan Peele’s NOPE and noticed the former’s DNA all over it. The first part of JAWS is the slow realization of the threat. Shark attacks keep happening and the only person who seems to care is Chief Brody. The mayor cares, but only insofar as it doesn’t affect the tourism money that pours into the island every summer. The central conflict in the first two acts is thus setup as a battle between the dismissal of the shark as a threat which represents a primal force and Brody’s attempts to convince the town officials that the shark needs to be reckoned with. As the officials continuously downplay the shark and hamper Brody’s ability to neutralize it the body count keeps growing, as well as the boldness of the attacks. Spielberg aims to show us that we continuously take for granted our roles as alpha predators in the food chain, when humanity grows complacent nature comes to knock at our door.

In NOPE (spoilers), the film follows a similar pattern with the key difference that the monster is summoned not due to complacency and greed but to humanity’s need for spectacle. Ricky Park cannot help but be enchanted by the danger of the monster, his past is inextricably linked with close encounters of the dangerous kind. As a child he watched a chimpanzee brutally beat his co stars within an inch of their lives then seemingly faced the monkey himself only to come out unscathed. He at once grows a false confidence and a need to recreate that traumatic event over and over in his life. It ends in tragedy of course as a central theme of the film is that you can’t tame nature. Once he entices the beast, and makes eye contact its predator nature fully unfurls.

In both films there is an undercurrent of unappreciation for nature and its untamable forces. So what does this long winded preamble have to do with my bike ride? I too have taken for granted the sheer size and viciousness of the course I signed up for. I looked back at my Strava post for 2021 Tour De Big Bear and I called it one of the hardest rides I’ve ever done if not the hardest. In the subsequent year I’ve done harder rides, and perhaps this gave me a false sense that I could tackle the 100 mile course this year. Don’t get me wrong I set my sights on it almost immediately, and set up what I thought was a decent training plan to get me there. Yet at over 8000 feet of climbing over 100 miles, at an altitude of 6000 – 8000 feet it is a formidable monster.

I knew in the weeks leading up to the ride that I wasn’t ready, my speed and performance on some of the most recent rides I did was just not enough to meet the 10 hour cutoff time at TDBB. Perhaps for this reason I started to tell my friends who were also going that I was not going to make it, and to please not wait for me or anything like that. I was sowing the seeds doubt early on. This was, correctly, assumed to be pessimism on my part. Yet I knew in my heart it was the truth. I had taken for granted the rigor and discipline training for this ride required. I found it very hard to stick to my interval workouts, especially after the disappointing results of my second FTP test. It was demoralizing to be doing these interval rides that were not enjoyable for me and seeing no payoff. So my training after became limp and half hearted. Throw in a couple vacations, small injuries, hot summer days and the writing was on the wall.

Philosophically speaking, setting the expectation that I was not going to finish was an effort to reduce the vulnerability I faced by failing. For me optimistically tackling a challenge and not succeeding is magnitudes of order more emotionally damaging than meeting my goal of failing. Yet the question remains whether I sabotaged myself by resetting my desired outcome lower. The flip side to that is that surpassing one’s goals also is a reward in its own right. A sliver of me held on to the hope that I would somehow disprove myself and complete the course, even if took me all 10 hours to do it.

I started off on the wrong foot already by giving my legs perhaps too much of a workout the day before the ride in what was supposed to be a low effort warmup spin around the lake I was trying to play catchup with my powerhouse cycling friends. I went to sleep with very tired legs and I doubt I had fully recovered in the 5 hours it took for me to wake up and get ready for the big ride. However I still started off feeling great, there’s always adrenaline coursing through you when these big events happen, plus being able to start with my friends sets a good mood. I think my ride to first aid station was pretty good, I wasn’t breaking any records or anything but I was on pace to finish if I kept it up. My friends of course dropped me within the first 5 miles but it was as expected. I saw them once more as they were ascending the second climb of the day from the first aid station and I was descending towards it, a pattern which would repeat itself 5 hours later. I made the same mistake as last year and had to pee so badly at the bottom of that hill that I waited in line with the rest of the cyclists who were trying to use the portable toilet, time wasted. On my way back up the hill and through the north side of the lake I was starting to feel the familiar signs of exhaustion: cramping legs, sore back, sore saddle. Yet these hit me a lot earlier than I am used to, no doubt the altitude was having its effect on me, my heart rate is of course elevated as there’s less oxygen to go around up there. After a couple salt tablets the feeling of cramps subsided and I stopped in for three pieces of bacon at the second rest stop because I couldn’t just ignore such a delicious treat.

Half the reason I kept going tbh

On my way to the third rest stop I knew that my faculties were significantly diminished, it was a relatively flat part of the course yet I was finding myself struggling to pedal and to stay abreast of pains accumulating in my body. At the third rest stop I indulged in TDBB’s famous rib stop and had a chat with Mike Manson who like me, valued just finishing a course over finishing it as fast as possible. I left asap as I didn’t want to spend too much time at the rest stops, still holding out hope that I might finish. Following this was the first big climb of the day, a 7 mile spin up to the top of Onyx peak. My goal here was to surpass last year’s effort since this was the last part of the 70 mile course. The good news is I did PR that climb but not by much, though on the whole I felt much better than last year where I remember struggling to make it even a mile, maybe it’s all a mental game in the end. Once I crested Onyx I stopped at aid station 4 where they advised me that if I took on the rest of the course at that time I might not make it. I definitely considered turning back and completing the 70 mile course instead. It didn’t help that I had to take an unscheduled break to deal with some uncomfortable stomach issues which I blamed on the incredible amounts of fiber Daniel had made us eat the night previous.

As I was deciding what to do I saw Mike again, who told me immediately that he was going to continue the course. I rallied with him and decided the course officials would have to come get me if worse came to worse. We began the descent to Jenks lake which was almost 9 miles. Partially through this descent is where I would spot my friends for the last time. Daniel in particular looked like he was suffering up the climb, a stark contrast to cool and consistent climbing he was doing earlier in the morning. The descent was electrifying as we reached speeds of 35 miles per hour down the mountainside. Yet my elation slowly blossomed into a dread as the road just kept going down and down. I realized painfully that the bill would come due as I had to make my way back up this mountain if I was to complete the course, which would be the hardest part of the whole thing. Here is where I think my spirit finally broke, I made eye contact with the beast and the monster revealed itself to me. I slowly began to accept and rationalize my demise. At the bottom of the descent there was yet more climbing to do around Jenks lake before I even got back to ascending up to Onyx peak. At the Jenks lake aid station me and Mike assumed we were the last people on the course, actually there were 3 cyclists behind us at that time to my estimation, but still not exactly on the right side of that bell curve.

I let Mike drop me here as I was suffering pretty badly. My need to stop kept growing more and more frequent as I was having trouble putting in a consistent effort up the side of the lake. Eventually I was passed by another rider and then a second who informed that I was not the last person on the course there was one yet behind me. I struggled my way all the way back to the bottom of that 8 mile climb and I took a rest on the side of the road. It was the last real challenge ahead of me before the finish line. It was here that the last rider on the course caught up to me. It was a sight you hate to see, a cyclist walking next to his bicycle defeated by the course. We exchanged “are you okay?”s and he told me his legs were destroyed as this was only his 4th month of cycling ever. I congratulated him on his ridiculous gumption as he slowly passed me on the side of the road where I sat eating my banana. There it was, at long last I was the last person on the 100 mile course.

By this point three SAG(support and gear) vehicles had approached me asking if I needed a lift out of here as they warned me that the remaining two aid stations head of me would be closing soon and might not be there by they time I rolled by. I turned them down saying I still had plenty of supplies and they moved on but not without recording my bib number in order to keep track of me. I watched as the cyclist walking his bicycle up the hill got into a SAG and took a ride back to the finish line. As I made my way back up the side of Onyx I was struggling, and was pretty sure I’d miss the remaining aid stations. My mind was made up to finish past the course cutoff at this point. The SAGs had other ideas though.

Two of them pulled up beside me and I was going so slow at this point that they were able to get off their cars and walk beside me as they tried to convince me to take a ride back since everything ahead of me was closing down and I would be unsupported with food or water in the heat and they further confirmed what I suspected, that I was in dead last. I told them no but eventually my exhaustion and their promises of being without water reminded me of my terrible experience trying to climb crystal lake three weeks previous. I eventually told them that I would go only if I could get dropped off at the top of onyx, skipping only about 6 miles of climbing and 1800 feet of elevation, they agreed and I took the ride.

Driving up the side of onyx in an air conditioned cabin I felt like an absolute fucking scab. I had broken the sacred pact between the cyclist and the road: That it didn’t matter how long it took as long as you finished. Passing all the cyclists still struggling their way up the mountain felt like I had betrayed them especially as they each also refused to take the ride. Eventually I passed Mike who was making much better time than I was. I was reminded of the shark cage fugue from JAWS, traveling in my own cage of sorts up the beast that I could not conquer, and like Matt Hooper I too was out of spit.

I was joined by two Japanese women who were also taking the ride to the top of onyx as they had underestimated the difficulty of the route, they were only skipping about three miles however. Once we got off at the peak they happily hurried back down the descent to the other side where the finish line awaited. I paused for a couple minutes just trying to wrestle with my perceived failure. True I skipped most of the hardest part of the course, yet the entire thing was a challenge to me. I had done much more than last year and in my mind I could have finished the 100 miles given enough time and water. Of course that’s true of any ride even if you crawl along at 4mph and stop a lot eventually you’ll be done. I decided to shake off the emotions for now deciding that taking the ride was smart from a well being point of view as I didn’t want to bonk and get stuck on the mountain without an exit strategy.

I proceeded to descend down the side of Onyx that I climbed 4 hours earlier, the usual elation of barreling down a mountain hampered by the feeling that I hadn’t “earned” it. There was about 16 miles of course left which is the second Strava route posted above. Half of it was easy and the second half involved about 700 feet of climbing back to the finish which was not the quick and painless effort I was hoping for yet much better than an 8 mile struggle of a mountain. As I was nearing the finish line Mike caught up to me. I thought he had blown me out of the water making it so far after I had taken the SAG ride, yet he informed that he too got taken by the SAG to the top of Onyx. I guess they were sweeping the course of stragglers. I felt better about my effort and Daniel and Will were waiting for us around the corner to the finish line to cheer us on which I greatly appreciated since they had been done almost 4 hours previous. At 9 hours and 30 minutes I finished a total of about 93 miles and 6300 feet of climbing which was still a climbing PR for me. I took it as a victory and yet I couldn’t help but wonder how much more I could have done in the extra 30 minutes before the cutoff. Will I be doomed to repeat my mistakes next year? Or will I saddle up like the holy trinity of Hooper, Brody, and Quint and blow Big Bear out of the water with extreme prejudice? Or Will I even attempt it again? It remains to be seen.

Dialectical Monism

Dialectical Monism

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I’ve talked on here about the concept of bad faith and the need for one to be authentic to ourselves. Half that battle is knowing who we are and what we want because those things are moving targets. The dissonance between those two realms of the inner and outer is what leads to unhappiness and un-fulfillment. Yet none of us are automatons with singular wants and needs, we are tapestries of desires and we twist and fold in on ourselves in a myriad of ways. Yet to simplify this paradox we abstract these internal battles into two opposing forces. All decisions can be broken down into a series of two choices: yes or no. This is at the heart of how we think, so it is no wonder that when creating computers we have embedded them with this sacred knowledge of yes or no, 1 or 0. Two opposing forces that build into a unified self.

Sometimes I feel my two selves at war, and the battlefield is my mind and body. Yet aren’t we always in constant battle with ourselves? There is the push and pull of time in every situation. If our decisions are the fundamental exercise of our existence and we cannot remain in a state of non-existence then time is both the cause of our existence and the measure against which we exist. The existential relief that comes from having chosen lasts only as long as the next choice remains looming in the distance. Putting off that next decision is at the heart of the human condition. It is the agony of consequence that keeps us in a state of complacency, an inactive participant in our daily lives. Yet if our biological imperative is to survive, then to live is to wage battle with ourselves over and over until we perish.

Under the tongue root

a fight most dread,

and another raging

behind in the head

These are the lyrics of Duel Of The Fates (before they got loosely translated into sanskrit), it’s a snippet from Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees). The lines refer to the fight amongst a tree yet it applies to us as well. The roles we embody with our words may be in opposition to the self in our minds. The act of decision can sometimes feel like a violent rejection of one role or fate over the other. The song plays during a battle as the two greatest opposing forces in the Star Wars Universe battle to lay claim to Anakin’s future. Light vs Dark, Yin vs Yang, and yet ultimately unification through balance.

Last weekend I tried to do a bike ride that I objectively failed at. Having planned it very poorly I ran out of water on a hot day and turned back having done only about half of what I set out to do. The heat was exhausting and every second I was on the bike was a decision point to continue riding or to stop. The mounting pain, onset of heat exhaustion and mechanical troubles that I was facing were forcing me to keep deciding to continue as opposed to the state I wish to be in which is passive activity, the role of cycling. Yet is willpower more like a status check that may or may not fail you depending on the severity of the decision or like a reserve that whittles away little by little as you are forced to take action over and over? To be an athlete you must be able to tolerate pain, that is the nature of strength and growth. The athlete in me told me to keep pushing forward, yet the pragmatist repeatedly questioned why I was pushing to the brink of suffering. So who is my true self? In that moment the pain, doubt, and realization built to a crescendo and I knew then I was cycling in bad faith. Eventually I chose to stop and turn around. This is a microcosm of the decision points we face in life yet it illustrates the profound effects the simplest ones can have. To wit, having invested in my identity as a cyclist I feel like I have failed myself yet undoubtedly I made the right choice that day lest I ended up on the side of the road with heat stroke. Who we are is a conjunction of the forces that shape us and it’s important that our identity and our confidence must come from different sources.

There will always be me and the shadow of me, the me I aspire to be. There will be times when they are in opposition and times when they are in agreement, they both may grow or diminish but through constant reflection and interrogation they should always remain in balance.

District Of Columbia

District Of Columbia

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At 3:30 am June 22nd 2022 I awoke to the booming sound of thunder rattling my windows and lightning illuminating my room. At first I thought it was a car exhaust, a firework, or a gunshot which are all known culprits for waking me up in the small hours of the morning. But as I heard the rolling boom fade away I realized it was a natural occurrence. There is much fun made of us southern Californians and our over-reaction to real weather. Believe me when I say though that thunder and lightning of all things is so, so rare. Even more rare for me was the proximity of it, it felt like there were explosions just outside my window. I silently cursed to myself because of all the nights this night I was trying to get as much sleep as possible because I had a flight to catch at 7:50 am. The jolt, along with the adrenaline that came with it virtually guaranteed I would no longer be sleeping that morning. I didn’t know it but the thunderstorms would follow me all the way to my destination: Washington DC, and even further to Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia on the second leg of my journey. Although the thought crossed my mind I chose not to dwell on this fitful start as an omen of what would come and before I knew it I was touching down on federal land.

From the national portrait gallery

Columbia is a personification of the United States because we love anthropomorphizing things, and it lets us assign optimistic traits to ourselves. Yet Columbia is named after Columbus who as modern revisionist history points out was more akin to the Americas’ first slave master than hero. Washington is a founding father and the first president of these United States, and perhaps most curiously…a Virginian. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Mason and Patrick Henry were also Virginians and together they formed some revolutionary heavy hitters. They helped write the documents we still refer back to almost 250 years later. So I say it’s curious because not 85 years after declaring independence from Britain, Virginia declared independence from the United States along with the rest of the confederate states. It would seem that slavery was too precious to their economy to get rid of even though most of the rest of the world had outlawed it already. Economic concerns trumping humanistic decisions are a recurring theme in our nation’s history. We refer to ourselves as a democratic republic but our system of government might better be called Capitalism. If the government is a political machine running the nation then money is the lubricant, the fuel, and its necessity is the guiding force behind the whole apparatus.

Looking through our nation’s history in DC presents a problem, the danger of storytelling. Even here on this post I present to you my opinions, mixed with some factual evidence, laid out in a way that accentuates the jaded, pessimistic, yet still prone to inspiration mind behind these words. There are around 74 museums in the capital, they stand majestically side to side with a who’s who of massive federal agencies. Walking through some of them I found it interesting to see descriptions of Benjamin Franklin with addendums of how he used slaves make his inventions, or descriptions of how many slaves each founding father owned underneath their portrait. It would seem that we are at last trying to hold a mirror up to the story of our national identity. For how long though was all this subtext and context missing, left buried under the rug in order to present a satisfying tale of tenacity and doggedness against the tyranny of King George. I’m an avid visitor of museums and I like to do a depth first dive into the exhibits which often means I leave the museum unfinished as I’m forced out by docents. The museums in DC were vast, varied, and detailed and yet for all that has been written about history what has been left out?

Lincoln’s Death Hat

I sat in the very theatre that Abraham Lincoln was in when he was shot to death by John Wilkes Booth. Exclaiming “Sic Semper Tyrannis” he ran from the stage where now a ranger was telling us about his fate. The latin phrase was a reference to the murder of Ceasar and it also appears on the seal of Virginia. Presumably Booth believed Lincoln was a tyrant, abusing his war time powers against the confederacy. Yet how could Lincoln abuse his power against the states that had seceded from under his rule? Even though the Confederacy lost it hasn’t stopped them from unloading a slew of pro-confederate propaganda immediately after the war to this very day. The Lost Cause is an attempt to couch what was a pro-slavery war in romantic ideals and heroic deeds. I visited Richmond Virginia, the capital of the confederacy on the last bit of my trip and couldn’t believe our bloodiest conflict erupted basically between two capitals barely more than 100 miles apart. Statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis were barely taken down two years ago. Only recently has the nation started to take an active part in rejecting the siren song of a feel-good story. How long will we keep it up and how far will our memory go, after all when I visit statues of Alexander The Great I don’t think of the man, I think of the god, and his list of accomplishments and atrocities float through my conscious mind with ease and without emotional burden.

The memorial to the Korean War haunts me still

The history of our nation and of the world is riddled with bloodshed, revolution, and turmoil. The many monuments devoted to the countless wars since our nation’s conception make that obvious. On the third day of my trip the supreme court struck down Roe V. Wade and protests erupted immediately on site. The only way to get lasting, real change in the US is through tireless coordination and effort, by constitutional design. I can’t help but think though that as a democracy, a crowd of protesters is inherent with the threat of violence against elected officials. After all if there is a disconnect in what the people say and what those in power do then the system has failed and what’s the ultimate and final way to take back the power? How long can we build towards our idea of a utopia before it all bubbles over again and we are forced to regenerate the only way we know how?

You Suffer

You Suffer

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English philosophers, scholars, and musicians Napalm Death have continuously pushed forward the discourse surrounding the atrophy of the mind living in service of multinational corporations. Their debut album Scum harbors intense dissections of amoral corruption, guilt via complacency, mass media control, and the exchange and origin of power. I want to focus in on one song in particular though, the voluminous epic You Suffer.

Make sure you carve out a healthy amount of time for this one

Clocking in at 1.316 seconds, the song is pregnant with existential quandary. Let’s break the song apart into its different dimensions by starting with the lyrics:

You suffer, but why?

The first half of the song sets the stage and forcefully reminds the listener that they suffer. The key to interpreting this part is of course knowing of suffering. Napalm Death cleverly removes the glut of having to explain the concept by assuming the listener has indeed suffered and continues to suffer. This assumption condenses what would otherwise weigh down an already lengthy song into abstract layers that maximize the use of its time. The words have been carefully chosen to make their thesis clear. The listener is forced to either reject or accept the hypothesis that they suffer. If accepted then they will have fallen into the trap made clear in the second half of the song. If rejected then the listener has been at least forced to self-reflect on why they think they don’t suffer. The emphasis is because inevitably one comes to the conclusion that even if they are not currently in the throes of pain and hardship, they have known it in some form or the other. Again, because of the carefully chosen language, tense is irrelevant. In a general sense humans suffer, and being directly addressed by the song brings forth memories of personal suffering whether it be physical, mental, or existential.

The second half of the song presents the listener with the central dramatic question, “but why?“. The guerrilla transition from exposition to challenge only serves to increase the impact of the lyrics. The listener is indeed in the middle of recounting the times they have suffered, or accepting that they are currently suffering when they are sonically assaulted by the tour de force second half of the song. Napalm Death makes the listener reconcile their personal pain with causes of it. On the surface it’s a simple question but the effect is that it shifts the thoughts from external evaluation of the self into the inner evaluation of the self. The band knowingly posits the question that will lead the listener on a bread crumb trail to self realization. Whether the addressee wants to or not they will come out on the other side of this experience having gained knowledge of themselves positive or negative. Rather than providing an answer, the band provides fertile ground for self examination, especially via the instrumentation which I will cover next.

Through a clever grindcore vocal technique of combining words, Napalm Death manages to condense the exaggerated 5 syllables of the lyrics into a more respectable 4 syllables. In doing so they allow the rest of the band members ample time to explore the sonic dimensions of suffering. The drummer, bassist, and guitarist first choose to use their respective instruments to imbue the words of the vocalist with weight and gravity by timing their notes to the cadence of the lyrics. This extra punctuation disarms the listener having a counterintutive effect of narrowing their focus on the words by removing any nondiegetic noise. Finally near the end of the song as the final words have been spoken the guitarist performs a virtuoso solo that dovetails into a final sustained note. This note provides the listener with a sort of mutable vessel on which they can fill with the answer to the question asked by the song. This liminal space between the lyrics and the song’s conclusion is inhabited fully by the catharsis of the listener.

Like the philosophers of old Napalm Death have tricked their listeners into interrogating the nature of not only suffering but their own suffering. Furthermore by providing no answer but instead a space for a response they make sure the addressee takes ownership of it, there can be no deflection. So what is your answer? I think at the root of the matter there is but one: “because I choose to”. Yet reading or hearing these words is not enough for understanding, they must come from within, from your being. Then and only then will the journey to apotheosis start.