reflection – Metal Regression

Jesus Christ. Messiah. Lisan Al Gaib. Dude.

March 31, 2024 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

Raise your hand if you’ve seen Dune 2. Keep your hand up if you’ve read the New Testament. Keep your hand up if you’ve been obsessed with the writings of Leo Tolstoy. If your hand is still up, then you might be Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. If they were still alive today. Tolstoy took a stance of radical love later in his life that influenced all forms of non violent protest that we are familiar with now. Where did this stance come from? The source of eternal life, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Yet he approached the life and teachings of Jesus in an experimental way, by removing the miracles, the divinity and the mysticism from the gospels.

I read A Confession in which Tolstoy admits his total lack of the will to keep living, and the book is framed as a way to make a logical argument against his own suicide because if he can find no reason to live then why should he. The thrust of the novella is beautifully summed up in the parable he details:

There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them.
Leo Tolstoy – A Confession

Facing the inevitability of his own death, the decreasing pleasure he gets from living every day life, and the inability to forget about the futility in which he now exists he comes to the conclusion that not serving any further purpose he may as well die but admits that he is too cowardly to do it. He tries to find a way to overcome the suffering when he remembers that he gets a glimmer of existential joy whenever he considers how he felt when he had faith in God. It was a matter of course, perhaps even the trend for intellectuals in Tolstoy’s time to be atheist, or to at least accept that religion was not a rational endeavor. Yet he makes the claim that he was at his most happiest when he believed and that this faith in itself could be the key to finding his will to live. He tries to return to the Russian orthodox church in earnest only to find himself disheartened and confused by the dogmatic and empty ritualistic acts that plague the sermons. Tolstoy decides that he must cut away the cruft that has accrued over the centuries since the crucifixion and get back to the very soul of Christianity which are the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is where the novella ends, with a promise that after years of research he will come back with his findings. He delivers this in a following book, The Gospel In Brief, which is itself a smaller piece of a larger work in which he reinterprets the four gospels of the New Testament, stripped of all superstition. Admittedly I did not see his existential crisis ending with a renewal in religious faith. I understand where Tolstoy is coming from though because his conceptualized idea of faith is akin to the Christian idea of the spirit. Then as Jesus teaches his disciples, eternal life can only be found through the spirit not through the flesh. In the parlance of the fable, all the honey in the world will not save you from being eaten by the dragon because the mistake is serving the flesh to save the flesh, in essence making yourself more delicious for the dragon to enjoy. One should serve the spirit to save the spirit which would allow Tolstoy to lift himself right out of that well and enter in the kingdom of Heaven, eternal life or as I like to think, existential purpose and fulfillment.

Now that I’ve put that out there I want to state that I myself am not religious, and I don’t believe in any literal sense the scripture writ in the gospels. Jesus never sat down and wrote his thoughts into words, the gospels were written around 60 years after his death. Not only that but the canonical gospels are only a subset of the many that were written which the budding Christian church decided were the most suited to be canon. Even the canonical gospels don’t always line up with each other either. So we must tackle these religious sources for what they are, unverifiable accounts of the life and teachings of a man which may be more literary creation than historical figure. This is of course supreme blasphemy according to the church. The funny thing about heresy is that it only matters to you if you abide by the institution that declares it such. The greatest Christian institution: the Roman Catholic church is a military hierarchical framework originating via the Nicene Creed. It was created as such to protect Christianity as a religion and to standardize the creation of theology, the greatest misstep I think in the history of Christianity as a philosophy. Because in doing this, they wiped out the most anarchic of Jesus lessons: the rejection of dogma in favor of belief. His words are simple, yet the institutions that sprang up in his wake continually complicate them in favor of maintaining the idea of religious divinity and disseminating this power into a purported chain of command that starts with the pope. Yet Jesus was a teacher of the poor, disavowed the rich and powerful and held that men are more important than all religious ceremonies. The catholic church then, and any offshoot from its inception, is itself a heretical organization.

Therefore I can get to the real business of Jesus, which is interpreting his philosophy in a way that applies to humanity not divinity. As I read The Gospel In Brief I could not help but make continuous connections to other great teachers of life. So much so that I thought Lao Tzu and The Buddha must have been pen pals with Jesus while he was in the forest coming up with his ideas. I kid, but Eastern influences must have been present in the time of historical Jesus, there’s very little evidence to suggest there was any direct contact but the similarities in some of the lessons is striking. Firstly there is Jesus’ role as an ascetic. The Jewish fasted before the time of Jesus but the biggest difference is they fasted to commemorate events or to perform a sacrifice as dictated in the Old Testament. Jesus not only willingly gave up food, but went so far as to say food is not necessary:

He who fulfills the will of the father shall always be satisfied and knows neither hunger nor thirst

He upends the paradigm choosing instead to not look at fasting as a sacrificial act but as a display of the will of the spirit, a supreme act of self control. The Buddha also recommended his followers to fast as a way to detach from the need of food and sustenance which would arouse suffering. He practiced extreme fasting for a time before giving it up in favor of the middle way yet he did so with the realization that one does not need as much material food as they think and that one’s power over the mind is one of the greatest tools against suffering. So on one hand we have the food of the spirit (service to the Father, the origin of life) surpassing the need for food of the flesh. On the other hand we have the removal of the attachment to food by our willpower. The two concepts seem inevitably entangled to me. Moreover Jesus taught generally that needs of the flesh chain us to dying by the flesh. His concept of eternal life, as being removed from any sort of fleshly desires could be read as another version of the eightfold path of buddhism which aims to remove all attachments to any concept or materialism that stop us from achieving enlightenment and exiting the cycle of death and rebirth, aka eternal life.

Next we have Jesus’ radically nonviolent stance. As he famously states:

If anyone strikes out your tooth on one side, turn him to the other side. If you are made to do one piece of work, do two. If men wish to take your property, give it to them. If they do not return your money, do not ask for it.

Jesus reinforces his belief that resisting evil is itself a mechanism of evil, hence the only means to do away with evil is to not only to willingly suffer, but to give more than the actor against you would take. This form of “generous” victimhood is a means to highlight that the things that victimize us do so at our own volition. Here we have a smattering of the stoic concept of “Amor Fati”, love thy fate. Jesus encourages his followers to love their fate by multiplying its effects. The buddhist concept of right thought, right conduct, and right effort all apply to this situation, because Buddha also taught the ancient concept of Ahimsa, nonviolence towards all living things. Jesus’ method of multiplying those violent or evil acts against us can be seen as the inversion of the buddhist belief that life is suffering. If you throw yourself on the sword instead of resisting against the sword then no action can be taken against your will and therefore you cannot suffer by the spirit. This also has moral implications because by increasing the acts performed in your detriment, you are increasing the evil done in the short term however there can be no moral victory against a non-violent resistor and in our modern times in particular, in which all actions are surveilled and criticized, the moral victory is the everlasting one.

Lastly Jesus preaches that the kingdom of heaven, contrary to popular culture, is timeless, cannot be seen, and is not physically present anywhere. He says that it exists on earth and can be entered at any time provided you access the origin of all life, the spirit.

Understand that, if man is conceived from heaven, then in him there must be that which is of heaven

Rather the kingdom of heaven is part of us because we are created from it. We lose touch with it and Jesus’ lessons act as the shepherd that reconnects us to our divine origins. This concept is striking in its similarity to the words of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. The tao, for the uninitiated is the eternal and limitless substance from which life springs, and life returns:

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching

The tao represents the unlimited potential from which humanity is made. In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu describes how being more like the tao improves our lives because the closer we are to the origin of life then the closer we become to realizing the perfect life, or perhaps as Jesus would say, the everlasting life. Jesus refers to “the father” as this origin of the spirit. The father is one with the kingdom of heaven and traditionally he has been identified as the Abrahamic God that created the earth, and gave Noah his purpose etc. But what if it wasn’t the same God? What if Jesus never meant that the father was an actual person or deity but a force, origin, or an immutable aspect of human nature like the tao? He certainly alludes to the fact that his father cannot be known, nor can the origins of his own birth be verified because the light that illuminates knowledge cannot itself be illuminated. Similarly Lao Tzu describes the tao:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching

Here he states that although we can try to describe the tao, give it a shape and a name, we are incapable of ever actually understanding it or knowing it. By naming it we create a lesser version of it in our minds, similar to Plato’s theory of forms, we can only reach approximate knowledge via an imperfect understanding of the infinite tao from which all life springs. Jesus seems to think similarly of his Father:

You have understood that understanding proceeds from the Father into the world and returns from the world to the Father.

Lao Tzu and Jesus reasoned that trying to define something intrinsically unimaginable robs it of its power and purpose. Rather they all preached that keeping this unfathomable barrier in mind while accepting that it is a part of us is instrumental to being at peace with ourselves. The Buddha and Jesus also both believed that maintaining strict beliefs and expectations were fundamentally damaging to our internal lives. Siddhartha famously encountered the four sights which (eventually) awakened him to the four noble truths of suffering. Jesus understood similarly in his meditation out in the wilderness. He states in the gospels that that the temple of God lives in the hearts of men who love each other, taking care to illustrate that no physical sacrifice, place of worship, or ritual can bring you closer to eternal life and speaking harshly to the orthodox who upheld these values for their own sake due to their attachment to scripture. According to the buddhists, once you remove all attachments you will achieve the state of enlightenment which will allow you to exit the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, eternal life, entering the kingdom of heaven, returning to the Tao: these all sound like the same concept to me.

So it seems there must have been some dialogue between east and west at the inception of Christianity. But whether these are all teachers that borrowed from each other or whether they all possessed the clarity of mind to arrive to similar conclusions doesn’t matter. Religions have sprung up in the place of teaching to try and control the power that comes with sanctity. Yet holding the words of our teachers as unimpeachably sacred is damaging to the whole endeavor of human progress. Jesus knew this which is why he taught that belief supersedes actions. Correct belief gets at an objective center of morality, but correct actions leaves room for the false teachers to bear ill fruit in the realm of subjectivity. This is the true power of Jesus’ words, because even if you do not believe in the christian church or have ever heard of Jesus, are part of a Satanic cult, or are born on a different planet if you do as he commanded and always, and to the end, love each other then you are a disciple of Christ without ever realizing it. It is this concept which propelled Tolstoy from suicidal ideation to passionate living. The connection to these truths which have been realized over and over throughout history saved him in spite of the obfuscation caused by the religious theology that paradoxically try to protect them.

33 in 2023

December 24, 2023 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

Usually I try to write these yearly reflection posts for my birthday. The better, and more accurately to coincide with my yearly dispositions. Yet I have felt that not much has changed since last year, which is reflected in the fact that it feels like the year has passed me by dizzyingly fast. Has it only been a year since I was holed up in the restroom of the Alamo experiencing a separation of mind, body and spirit? It feels like yesterday, or rather like one long unbroken and deterministic chain of events that hasn’t really stopped. Something has definitely changed though, my creative output on all fronts has slowed down. I write less, film less, produce less “content” for lack of a better word. Though to be clear none of this is ever meant to be marketable (because you would need a market) and in fact anything you ever read that is meant to be profitable should be looked at with suspicion. Not because of any ill intent on behalf of the author but they are now serving something outside of their authentic self, and despite claims to the contrary this master will creep into their process. Sorry, this could really be a post about the Hollywood studio system vs less profit driven world cinema but I wont digress.

Why has my output stopped? I think I’m victim of a pattern I fall into where I consume consume consume in an attempt to parse through and come up with some subjective view of an objective reality. To put forth an example, if I want to write about a movie I love it’s easy to watch the movie, then read everything written about it, then read about all the sources of the prior reading, then explore tangentially related topics all in a vain and desperate attempt to hold an opinion that is unimpeachable. Obviously I’m not the subject matter expert on anything because once I see the maw of knowledge open itself to me I recoil back and think “you know what I think I know enough”. Yet I don’t feel satisfied enough to ever really publicly say anything so I think “let me just sit on this for a while longer”. There’s a clip I’ve seen of Ethan Hawke stating how Leo Tolstoy thought his brother was the real genius, but he lacked the ego to put pen to paper so Leo was the one who was showered with accolades. Here we have a terrible shadow though for if those with egos are the ones who write then wisdom, or even competence, is not really a determining factor in success, and with success comes the further dissemination of ideas. Maybe this is best reflected in our political landscape where we have a bunch of Socratically deficient dummies that don’t understand that they know nothing. This is an oversimplification though because even the smarter politicians get consumed by the political game everyone plays to assure majority support but regardless being able to show your face in public and say “yeah I got the answers I can do that” is always a lie, regardless whether the person saying it disagrees or not. To break down that into its arguments though…I think the mere statement “I know” is false. The implications are thus:
If I have verified something as a fact then I know it.
I have verified it as a fact.
Therefore I know it.

The jungle cat lying in wait to eviscerate this argument is “I have verified”. When is the last time you verified something? a quick google search? A text? Asked Alexa or Siri? Academics all know to check sources when reading through others’ works. Yet how deep do we search through this tree of knowledge? Sources have sources, those sources have sources, even when it coms to raw data and numbers it is interpreted by someone or something. This is a pedantic view but my point is all our knowledge is built on others’ “knowledge”. So then when we say I know it is not the previous argument we are really saying it’s this:
If someone/something I trust has verified a fact then I know it’s true.
This fact has been verified by someone/something I trust.
I know it’s true.

Of course the second ticking time bomb here is the definition of verification. Scientifically we have errors of measurement but what of non-empirical matters? If I find a friend who looks down on there luck I may say something “I know you’re sad, but things will turn around”. Do I know they are sad? I am interpreting their emotion using body language. Or to remove doubt I ask them what’s wrong and they may answer “I am sad because my ice cream fell”. Ah there we a firsthand verified source. I know they are sad because I trust them to know they are sad. Later I may go and tell mutual friends that I know our friend is sad without any second thoughts. But does my friend know they are sad? Is sadness something we learn or is it something within us that carries a blueprint of what it means to be sad. Of course the final question is what is sadness? And do I really know that my friend’s definition of sadness is the same as my own? When I say “I know you are sad” what I’m really saying is “I think you are exhibiting signs that I identify as sad” or in the second scenario where I tell our mutual friend: “Our friend is feeling emotions he has defined as sad and I think it closely resembles my interpretation of sadness”. Our language is mutable enough that in both cases we understand what is being said and since “being sad” has no true objective definition we all have to accomodate various interpretations of sad into one term. I can never really know if my friend is sad just as they can never really know if they are sad because being sad is an external concept which we have continuously tried to define in the course of our lives. There are more accurate words you can use to be sure. My friend could say “I am unhappy” which relies upon both of us understanding what it means to be happy first. Or he could say “I feel upset that my ice cream fell because I wanted to eat it.” which is more precise language. Yet we had already no doubt assumed that was the case when they remarked that their ice cream fell. Even now do we know they are upset because of that or is there some deeper significance to the ice cream. So the margin of error lies in the abstraction of our language and thus in the abstraction of knowledge.

It is how we have advanced as a species to rely on secondhand information that we accept as true empirically or non-empirically. Yet it is the same reason that in the age of technology we have come to our reckoning. We have unlimited sources and virtually unlimited discourse. We can pick and choose trusted sources that say whatever we need them to say. It’s a relativist nightmare which we cannot wake up from, an unceasing churning of truth. Which is all to say that if nobody can know anything, then maybe it’s okay if I produce more dumb stuff next year. I know you’ll agree.

My Grandma

August 26, 2023 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

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.

Dialectical Monism

July 28, 2022 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

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

July 10, 2022 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

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.

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?

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

May 28, 2022 Jairo Comments 2 comments

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.

Victory In The Valley

May 8, 2022 Jairo Comments 1 comment

I blew past my previous max distance by a resounding 24 miles. The total elevation ended up coming up just under 5500′ which is about 500 merciful feet less than the route was described. Still it’s the most I’ve climbed on one of these long rides. I completed the route one hour and a half before the cutoff. Looking back on the ride itself, my previous post sounds childish (maybe it did anyways) with how strongly I managed to finish. Yet even the night before I was still in the throes of anxiety…

I rolled up to the Simi Valley Hotel I was staying at with Daniel around 5pm. I was immediately beset by concern because they had multiple “No bicycles permitted in building” signs plastered all over the entrances and windows. I wondered how this could have been such a recurring problem that it warranted such aggressive signage. I imagined Simi Valley being swarmed by flocks of cyclists at hotels but I never saw a single other one besides Daniel and the rest of the randonneurs I was heading out with. One thing bicycling has reinforced in me is that sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I believe they call this exercising your privilege. If you’re in a shady neighborhood you grab your bike and walk right into the store; If you’re at red light with a weight sensor and no cars for miles then you just roll on; if you feel unsafe on the shoulder of a road you just take up the whole lane instead. I gathered my nerves and walked right in with my bicycle already mentally preparing my defense: “Your website never said no bikes allowed”. The lobby was completely empty, I leaned my bike out of sight of the reception, checked in, and went to my room after the worker walked to the back room.

…

Roles And Bad Faith

April 18, 2022 Jairo Comments 2 comments

I watched Michael Mann’s Thief yesterday about, you guessed it, a thief. He’s the best thief, but he’s trying to get out of the business. You see this archetypal film a lot, “The best at x because it’s all they’ve ever known, but the consequences are catching up”. Compare this to another archetypal plot: “They’re the best at x but no one will give them a chance to prove themselves”. Of course there is the Hong Kong Kung Fu twist on this: “They have the potential to be the best at x but they need a master to help them achieve it”. It’s all influenced by the other now but this was a highlight between traditional Western and Eastern thought. Look at the cowboy films from the 60s, these badass men just drifted in from who knows where and they were masters of their art, fully formed from the womb no doubt. In the West we want to believe we can become masters using only extreme American gumption, and the tools at our disposal. In the East one can only achieve their true potential by acknowledging and listening to the wisdom of their elders. Like I mentioned though the two schools have mixed, at least in film (Think Kill Bill). James Caan’s thief did have a master in the form of a character played by Willie Nelson.

So what is it about these people that are the best at what they do that makes for a fascinating watch? All of our human existence is a struggle to learn and I think sometimes we want to fantasize about what happens when we get to the end. To use a concrete example, I’ve been cycling two years now and yeah I’d want to watch a film about the best cyclist (sit down Lance Fakestrong), what does that look like? What kind of super human feats could they accomplish? I know that objectively there is an actual best cyclist out there in the world since that’s how sports are structured, but give me a mythical, fictionalized one that I can aspire to, that will never break, disappoint or otherwise let me down. I think we all inhabit various roles every day of our lives, and there is satisfaction that comes from the being the best at it. Yet none of these roles are truly us.

To use an example from Jean-Paul Sartre that I just read about, say I am a waiter and I’m the best waiter gliding around a restaurant, taking orders, never forgetting a single item, never dropping a plate or delivering food late and charming all the patrons meanwhile. The totality of my being and energy in this moment is devoted to being an absolute badass waiter. Sartre describes this as living in bad faith with yourself because by inhabiting a role so perfectly you are undoubtedly pushing down the part of your consciousness that makes you a real person. So why do we do it? It feels good to perform. If we imagine an action as a series of miniature goals and targets then in a way every person on earth is an athlete and their sport is living. For example, as a waiter I know I have to take the orders of customers in the order that they arrived: that’s goal #1. I need to jot down or memorize the order correctly including customizations: goal #2. I need to deliver these orders to the kitchen on time: goal #3. These micro goals go on and on and achieving each one will produce some measure of satisfaction.

Another reason why we like to exist in bad faith is because it can be a form of meditation where we stop thinking of the pressures and anxieties that are outside of our control. It’s essentially a relief to inhabit some perfect (or perfect adjacent) version of ourselves that does not have to deal with pressures of true existence if even for a short while. It’s not a cure for our existentialist ailment of course, as our true authentic selves need to reassert eventually. Existing in a role for too long provides diminishing returns and if we lose sight of the compass that is our real being then we grow stale in the roles we have chosen for ourselves. This is the great wheel of life that capitalism (for one) has sunk its teeth into. Our jobs are defined by roles, and we are provided targets and goals for these roles. Corporations know that positive feedback titillates us, and providing a great amount of work for us to accomplish will keep us working by sheer force of existential dread. Yet even if we like our jobs, we are existing in bad faith because we ignore the multi-facetedness of our life. What’s more, existing in a role takes away our ability to choose, technically we are “deciding” to go to work every day, but ask yourself if you really are or if you feel forced to via the pressures surrounding you and then you’ll know that you’re living in bad faith. “But that’s what the weekend is for” I hear you corporate shills saying. Our lives should be lived in accomplishments, feats, decisions, and changes not in two days out of the week.

Fleeting

April 5, 2022 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

I feel like it was five weeks ago that I was graduating college, elated, thinking I had my whole life ahead of me to make my mark upon it. It’s been almost 10 years since that and life continues to evaporate on sight. Where does it all go? Is it pooled up somewhere beneath the floorboards of my home waiting to be discovered? It’s 80% air and 20% chips. The more life I try to have, the faster it goes. Time dilation is a hell of a drug. Yet my purse holds but a meager three decades of life whereas others have lost more than that on a bet.

At a child’s birthday party last weekend I was acutely aware of the whole spectrum of current human existence. I’ll chalk it up to the first big event of the kind that I’ve been to since the great stop-gap of covid 19 but I could see the generational lines in the sand. The baby boomers were sitting, observing, and vibing with the kids, generation x was taking a chill pill and laying back as their children took on the duties of the party, the millennials were hurriedly looking after their kids and frantically making sure the festivities took place as planned, generation z was talking about the latest music and sitting in a corner laughing at tik toks, and the children…running around with boundless energy, ready to replace all of us.

I was there with my baby brothers who my father decided to have later in life. So I got a taste of what some of my friends are going through right now having to manage two walking, talkings ids. There was an octogenarian acquaintance of mine who I touched base with briefly since we hadn’t spoken in a long time and as we watched my little brothers marvel at the animals in the petting zoo he wasted no time delivering straight cold hard truths to me in only the way a man whose shed all pretense can. He told me how all the friends he went to high school with were dying, “that’s just the age I’m at.” I thought how crazy and distant that sounds, all my high school friends are buying homes, getting married and having kids. Yet I remember how quickly the last 10 years have flown by. When I was 15 I thought living on my own seemed almost impossible and here I am in the third decade of life in the blink of an eye spinning the plates of self-sustenance. All of a sudden it seems like getting to 80 and watching the world crumble around me doesn’t seem so far away. What’s the lesson here? Be present, self-reflect as much as you can, the saying goes that you don’t know you’re living in the good times until they are over but that sounds to me like that person never stopped for a beat to evaluate their happiness. Better yet, assume it’s always the good times and don’t ever stop making them so.

2016 hits the fan

December 31, 2016 Jairo Comments 0 Comment

2016, what can say about it that hasn’t been beaten into our collective consciousness already. It sucked for the world. On like a scale of things I didn’t think could happen, 2016 hit a pretty high note. Legendary musicians and actors dying left and right, a bitter and embattled election, more mass shootings, civil strife around the globe, Harambe. But it’s not all bad, Leo finally got an Oscar. But I think everyone is well aware of that part of the year.

Things for me personally though have gone pretty well…for the most part. The first couple of months were rocky at best, but it led to great new opportunities, mainly my new job. My health is still a concern as well, though it certainly doesn’t seem like it. I’m not a fool, I know I’m pushing the “youth invincibility” thing too far already and I’m getting ready to take steps towards a healthier me again. Anyways people love lists at the end of the year right? (I’m people too I think). So here you go:

Top 10 things Jairo did in 2016 (In a particular order):

1. Landed a new job

Yep, you get number 1 right away. It’s awesome because it was finally a step in the direction of the career I always wanted when I was programming on those sleepless nights in college. My coworkers are great and they are very much focused not just on squeezing out great automated testing, but improving quality of all code and fostering a culture of testing. Having that shared focus really drives my inspiration and lets me get into that groove on a day-to-day basis. I’ve also been able to attend my first industry conference and a couple of meetups. Not to mention Silicon Beach perks are top notch 😉

10. Bought a House

Yeah that’s right you got the best good thing and the worst good thing right next to each other, this list doesn’t give a FUCK. Buying a house is painful. Half the time I wasn’t really sure what I was doing but you have to do your research as with all things in life. I can say I think I got the property at a good value, low enough interest rate on my mortgage, and Lancaster while being kind of on the wrong side of nowhere is an up and coming city that I think will propel the property value. So let’s avoid crashing the market again for a another century or so please. The house itself is great: 5 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a nice living room with a fireplace and chimney, lots of open space in the backyard, and the neighborhood is nice. Oh god…why am I talking like this.

3. Bought A New Car

https://youtu.be/JQRZVbsAMrk?t=20s

I think I got really lucky here. For a long time my car of choice was a Dodge Challenger. I wanted it now while I’m still counted as being young because when I get it later I don’t want to hear any mid-life crisis BS. I wanted the blacktop edition, I had notions of putting a giant Punisher logo on the back or that Immortan Joe skull from Mad Max: Fury Road. I had dreams of driving it down desert highways, blasting Space Truckin’. Alas, it was not meant to be because in the end my sensibilities won over. There is no reason to drop a fortune on a base model Challenger when I can get a tricked out Chrysler 300c for an even lower price. Seriously, I’m still looking over my shoulder every day trying to figure how this baby was so cheap but so awesome. Leather interiors, heated seats, rear shades, rear cameras, media center, premium audio, all the bells and whistles. It’s such a comfortable car, makes the commute from Long Beach to Marina Del Rey a pleasure. And honestly anything was an upgrade from my 2000 Toyota Corolla with the broken stereo, broken indoor handles, and chronic oil problems.

4. Attended Riot Fest and The Misfits Reunion

Never thought I would have a reason to go to Denver, but when I woke up one faithful morning to find out the classic Misfits lineup was getting back together I had a choice to make. Denver or Chicago? When you factored in housing and airplane tickets the choice was easy. Besides the Misfits the lineup was different for both dates and I’m still not entirely show which one was better but there was plenty to enjoy in Denver: Suicidal Tendencies, Chevy Metal, Jane’s Addiction, Bad Religion. We even managed to get out into the city a teensy bit for metal beers and food. But for sure the highlight was the Misfits themselves, they were on FIRE. It was like the lackluster Glenn Danzig covering his own misfits songs at the Legacy shows became someone who actually cared to put energy back into his performance. Doyle and Jerry crushed it and the set was and hour and a half of non-stop singing along. For sure it will probably be a highlight of my life not only this year.

9. Played Overwatch

That’s right, no thought being put into this ordering at all. I know what you’re thinking: wtf is a video game doing on this list. I would be straight up doing a disservice to the honesty of this blog if I didn’t put this on here because honestly…a huge chunk of 2016 was spent playing this game. I was a little turned off at the thought of an only-online, only-multiplayer game because Titanfall kinda ruined that concept for me years earlier. But through great peer pressure I purchased the game and never looked back. Blizzard’s steady stream of free new content and seasonal events keeps me coming for more. Now when me and my friends would usually be blowing money at the bars we tend to stay in and play instead. I know it sounds super lame but damn is it a money saver, the game has probably paid for itself a couple times over at this point.

8. Saw Bob Dylan Live

Seeing the main man Dylan in concert was….interesting. Bob Dylan is one of, if not, the greatest musicians of our time. His songs have influenced other musicians and the very culture of America for decades. So of course I wanted to see the maestro live. Especially since I had utterly failed at getting Oldchella( Desert Trip?) tickets. I definitely enjoyed the concert but I knew almost none of the songs and the ones I did manage to recognize had been vastly reworked by Dylan into completely different tunes. I guess there’s no reason to expect an artist to play what you want to hear but man I really would have grooved along to Positively 4th street. Regardless, it was definitely a bucket list item of mine and I would probably see him again if given the chance.

6. Saw The Who Live

Speaking of Oldchella acts I watched solo, I also had the opportunity to see The Who tear up the Staples Center earlier in the year. It was so great, the old Englishmen have not lost their energy. Pete Townshend can still rip through the guitar licks like no one’s business. I wish I could have seen them with Keith Moon on the drums but in this day and age I’ll take The Who any way they come. Their music has always stood apart for me in the realm of classic rock greatness. They have the ability to construct really epic songs out of devastatingly simple riffs or can get complex as hell with several layers of synth and effects, and there’s so much energy in each member’s playing, it’s infectious. It was great to see them and I would jump on the chance to do it again. Another bucket list item checked.

7. Attended Punk Rock Bowling

What do you do when you’re in between jobs and have a week off. Go to Vegas. I wouldn’t consider myself Punk by any means but I do listen to a lot of hardcore punk and crossover. The genetic identity of punk and metal really isn’t so different and the anti-establishment culture of Punk sits mostly well with me too. A lot of my friends were going to this too so why the hell not. It turned out to be awesome and a great way to relieve some of the stress that had built in the first quarter of the year. Going to Vegas is usually okay but being there with a bunch of punks and (I suspect) metalheads is what makes it next level great. It was like a little counter-culture takeover of the most mainstream party destination. Didn’t feel like I was surrounded by frat guys and old rich people anymore. I only attended one day of the festival itself and got to see the ‘Black Flag’ offshoot ‘Flag’ play their set and I could dig it.The icing on the cake was finally being able to see Rock Of Ages the musical.

5. Had a Rocktober Birthday

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This year I had one of the best birthdays in recent memories. Lots of bands were coming through L.A. on tour in the month of October, three concerts alone on my birthday week. 6 in total that month and I went to all of them. Devin Townsend Project co-headlining with Between the Buried and Me, Meshuggah with support by High On Fire, Opeth playing a monstrous double set, Ghost, Tiger Army’s Octoberflame, and Tenacious D’s Festival Supreme where I finally saw Weird Al and Flight of the Conchords amongst other acts. Maybe you’ve noticed a pattern here but I love going to live music especially bands I like that I’ve never seen before or bands that put on a great show and having all these great bands tour in October was a great birthday present. I also had the most birthday-ish party in recent memory at the new house in Lancaster with good friends and family.

…and drum roll please, the second best thing I did this year was…

2. Visited the Pacific Northwest

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Took a trip to Portland and Seattle. My cousin lives in Portland so I got a nice little insider tour of the coolest neighborhoods and bars, But I think what we really explored in Oregon was the nature. We drove along the Historic Columbia River Highway and it was breathtaking. We ended up at Multnomah Falls and we climbed up the stairs a bit to see the waterfall then we retreated to the lodge for some drinks and appetizers. We had a rental car on hand so we drove from Oregon to Seattle (like a 3 hour drive) and just seeing the forests and rivers on the way was awesome, you really get a sense of the life people lead up there. Seattle probably deserves it’s own post here because we did a lot but the highlight for me was the EMP museum. They had so many exhibits that were so relevant to my interests I had a hard time seeing it all. There was a sci-fi wing, horror, fantasy, a dedicated Star Trek exhibit. There was an exhibit on the grunge movement, Jimi Hendrix, Indie video games, the history of the electric guitar. There was so much to see, I will probably have to go back if I ever travel to Seattle again. Seattle the city itself was great too, we stayed on a tugboat that our host graciously took out onto Washington Lake for us one day. We also visited the Public Market, the Aquarium, took a boat tour around the city, visited the space needle, and the Starbucks Roastery. It was a great experience.

Honorable Mentions:

Iron Maiden: finally the show I deserved after seeing them the last time where they played almost none of their hits 🙁

Watching Cannibal Corpse twice in a year: brutal.

Finally launching this website: I toyed with the idea of writing my own code from scratch for a long time but I got over it. I just need to write.

Camping at Catalina Island: I kind of hated it but it was an experience I needed to have.

Destination wedding at San Luis Obispo: The wedding party stayed in such a nice little estate in the hills, and the reception was in a barn on someone’s farm land. It was good times.

Black Sabbath: I saw the godfathers of metal on their last tour and I kind of regret not seeing them again on the second leg but oh well. they still sound so evil.

Bachelor Party at Lake Tahoe: It was awesome, and that’s all I’m allowed to say.

The Adicts Show: Probably one of the best shows I’ve seen and I was not prepared for it at all.

See you in 2017.