Pistachio

(I was on a streak of writing posts, althought not publishing any of them, and this was number 6 or something in the streak, which ended right after this one, and was probably the greatest post streak I’ll ever have in my life.)

I’ve kept the streak alive. I’ll continue to do so.

All I have to do is write something, of any length, about anything at all.

What I would like to write about.. is emotional contagion. This is something I’ve been thinking about. At least, that’s what I’m saying I want to write about. Is that really what I want to write about?

Maybe, no.

I am tired.

Well, it’s been a good streak.

That I’m keeping alive, with this little writing here.

Write a little, write a lot, it’s all the same to me,

but write not a little bit at all and the book will never be

Type a little, type a lot,

tip tap type away

You never know if you will live

To type another day

some things are red

some things are blue

some things are green and grey

I’ve seen so many colors before

But my favorite, I cannot say

(it’s purple)

money money money

it makes the world go ’round

is having too much a problem?

that problem I haven’t found

dolphins swim

dolphins jump

dolphins dance and play

dolphins come and splish and splash,

and then they go away

horses horses horses

horses make me sad

they make me think about the things

that I have never had

People think I have a cat, but the cat doesn’t matter to me

I only keep the cat around because I have a flea

Chocolate is as chocolate does

Chocolate does alright

Strawberries do as strawberries did

Strawberries do it nice

Vanilla was as vanilla is

Vanilla always will be

But Pistachio is the flavor for me

As it always has been

A Day In The Life

What the f*** is up motherf***ers!!!!!

The date is January 28th, 2025.

I am 29 years old living in East Nashville, in the great state of Tennessee. I am a shift supervisor at Starbucks. As of about a month ago.

I play guitar every day, if I can.

I have two roommates, living in half of a duplex building. The walls of my cube are lined with Yayoi Kusama artworks, Nirvana pictures that I taped up after ripping apart a little picture book that was in my deluxe Bleach album, and a tapestry that I got when I was living in Ozu, from a local Indian restaurant that I frequented, and an Aerosmith record in a nice display case, the record is Draw The Line, which came from my father, that I am borrowing, and the display was a Christmas present from Smosh, one of my roommates, who I still have not gotten a present for, as I have just remembered.

I also have two plants, and a row of books, I would guess about twenty or thirty, and some other nicknacks. I have a desk, a couch, a dresser, two guitars, an old drum that I picked up at Goodwill for $12 and am trying to sell……..

Alright, I’m getting tired of this.

The point of my writing today was to write about some things in my life, to capture them as I have done in the past…..

Today I destroyed Bush Honeysuckle stumps with a beast of a man named Don, who was about 6’2″ and seemed to be over 60 years old, but he was strong and didn’t need to take a break once. We spent a solid two hours swinging a mattock, which is like a pickaxe on one end and a spade on the other, for digging up tenacious plants, and chopping roots up with clippers. We quickly worked out an effective and efficient system, we were really a great team, of circling the plant, digging out around it with the mattock, hunting for roots, locating them and digging them out, and then cutting them with the clippers. I was generally doing the work with the mattock, but Don wanted in on it and worked with it too, and when he did it was amazing to see. He was particularly good at scooping out the ground and digging it up with the spade. After we would hit something, you could tell if you hit a really big root because there would be a thunk, and you could figure out where the major roots left were after you had already cut some, because you could put the pickaxe part of the mattock under the root ball and lift, and you would see where the ground moved, and that’s where the roots that were still holding the stump in the ground were. Or, if it didn’t move at all, you knew that you still had a lot of roots to find and cut. So we would dig up all around the stumps, and find the roots, and cut them, and go back around, and test the stump, and in this way we had a great process going, and we got out about six or seven Bush Honeysuckle root balls. I wish I had a picture to show you, one of the root balls was so large that I could barely hold it up. It was that heavy. He was a great worker and we were a good team, I think because both of us were now seasoned in the work, he had definitely done this kind of thing before, and also because we were both completely 100% about the business. We were not there to chit chat. We were there to tear up Bush Honeysuckle stumps, and that’s what we did, and did it very well.

There were about eight of us there this time around, volunteering. Eve was there, who I had met before, and Patrick, who is a group leader, and I met a guy named Boston who it was his first time, and he had a cool shirt on that looked like some kind of modern thrash metal band shirt, and I said, “What’s your shirt all about?” And he told me it was a local artist, called, Nordista Freeze. It was a cool shirt. And then we talked about the things that you talk about, why we were volunteering and etc. I am a group leader too but this time I was just a regular old volunteer. In case you didn’t think I was anybody special, you should know that.

While we were working, we were just outside of the fence that encapsulates the large Shelby Park dog park. And halfway through us working, a fight broke out among the dogs. There were about 12 dogs running around, conglomerated in the middle, and a fight broke out in the middle of this pack, and there was screaming, and a woman ended up on the ground, and there was a lot of screaming. I think that a dog was first being attacked, and then I don’t know exactly but the woman probably ended up being attacked, because she was laying on the ground for awhile. It was hard to see because it was far off and there were people and dogs all crowded around, I think there were only girls over there too. While this was happening, I thought about jumping over the fence, and running over there and trying to help. This thought did enter my mind, and for some reason I decided against it. I thought, let them handle it, I’ll only get it in the way. But on the way home in the car, I thought, what if they didn’t handle it? What if they needed me? I don’t know what I would have done exactly, but if no one else was kicking the dog in the face, I probably would have done that. I remembered that you are supposed to lift a dog up from the hind legs, to get it to let go of something. I had researched what to do in a dog fight after there was a fight at the dog shelter I volunteered at in Thailand. But in the moment I probably wouldn’t have remembered that. I thought then about an event that I had read about in my introductory psychology class, in which there was a woman being assaulted and murdered (sorry, it’s dark) in the courtyard of an apartment building, and there were many people who witnessed the event, because she was screaming loudly, but not one of them went down to help her, and nobody called the police. The takeaway was that most people just watch, because they think someone else is going to do something, and then no one does anything. When I read about this in my psychology class I thought, as we probably all do, that I would definitely have done something. But after today, which was seemingly a similar event, and I did have an urge to get involved and do something, but I decided to not do anything, I wonder what I would have done with the woman in the courtyard of the apartment building scenario. There are differences, sure, such as that in the dog fight scenario there were already people around, but I still assumed that any one of them were going to get involved, and I know that most of them didn’t. They just watched. I can’t know who exactly did get involved, because it was hard to see, but it could have been that only the two owners of the dogs did anything.

In retrospect, I think I should have jumped the fence and ran over. The least I could have done would be to run over there and see if I could have helped.

That was the interesting meat of today. So far, at least, as it is only 6:30, but there will not likely be anything more interesting than that happening. I came home and went to Kroger and secured all of the ingredients to make my now famous Kale and Cannellini bean soup. Cooking is a great thing to do. So relaxing and enjoyable. Very satisfying. This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve made this soup now, a recipe I use that’s written on the side of the box of vegetable broth. I can tell you exactly what’s in it, if you would like to know: kale (it calls for regular kale but I’ve been using red kale because that’s what I first made it with), garlic, onion, carrot, cannellini beans, tomato paste, veggie broth, thyme sprigs and bay leaves… and there you have it. Not hard at all. You get to do a lot of chopping, and there are multiple stages of chopping things up and adding them to the pot. Oops, I forgot oil. Very important. Today I actually burnt the oil, which has never happened, because I didn’t put that much in (olive oil), and I decided to use the full burner, instead of only the smaller ring inside of the big ring on the stovetop (you know what I’m talking about right), and so I used the same heat settings as I’ve done before, but because of that the pot was heated much more, so the cooking was done faster, and some of the oil got burnt, which didn’t matter at all or affect the flavor, but I did in the end have a mushier soup than I would have wanted. I cooked it longer too because I wanted the kale to be cooked well.

Yesterday in the mail I received an envelope from the National Resource Defense Council, that was thorough and well written, and the topic was: bees. There were many good facts in their letter, and in the envelope was a petition that they wanted me to physically sign, and then they were going to send to the headquarters of Bayer, the plan being to bombard them with petitions from citizens who wished that they would stop selling a product that is directly responsible for the massive bee dieoffs. I thought it was a good plan, and I signed the letter, put it in the envelope and stamped it, and filled out the form to donate $25 dollars to their cause. They are a multimillion dollar organization and are currently battling the EPA to prevent neonics from being sold on the market in the US. Europe has already banned many of the pesticides we still use here. The EPA recently approved the pesticide sulfoxaflor for longterm use even though the EPA itself, “according to the EPA’s own analysis, declared it ‘highly toxic to bees at all life stages.'” Great. Let’s keep using that then.

“45 percent of the nation’s honeybee colonies collapsed over the past year – one of the largest losses ever recorded.”

“We depend on bees to pollinate 70 out of 100 major crops – from apples and blueberries to watermelon and zucchini.”

And of course, bees are cute and fun.

Think about that.

We had Rachel Carson blowing the whistle and raising the alarm for the birds, because of DDT. Well, we are going through it again now, and this time it’s the bees and the monarchs. Although basically all insect populations are falling now, and there is a major insect apocalypse happening, and this is being followed by insectivore bird population collapses. Not good.

There is one other thing I can write about for you here, which is that recently, for the first time ever, I was a waiter. I did some waitering, including using the famous waiter platter, and bringing people food and drinks, and by the end of the night, I was even taking orders. It’s an interesting way to go about learning and getting involved in a business, because it was my second night of being there, at this fancy cocktail bar that is next to the Starbucks I work at, and that’s how I got in, my friend is the General Manager of the bar as of recently, and he asked me to come by and check it out and see if I wanted to help out. And by the end of the second night, I was a full blown cocktail waiter. I ended up having my own tables because the girl who was working the floor left, at 10, and after 10 the floor closes and everyone has to go up to the bar to get their drinks, but people still want to hang out in the comfy chairs and tables around the room, and so I was still going around cleaning up and the next thing you know, the two gals in the round comfy chairs were asking me if I could get them another round of espresso martinis, and I opened up a new tab with them, and then a group of girls came in and I sat them and waited on them, and so those were my first and still only two tabs ever, because I haven’t done this yet again. The best part of this was that when I had come over to the group of four girls that I had seated, and was prepared to take their order, bracing myself for whatever things they would say that I would have no clue about, although I had already learned quickly about many of the most popular drinks, and I could remember what people told me, such as a “vodka still water lemon and lime” and a “gimlet.. something on the rocks” (now I’ve forgotten it), but still had almost no experience using the little magical machine that we use to take orders, and so I squatted down next to the first girl ready to take her order, and she said, “Oh my god, is that Toast? I love Toast!!!” (Toast being the name of the application/device that we use to take the orders.) And I said, “You know about Toast?” And she said, “Of course!” And I said, “Okay, then you tell me what to do. This is my first day and I have no idea what I’m doing.” And lo and behold, one of the other gals sitting there also knew about Toast, her name was DJ, and between them they taught me everything I now know about Toast, and they basically did their own orders, but helped me through it, and it was absolutely amazing, that my first table ever had two professional Toast users at it, who could train me. Dessiree was the first girl, who said that she loved Toast, and was talking out loud about how to ring up her order, and I was like, “Yes, yes this is what they were saying, yes that sounds right.” Connecting the dots. And then DJ blew my mind when at the end of the night, and they were closing out, and I was like, okay I have to take your card over to machine back by the bar, because that’s what I was told to do and had seen done, and DJ says, “No you don’t.” And she showed me how to pay, right there at the table, with this magical Toast device. And I was like, uhm, this is incredible, I had no idea, and she said, “Who trained you????” To which I replied, “Old people.” Which is the truth. I was trained by old people who didn’t know about Toast. Victoria is not that old. She probably knew about Toast payment. When I had gone back over to the bar, I saw Chris (the GM) and I said, “Did you know that you can pay with this thing?” (holding up the device). And he said, “No.” And I said, “We need to talk.”

The difference between having to take their card and go across the room over to the machine, or take all of the cards of everyone who is paying and go all the way over to the main machine, and then have each one pay, and then bring them the receipt, and then go get the receipt, vs. just being able to collect payments right there at the table, is crazy. HUGE difference.

I also tried Dom Perignon on this night. Ian, one of the two working bartenders, caught me in a moment and said, “Are you busy right now?” Of course I replied, “Never too busy for you, Ian.” He’s a fun and charming guy. A lovable individual. From all that I have seen in two days of him, but he has a good reputation with Chris the GM, which matters enormously, so we can be confident in saying these good words about him. And this small story will highlight his character, because he brought me into the reserve party room to the side of the main room, used for large gatherings, and there was a glass of Dom Perignon sitting on the table, and he said, “I wanted you to try this. This is some expensive bubbly right here.” He saved some Dom Perignon for me. It had come from the CEO’s birthday party, which was happening that night, and was very entertaining, moreso for me because I was new and had nothing to be held accountable for, and so was just able to spectate and be entertained, although by the end of the night, that was already over, because I started to understand what to do, and as soon as you understand what you have to do, at least with me, that means you have to start doing it, and you are not a spectator anymore. You are part of the action. The CEO in question is the owner of DZL, the company that I work for, that owns the building that I work in, Cummins Station, and the Starbucks that I work at, and the bar that I was then working at, this night, Pullman Standard. But Ian had said something about how this glass of champagne costs more than either of us make in a night, or more than half our night’s wages or something, so it must have been expensive. And I drank that Dom Perignon, in one gulp, maybe two gulps, and that was all I had to drink that night, and it was delicious. It must have been the best champagne I’ve ever had, because it was expensive, and I haven’t had many champagnes, but at least I could tell that it was a really good champagne, because it had a lot going on with it, and a lot of complexity, which is exactly what you want, right? It was sweet at first, and bubbly, but not too sweet, and then very quickly you could taste flavor, and then it ended by being dry, and so it did not leave a sweet or sticky taste in your mouth. Pretty good. And Ian really did that for me, I hardly know the guy, this having been only my second night there. That was cool of him.

The real sitcom moment that had happened on this night, of the CEO’s big birthday bash, was that there was some uncertainty over what to do with this magnificent three-tiered birthday cake that was for Zach (the CEO) and his party’s enjoyment, and it had thrown a significant wrench into the works of the Pullman Standard team. Chris in particular was desperately wanting to talk to Zach’s wife, about how to do the cake, and I think he wanted to talk about when they were supposed to bring the cake out, and how to present it, and whatever else, and I know this was or would have seemed to be a big deal, because I have learned that Zach is quite particular, and so he probably had a particular way that he wanted this to be done, as he probably does with all things. I don’t know him very well but I can already see this about him, as he is probably very smart and smart people are often very particular about things. He seems to be quite particular about many things, so I’m sure they were thinking, how does he want this cake business done? But nobody knew who Zach’s wife was, and I thought, I can just go over there and find out, discreetly of course, just ask a member of the party if they could point Zach’s wife out for me, but when I made my move to go over to this birthday party, they were then in the middle of having a birthday toast, and so that wasn’t going to happen. They figured it out in the end and I think first ended up bringing over the cake in its entirety, to be viewed and perhaps candles to be blown, and then brought it to the back and cut it up and brought out the pieces. I was just getting such a kick out of this cake business, that it was so much drama for such a small thing, but yet, that’s how it goes. It seems small, but it just depends on whose perspective you’re looking at it from. Where is Zach’s wife, we have to ask her about the cake!!! The cake, what do we do with the cake???? We forgot about the cake!!!! You can see why that’s funny. At the CEO’s big birthday bash. And because I had no responsibility for doing anything with this cake, and had no expectation to have any answers, I could just look on in amusement, and shared no burden in the stress.

Well, I think we have achieved some good writing here. Now I will go try and play Metallica songs.

The Wedding

Where do we start? At the beginning, and what was that? My friends were getting married. Well, they already were married, but they were having their official ceremony now. They got married some fine day at noon, walking into the local marriage office or wherever they do these things, and had someone seal the deal for them. Now, a year-ish later, the official ceremony happened. It was a magnificent and amazing wedding, with, at least not that I could see, any drama, any undesirable circumstances or fires to be put out, anything wrong, it went off without a hitch, but that’s what I saw on my end, and to know the truth we’d have to talk to Ross or Julie. The bridge and groom. At this wedding I talked to so many people, saw old friends, made new friends, had pleasant surprises, and even, just maybe, fell in love (actually that’s definitely happened, more on that later). It was such an incredible time, and with so many people that are like family to me, people I’ve grown up across the street from, guys I’ve played soccer with since I was in elementary school, and some of my to-this-day besties, in NYC, in LA… Oh man.

It’s just hitting me how much writing I have to do.

I know exactly what I want to write about, and just about how it will come out. If only I could skip the hard part and just dump it all out. Wouldn’t it be so easy? The thing is, that’s what I do at the computer, with my blogs, but I really want to do this piece justice, and so I’m writing it by hand. I was re-reading my blogs, and there was one post that I had written by hand, and I felt that that post was as far as quality goes, a cut above the rest. So there’s something about writing by hand that’s just better. I have thoughts on that but this is for another time.

A TANGENT. We don’t have time for tangents!!

Mainly, I want to share some funny stories and significant takeaways I have from this incredible wedding. And I want to start with the fact that I actually considered not even going at all.

I had a crisis at the super-200 pump amusement park gas station that is known as Buc-ees. Buc-ees is an experience, and I did experience it on my long, arduous journey to Bloomington. I started this long, arduous journey off by spending 45 minutes going the wrong way, and then 45 minutes retracing my steps, and then coming back to Nashville and trying again. This happened because, well.. it’s complicated, alright? Leave it at that. But as I made my way along, bored, anxious, upset to have my rhythm broken, feeling poor, that I couldn’t afford this trip, that I didn’t really need to be at this wedding, that I don’t even deserve to party or celebrate because I have so much that I should be doing, all of these things in my mind, and.. I was having a tough time. Then, I get to Buc-ees. I went inside to use the bathroom, the station was chaos, people everywhere, hundreds of people, employees shouting “Welcome to Buc-ees!!”, the station manager dealing with an upset family.. it was really like being at an amusement park. I did my business and got the hell out of there. I was thinking about covid too, and if you were trying to catch covid 100 times in 30 minutes, I can’t think of a better place to do it.

But I went back to my car, and I just sat there, and I guess, felt my feelings, and my feelings told me that I needed to have a cathartic experience rocking out to Disturbed. I was playing music via Bluetooth off of my Mac, my trusty sidekick in the passenger seat, and I had three albums downloaded, and “Ten Thousand Fists” by Disturbed was one of them, and its time had come. I pushed play, and immediately was taken away. In that moment, it was everything I needed, and I closed my eyes and headbanged for forty-minutes straight, thinking nothing and giving in completely to the rock. It was the boost I needed, and I left that Buc-ees headed in the right direction. In my heart of hearts, I was never actually going to turn that car around. Ross and Julie meant too much to me. I think I just needed to feel that I was making this decision to go totally on my terms. That somehow psychologically, that was seriously important to me. I have felt that recently, I’ve been giving a lot of my time and energy, and it might be, it has probably been too much, because I am a giver, and I also want to do everything. But Ross and Julie’s wedding, I knew, whatever it cost me, it was going to be worth it, and that’s what I knew in my heart. And then the first night/day of the wedding weekend passed, and I lay in bed thinking, “If I had actually turned around it would have been the most disastrous decision I’ve ever made in my life.” So shoutout to whoever above is looking out for me, and for Disturbed, and for my sister, always a strong voice of reason, in helping me through.

Alright… That was a lot about me, and not really about the wedding, but it is an important part of the story. Now, some stories from the wedding.

In case I run out of steam before I can tell this one, I’ll start with one of the best. It was a true sitcom moment.

It happened at the wedding ceremony dinner. Now, I didn’t eat much this weekend. I showed up that Friday night both dehydrated and famished, having spent 7 hours on the road with only a glass of coffee (yes I’m drinking coffee out of glasses, sue me) and no food that day, at all. I could hardly stand, let alone talk to people, and I was walking into a lion’s den. My man Scottie took me over to the charcuterie table and I got some sustenance, some provisions, and a Miller Lite in my tank, and felt the wind coming back into my sails during some speeches. That lifestyle, of finding windows to eat between socializing and drinking copious amounts of alcohol (I actually didn’t drink that much) continued all weekend, and by Monday morning I was 145 pounds. That’s the lightest I’ve been since high school, which is actually wild as hell. I feel like this is why celebrities are so skinny, that one Nickleback song about “we all stay skinny ’cause we just won’t eat.” Except that I’m not trying to be skinny, and I’m not trying to not eat. I just wasn’t hungry ever the entire weekend. Man, I’m really seeing that I had a kind of a food journey here.

Scavenging from the charcuterie tray, probably about 200 calories, was the first food meal I had, and the 4 or 5 drinks that Friday night. So, Saturday comes around, and I’m running on fumes. I didn’t realize it until after going back to our hotel room for the second time, after having done some socializing in the hotel cafe, and where I was first introduced to my future wife, new love, M. I can’t tell you her name because I don’t want to jinx anything, and I don’t want to look stupid if this doesn’t work out. But man, wouldn’t it be something if I could call it now. This morning, we go down to the lobby to get some breakfast and coffee, and end up sitting with Melanie, married to the bride’s oldest brother, a stallion in the military who unfortunately couldn’t be at the wedding, as he had been deployed to Bahrain. I had to ask Melanie if that was even a country, I was so unsure. You gotta’ do what you gotta’ do (regarding Jake’s having to miss the wedding because he’s in Bahrain). I’ve known this guy for many, many years, and Melanie I’ve known for a few years at least, and have always, like everybody, really liked her. But I realized when we sat down for breakfast together, that I was now also sitting right next to a really pretty girl.. Ah man, I’ve got butterflies right now.

So that this is not all about this really pretty blonde who is about my age, lives in the same city as me, and happened to be dressed exactly like me (black synthetic tank top, black synthetic skirt/pants, plain white sneakers, matching just like a real Japanese couple), Melanie had some avocado toast that she wasn’t going to eat, and she offered it to M, and M wasn’t going to eat it, and so she offered it to me. To be honest, it didn’t look all that appetizing, and like I said, I didn’t feel hunger once this entire weekend, but I am at least 50% Japanese in my soul, and I thought 「もったいない」(mottainai, no waste) and I took it. I said, half-jokingly, “Can I get a box for this?” And somehow a box appeared, and in the toast went. And the pretty blonde said, “Are you really going to eat it?” And I said yes. I would.

I should just mention this important detail now, which is that Melanie had actually tried to introduce me to this pretty blonde girl, her sister, at the first gathering last night, but she was seated and occupied, so it didn’t happen. This is important because it was the beginning of what I would by the end of this magnificent wedding weekend learn was a great conspiracy to set M and I up, or at least set M and somebody up. There was an M lottery going on, and I had no idea, but I had been chosen as the lucky winner.

Many comments were made about us, subtle and not so subtle, I’m realizing now.. but I’m getting ahead of myself. This entire piece might all ultimately revolve around the giant axis of my new love. I can see that it’s already happening. I am, as Usher says, “Caught up.” But the thing I’m trying to tell you here about this avocado toast and the not eating is that I graciously accepted this avocado toast, took it back to our room, which was a Stranger Things-themed room, that was a big hit and that my parents got great joy out of giving tours of that morning, and in-between and during these room tours, I realized that I was again running dangerously empty, and I went for that avocado toast, and managed to find some more precious nourishment, and I realized later, and my mom pointed out, that M was already taking care of me. (I know that was your toast originally Melanie, thank you too. It’s better for the plot if M is the one who really gave it to me, and it did go from her hands to mine.)

Holy crap you guys. Does anyone realize that this has all been to lay the groundwork for the sitcom event that happened at the wedding dinner? How many words ago did I introduce that? Amazing. This is some serious rambling right here, but it’s all with intention. So, now at the wedding ceremony dinner, I’m sitting with my three long-time friends, Adam, Emily, Caroline, friends that you know you can be 100% comfortable with. When you’ve been good friends for so long, when you know exactly who they are, when you don’t have to explain yourself, it’s an incredible thing. That shared history. Caroline from Spokane, Emily from New York City, Adam from Los Angeles, me from Nashville, we had all scattered like seeds in the wind after college, but we had all grown up together, shared the stomping grounds of Elkhart, Indiana, gone to the same schools. That’s the shared history, and I was happy that for that moment, we could all be together again. And, while we were all together, they could all be there, especially Caroline, who was sitting next to me, to witness the kind of event that makes my blog what it is.

So we sat together in the banquet hall, at this circular table for 8, although we were missing 2, adorned with beautiful flowers, napkins (cloths? There’s a better word, right? I’m not fancy.), candles maybe.. all very nice. We’re talking, laughing, chatting with our new friends Rob and Maddie, when the first plates are brought to the table. The appetizers. I look down at it, and see, amongst other bits of things, an enormous hunk of iceberg lettuce. I’m not the only one who thinks this is a massive wedge of lettuce. We all do, and many comments are made, including about how we also have to do the work of cutting it ourselves. I’m cool with that, personally I’m a big fan of chopping. But, man, this is a HUNK of lettuce, and between the chopping, the talking, the drinking.. it feels like twenty minutes pass, and I’ve managed to eat about 3/4 of this hunk of lettuce, and touched none of the other garnishings, and I can’t make any more progress. I’m full. I think then I made a few jokes about being full off of the lettuce. I had a feeling, in the back of my mind, that this wedge was going to do me in. I mean, it was bigger than both of my fists combined. That’s no joke. That’s a lot of raw plant matter right there. So, I chowed down on that lettuce, and I don’t remember exactly if anyone else at the table had been able to finish theirs.. I don’t think they did. But, eventually, the waiters came, the hunks were whisked away, and not long after, the main dish arrived.

As soon as this main dish was placed down before me, I was stunned. This, the main dish??? Because, while it was visually pleasant, and looked appetizing enough, it was actually, the entirety of it, smaller than that single hunk of iceberg lettuce. That’s not a dig at the meal at all – only a testament to how big the wedge of lettuce was. I had to point this out to Caroline. “It’s smaller than the lettuce!” She agreed. Now, I was busy gabbing, jabber-jawing away with my besties, and I had been done in by the lettuce, truly, but still, I knew that I should probably eat something more than 20 calories of lettuce so that I didn’t pass out later tonight. Before me was a plate of steamed broccoli, squash, two cherry tomato halves, and a clump of some interesting rice-mashed potato thing. “Light work,” I thought. This would be easy. That’s what I told myself, but actually, I knew the truth. If I ate any of this, I was going to be sick. I poked at the mashed potato. “What’s this?” I asked Caroline. “Risotto.” She said. Risotto. Interesting. I took a small bite. Way, way too salty. That wasn’t going to be eaten. I looked at the steamed vegetables. Hmm…. Where to start? Nowhere. I don’t want squishy right now. And, I’m full off of the lettuce.

That was as far as I got with that plate, for now. I’ll save it for later, I thought. But later came all too quickly, and it felt like the dinner had just started when the first waiter came over and said, hesitantly, “Should I take your plate?” You see, they were hesitating because they could see that I hadn’t touched a single thing on my plate. I was shocked to realize that so much time had passed, and I looked around the table. Plates were leaving, people had finished. I hadn’t eaten anything, but I couldn’t just waste this food, and I did want to try and eat something, so I said, “Not yet.”

The next waiter came in minutes. Almost no time had passed at all. They were circling like sharks, now. I hadn’t even thought about taking a bite yet. She came up (and every time a waiter came over, I was in the middle of blabbering), “Excuse me, are you still working on this?” “Ah…” I looked to my friends for help, as they were now starting to be amused.

And so it went, with me unable to eat but wanting to, and the waiters wanting to do their duty and take my plate. At this ceremony dinner a struggle was taking place, a battle between indecision and duty. The 4th waiter to come around was older, and wiser. He knew my type, he had seen this before. A slow eater, a jabber jaw. He was smiling, with a knowing look on his face, and I think he knew my answer before he even asked me, when he said, “Whaddya think boss?” I was still, even at this point, unwilling to let my full plate of food go, still guilty, still undecided, and he felt me out for a second, clearly enjoying my wavering, before letting me off the hook and saying, “I’ll let you keep going.” And at this point I was saying to the table, this is it, you guys. This is my life. You’re seeing firsthand what it’s like to be me. Because, what was happening here in some way encapsulates a great theme of life, and I was feeling it again so strongly in that moment, in this battle with the waiters – that is, life comes for you, whether you want it to or not, whether you are ready or not. You can stall, you can dodge, but life is relentless, and the great wheel never stops turning. You can put off one waiter, you can put off two, but they won’t stop coming. Sooner or later, you have to make a call.

After the 4th waiter, I had to make the call. I ate the two cherry tomato halves. That was all I could manage, but I had to do something, and that was enough to justify every waiter I had put off before. When the 5th and final waiter came, I had eaten my tomatoes, and as soon as he showed up I burst out, “Yes!! Yes, you can take my plate now!!” In my imagination, of course, the waiters would then all celebrate, as ecstatic to finally be able to take the plate as I was to get rid of it, but the poor guy that finally got my plate off the table, he looked like there was nowhere else he’d rather be that night, and had absolutely no interest in sharing in my enthusiasm with me, and I felt ashamed, and said then, like a normal person, “Thanks. I’m sorry.”

So there you go. That’s why I’m 145 pounds of lean muscle and bone.

There is no other real great story here, and now we fall into a collection of one-offs. I guess we are kind of in a way on the great story of the wedding, and even if they are out of order, as I tend to do it, these snapshots combined will make for a whole picture.

I didn’t get to talk to either Ross or Julie, the groom and bride (which feels strange to write backwards, as I just did), but that first Friday night I got to sit next to Ross on the couch, and we were talking about his speech, him having just been called on to speak, (you know when people chant, “Speech! Speech!”, I wonder if they do that in Japan?) Ross had been called on after Julie had just given a speech thanking everyone for coming, and after displaying that he really did not have anything to say, stood up and announced, “The bar is open.” And sat back down, like a boss. I was complimenting him on this fine speech, and asking if he would speak more tomorrow, and about speeches in general, and I asked if he had to do any public speaking for his job working in the parks department for the state of Indiana. He said that sometimes if the three or four people ranking above him drop out, he’s called on to speak at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and I thought, you know, if you’re speaking at an actual ribbon-cutting ceremony, no matter how big of a deal it is, you’ve really gotten somewhere in life. I was really proud of him in that moment.

I want to tell you more about M but it’s giving me butterflies. There was another scene, a few scenes, that are story worthy, but they’re not scenes out of a sitcom, and they’re not even scenes out of a romcom. They’re scenes out of a straight-up romance. And you know, I’ve actually never written about romance before, because I really don’t have many romances, and they’re kind of private, but after reading my Anthology of Japanese Literature, which is like 80% about romance, I’m inspired to go for it.

When we were back in the hotel room, after all the Stranger Things tours, my parents commented on M. “That M is pretty cute!” Says my dad. She was pretty cute, oh yeah. I had noticed that, and that we were wearing the same outfit, and were the same age, living in the same place, and I had noticed too, that she was low-key, unassuming, laid-back, and had a dry sense of humor. That’s my kind of girl right there. She must have had some powerful-ass pheromones too, because for that short time we spent together at the cafe table, without much direct conversation between us, something was already stirring deep within me. She was now a major blip on my love-dar. M had my attention.

The next time I saw her was at the wedding ceremony. I had enough on my mind, with so many friends around, so much family, good people, good conversation, that I didn’t have much time to think more about her – but she was on my mind, and when after the dinner I went over to the bar to grab a drink, who did I spy but the beautiful blond in a black cocktail dress. I moved on over, accompanied by my #1 Fortnite duo Adam. Adam and I have a long history and are the best of buds, and recently, have been absolutely crushing on Fortnite, and I told many people at the wedding about this, and I’ve been so into it that I plan to end this entire piece with an epic Fortnite tale that includes Adam, but for now.. romance. M was over by the bar, and now Adam and I were over by the bar.. Wait, actually, it’s better than this. It’s actually a lot better, because Adam and I were actually at the bar first, and then, M came over and approached me, smiling, and saying, “Hey Nashville.” She was flirting with me. Now, it was on. I wasn’t going to put the mack on her exactly, that morning at the cafe table, woozy and famished, having slept for only two hours, and with my parents right next to me.. I’m not that good. But this, this was prime, and she seemed to be as interested in me as I was in her. I asked what she was ordering, and she said, “Double-vodka Diet Coke.” That was music to my ears. Not because I liked a double-vodka Diet Coke, but because it was exotic, I’d never heard of it before, and because it was a double, which is hardcore, and because I liked the way she said it. And I said, “A double-vodka Diet Coke. That’s kinda wild. Are you kinda wild?”

At that moment, the bartender calls to her. She get her double-vodka Diet Coke, and I step up, wanting whisky, but concerned that a straight whisky would hit me too hard. Adam suggested an old-fashioned, and I went for it. I like trying new things, but that old-fashioned was rough. I told Caroline when I had gone back to the table, and she tried it, and thought the whisky wasn’t very good. Hey, that’s not important. Romance.

M and I reconnected after getting our drinks. She said, “What table are you at?” She wanted to know where I was sitting. Oh yeah. “15. Come sit with me.” Now, for her to actually come sit with me would have been a huge power move, but I could tell, she wanted to. I went over with her to her table and cracked some jokes, said hi to Melanie, and left them, and as you can imagine, I was feeling pretty good in that moment. I also had a new quest, a primary mission forming in my mind. As I sat down at my table and chatted, I thought, “Whatever else I do tonight, I have to get this girl’s number.”

Well, to make a long story short.. later that night, after the toasts, the speeches, which were amazing, I’m sure some of the highest quality wedding speeches you could ask for (where I learned that Mr. Nolan is a professional host and toastmaster), it was the time that everyone had been waiting for: dance time. Take off the shoes, let down the hair, loosen the tie, and go crazy. M and I gravitated towards each other right away, with the man Mr. Pletcher bringing us into final contact. He took me by the arm and said, leading me over to her, and said with a smile, “Steven, there’s someone I want to introduce you to..” At the time I was all eyes on M, but looking back on it I realized that Phil must have known that we’d already met before, together that morning at the cafe, because he had come over and talked with us while we were there. He knew what he was doing, the sly dog, but I was looking at M, and we laughed, and I said, looking her in the eyes and laughing, “We’ve met.”

We took some space on the floor. She wanted to dance and talk, and I wanted to dance and talk, but my main mission had to be fulfilled. I will tell you guys, I’ve missed too many opportunities in my life by waiting for a better time, and I wasn’t going to miss this one. As soon as I had her, I stopped and said, seriously, “Please give me your number.” She laughed, and said, “I like how you stopped dancing to ask me that.” I said, “I’m worried I’ll never see you again.” I really was. I am renowned for falling fast and hard, it’s true. It’s also rare for me. Except for when I was in Thailand, and I had a new love every other week.. but that’s another story. It really doesn’t happen often for me, that I find a big fish, and here was a big fish I had on my line, and I knew it, and I was not going to let it go. She said those blessed words, “Yeah, I’ll give you my number.” And then, “You can just get my Instagram from Melanie. I don’t have my phone on me.” “I do.” I said, and whipped out my flip-phone, flipping it open. Now, I have in my years of ownership of this flip-phone come to learn that it is something of a legendary device. The flip-phone has been almost entirely phased out, although I have heard they are making a resurgence, and especially among young people, it’s a relic. It’s like going to battle with a sword instead of a gun. My flip-phone was a toy for many at this very wedding, and multiple times it left my person, for the other guests to play with. Mitch called my brother on it, and Sharah, Julie’s maid of honor, spent five minutes posing with it at the bar after the wedding ceremony before handing it back to me and then immediately asking, “Wait, can I have it back?” To pose for more photos. The guy next to me, another Adam, said to me, “You really live with that?” And I said, “Yep. It’s my real life.” He was impressed. People are always impressed. Derek was impressed too. I think he said I was living his dream. That’s often how people feel about it, but now we’re entering into new territory and we’re not going there, because, romance.

M put her number in my phone, and y’all are going to cringe at this. I actually made a terrible mistake here. I filled in the name for her, so that all she’d have to do was put down her number, but I put the wrong name down. I wrote, “Madi”, inventing some kind of strange new spelling in the process (at least I’ve never seen anyone named Maddie spell their name this way). Look, I had learned about 50 names that night, and I had just been sitting with a Maddie/Madi, and I had had some drinks, alright? I knew what her name was. Seeing this, M said, “My name’s M” and I said, taking the phone and fixing my mistake immediately, “Uhm, this never happened. Please forget this ever happened.” I thought about the Men In Black mind-wipe device and almost pantomimed using it, but this was a crucial moment. Keep the silliness to a minimum. I handed her back the phone, and she put the digits in.

So, what happened next? Well, the right thing happened for making this a good romance tale, but the wrong thing happened for me and my happiness. Instead of us then dancing away the night and sharing a magical kiss during a slow song, as it should have been, someone pulled me away, and when I was free again, M was nowhere to be found. I haven’t seen her since. I knew exactly where she went, and she wouldn’t be coming back, but that didn’t stop me from scanning the room every 5 minutes to see if she’d returned, and eventually giving up and leaving the dance floor a sad puppy. To be honest, also, they just weren’t playing enough Nirvana for me, and when you’re having a grunge era, there’s only so much happy dance pop music you can take. Too long without talking to either the pretty blond or hearing a distorted guitar, and I was out. Before tapping out, I didn’t miss looking up to see two woman up on the stage above everyone else, dancing away, one of which being the mom of the bride, and the other being the mom of me. And you know what? If I can say that I watched my mom dance on a stage at a wedding and it didn’t cause me a shred of embarrassment, and even the opposite, some pride, I think that includes me in a special class of son. And I can say that.

I have a few more top-tier anecdotes to share with you from the wedding. As far as the romance with M goes, if you’re looking for a resolution, you’re not gonna’ get it.. Not yet, anyways. This story is ongoing. But for all who are invested, know that I am doing my best with the M lottery I’ve won, and am on the case, to seeing this Pisces.. Oh yeah, Pisces.. I forgot about that. We did talk a bit on the dance floor after I got her number. She asked what my sign was, and based on her reaction I guess I had the right answer, which was Scorpio. She told me she was a Pisces, and the next day I Googled “Scorpio and Pisces”, and guess what? “Highly compatible.” The stars are on our side.

I didn’t have much of a chance to speak with Julie, the bride, either (they should be the two most popular people at a wedding, after all), but we had a moment of bonding out on the dance floor, and I said hey and gave her a hug and she said, “You know this is because of you, right?” And I said, “What?” And she said, “We met each other at your house!” And I said, in shock, “I did this??” “You did this!!” (I know I didn’t do it. They did it, and my parents did it because it was their house.. but hey, I’ll take it.)

At the bar, The Upstairs, after the ceremony, I moved my way into the back, after talking with a couple who started off the conversation with, “You and M were looking really cute together..!” And that’s when I said, joking, but also not, “Ok, what’s going on here? Was there some kind of conspiracy about M and I going on?” And the husband told me, “We were all wondering who was going to win the M-lottery.” And his final words to me in that conversation were, “You gotta follow up man. You gotta follow up.” But, at The Upstairs, and I had made my way back into the corner of the deck that our wedding party had taken over, I made it to Emily, and Haylee (sorry Haylee if misspelled!!), and Haylee was in the middle of a hilarious bit about none of her coworkers knowing any of the modern country stars. “Who is this? It’s Morgan fing Wallen. It’s fing __” (insert the name of another country star I don’t know. I was actually standing there sweating because I didn’t know these people either.) But, we were cracking up, and she finished it with, “City people are weird, man.” And I looked over at Emily and said, “Yeah, city people are weird.” And she laughed, and Haylee caught on, and said, “Wait, where are you from?” And Emily said, “New York City..” And they laughed, and so that Haylee didn’t feel too bad, she quickly added, “But I grew up in Elkhart.” (Elkhart, not quite New York City.) I agree with you though Haylee. City people are weird.

There were many fun interactions on that deck. I talked with Steve, the father of the groom, about his name, and what his given name was (Steve or Steven) and if he had always been Steve or had at some point switched over, as another friend (Jared) had been asking me if I was or wanted to be a Steve or Steven and what people called me. Steve said he’d always been Steve, although his legal name was Steven, and he would only hear Steven from his mom when he was in (serious) trouble. His advice was that I stick to Steven, because it sounded more modern. After this, Steve gave me an earnest compliment and told me that he respected my willingness to go abroad and live in another country. His oldest son did the same and lived for several years in Thailand. That meant a lot to me, and we talked about travel and I asked if he had wanted to live abroad when he was younger, and he said it just wasn’t really an option, coming from a traditional family, and with a family business to run, (that he had inherited), but he was making up for it now, and told me about his upcoming travel plans. The last place he mentioned was Montana, a place I really want to go, and we talked about it, and eventually of course, as boys will be boys, started talking about hunting animals and eating meat, and he was telling me that the best meat he’d ever had was caribou. That’s an exotic one, and I’ve never heard of anyone eating caribou. Steve said it was something like turkey. He was really selling it to me then, and as he was talking about it, I knew I had something good for him. When he was finished describing the deliciousness of caribou to me, I told him the most exotic meat I had eaten, which was badger, and he said, “Badger??” And I said, “Yeah. It was terrible.” (It was pretty terrible. Tough, really tough. Who knows, that may have been the chef’s fault though, Osajima San, a cool photographer farmer guy back in Taketa.)

There was another Stephen at the wedding, a UK lad. We bonded over both being Steven, and then later at the bar, right after I finished talking with Steve, Stephen came over and said, “Steven!!” And I said, “Shit, you remember my name?” And he said, “We have the same name!” And I was like, “Oh yeah!” And he said, “You’re Stephen, with a ph too right?” (We had talked about it when we first met because I asked him, when he said his name was Stephen, “Ph or v?”) I looked over at Morgan, who knew I was not a Stephen but a Steven, and I looked back at Stephen, so enthusiastic and friendly, and I said, “Hell yeah I am!” And we did some kind of bro-touch-thing. That’s a white lie worth telling right there, and for the rest of the night I wasn’t Steve or Steven, but Stephen.

Alright, I just want to tell you Adam and I’s Fortnite story now, but before that, for the sake of literature, I have to write a few more things.

On the deck at The Upstairs, I was talking with Adam about M. We had a pocket of space, and were facing away from the horde, and leaning against the wooden deck rail, looking out into the street. We were talking about M and he said, “Hey, if you guys get married, I’m your best man.” And I said, “You got it bud.” And we shook on it. So I also secured my best man this weekend.

After all of this, driving back from the weekend, having seen so many friends, family, and with these feelings for M, I started to feel something stirring deep within me. I don’t know if it was all because of M, or also the setting, or my age, but for the first time in my life I was having what I was calling “primal urges”. Deep genes had been activated, and these deep, ancient genes were telling me to get money, have status, move up, have power, be successful and strong, leave my small apartment with the roommates and have land, have a house, so that I can provide and protect my woman, and have 10 kids and a family. These were really powerful feelings, strong, seizing me, and I was envisioning it all clearly. No more f***ing around, for her sake. Something has now been unlocked in me, and here we are, now four days later, as I write this (now almost two weeks later), and I still haven’t wasted my time once, and am wholly committed to my goals. Now, more than ever, I have to get it done. It’s not just for me anymore.

That’s how I feel. This wedding might have just taken me from Charmeleon to Charizard.

I was having some other primal urges about M, but for your sake.. I won’t go into them.

Now, I tell you the Fortnite story, and I am so excited to write this. I had actually forgotten about this one, but it came back to me at the wedding, and it was one of Adam and I’s first wins together as a duo.

From the start, Adam and I have been pretty solid, and were always placing highly in the game. There are 100 players in a battle Royale match, that’s 50 teams of 2 if you’re playing with a duo. Adam and I would do well, often making it to the top 20%, final 10 players, but we were getting bodied in the final battles. A big part of that is because we had no plan. I recently went on a 10 minute rant to my poor roommate, Hope, who was again, trapped (crocheting), and had to listen to my passionate and inspired speech on Fortnite tactics. Once you know how to aim and shoot, tactics are 95% of the game. (If you’re not playing in build mode, where building is 100% of the game.) And especially at the end of the game, when shit hits the fan, you want to have a plan. Now, in this particular match, Adam and I did not have a plan, and so when shit hit the fan, as there is always a moment late in the game where the strongest teams are left, and eventually converge on one final battleground, usually forced together by the storm (a region of purple death that saps your life and gradually encloses on the island throughout the game). So, when the firestorm broke out, I think there were about 5 teams left, and Adam and I had been in a car, in hot pursuit of another duo in their car, trying to gun them down, and we ended up chasing them down in a river at the bottom of a ravine. Now, Adam has since been banned from driving (by me) for his intense love of driving through rivers. When for the 4th or 5th time we were playing together, and Adam was driving through a river, which are all situated at the bottoms of ravines and canyons and ditches, meaning you’re trapped in them, and at low elevation, which is 100% BAD tactics, I said to Adam, “Adam, why are we in the river?” And he said, “Uh… I don’t know.” But the real event that got Adam banned from driving was that we had one match where I had done most of the driving, and Adam was manning our grenade launcher, and things were going well for us. We pulled up on a three-way firefight happening down in a village, and we were in perfect position on a hill overlooking the fight. High elevation, where we could watch the other teams duke it out, snipe, and lob grenades from the launcher, like an artillery unit. Adam stepped out of the car to do some sniping, so I took over the grenade launcher, and was firing away, when he said, “They’re at the Reboot van. Let’s go get ’em.” And before I knew what was happening, Adam had gotten into the driver’s seat, floored us right off the top of the hill and straight down into the hornet’s nest, and ramming us directly into the side of a three-story building, that was the main focus of the fighting, whereupon we were immediately beset on all sides, from the roof, from the windows, from the van, and being so close to everything, I could no longer even fire the grenade launcher without killing myself and destroying the car, and within five seconds of driving us off that hill, our car was in ruins and both of us were eliminated. I was actually pissed after that, and Adam was banned from driving.

In this story that I’m telling you now, Adam hadn’t been banned yet. That’s how we ended up stuck at the bottom of a ravine, in a river, trapped under an overpass, and as soon as we hit the river, and our prey had escaped to the left, climbing up the embankment and driving off, we ended up in the storm. At this stage, the storm meant swift death, and when you’re enveloped in that purple, you have one priority – get out. We ditched the car, and it became every man for himself. I tried to go left to climb out of the river but the embankment was too steep. Now, I wrote this before, in my last Fortnite story, but although my health bar was tanking way too fast, I wasn’t totally panicking, because I had my trusty shockwave grenades that can send you hurdling in any direction you want to go. I had 6 of them to use to get the hell out of this storm, but first, I had to get out of the ravine. Complicating things was the fact that there was the overpass above me, so I couldn’t just blast up and out. I had to run around, and so I ran to the left, like I said, but found the ravine wall too steep to climb. I tried to use a grenade to blast out, but I couldn’t go high enough, and I slid right back down into the river. F***. One grenade down, my health bar is lower, and the clock is ticking. I run back under the overpass and to the right embankment, and found it wasn’t as steep. I threw down a grenade and managed to blast myself out, and I was now on the edge, and could see out before me. The storm had continued to close, and there was a lot of purple in front of me, and two cars driving around, and gunfire. I had to go this way, I had to clear the storm, and so I then blasted myself, once, twice, watching my health bar ticking down, three times, I was not going to make it, four times, and on the fifth and final shockwave grenade, I was just out of the reach of the storm, and at the last possible second. I was down to 1 health. One single second more and I would have been done for. Now, the immediate priority having been taken care of, escaping the storm, I got my bearings. It wasn’t pretty. The two cars driving around, guns blazing, at least two players firing away to my right, and Adam somehow out in the mayhem, he having made it out further than I did, but he was down for the count, crawling around pathetically on his hands and knees. I needed cover, now, and to my left there was a small house with a gas station attached. I managed to dash across the road and get inside without being shot, or apparently, noticed, because nobody came for me. I had 3 medkits, and used one to patch up. I saw that Adam came crawling through the garage door. Somehow he hadn’t been finished off either. I healed up, then revived him, ready at any moment to switch to my shotgun and blast anyone who came in through the door, and tossed him a medkit. Both of us healed up and ready to fight again, coming back from the brink, we left the house. While we had been taking shelter, one car had been destroyed, and there were 5 players left now. The car gunner eliminated a player as Adam and I crossed the road. We blasted the car, and after making a few passes at us, it blew up, and Adam took down the first player to get out of the car. The second player made an escape. They had the Nitro Fists, steampunk mechanical fists of death that can propel you into the air and send you flying around like a superhero. They had launched themselves up and over the road, on the other side of the hill. Adam and I chased, back across the road and onto the other side. As soon as I had hurdled the hill, the Nitro Fister turned on me and charged to pound my face in, but Adam was there, and after I was punched once or twice, Adam gunned them down, and that was it. The match was over. We were the victors, the last team standing, and the golden #1 popped up onto the screen.

And that’s it. That’s the Fortnite story, one of Adam and I’s most glorious wins, scavenged out of adrenaline, impulse, bad tactics and chaos. You can have at most 250 health and shields combined, and we had gone all the way down to 1, with a player down, and pulled it back. That’s a special duo right there.

Well, that’s about it for the wedding. Coming back and in the days after, I’ve been thinking, or rather it made me feel strongly that what’s really important in life is family, friends, and love. And then rocking out, because Disturbed helped me to get there, music made the night of dancing, and I played guitar for three straight hours, not putting it down for a second as soon as I made it home, shredding through my repertoire and learning “Poor Aileen” by Superheaven, one of my new favorites, in Eb standard. My creative batteries were fully charged, and within 48 hours I had written all of this, and learned two new songs on guitar, and written one of my own. I even went on a run, and I haven’t done that for at least a year and a half, and I was wheezing and suffering, but we made it through. I really wish I could see all of these people more often, my homies, that we all lived together in the same city, that we could introduce each other to new loves, partners, go out, have game nights, like a good sitcom.. but that’s the way of the world. We’ve got jobs to do, ambitions to fulfill, dreams to chase, and they take us where we have to go. But for that weekend, we could all be together again, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Fortnite Story // Japanese Use Of Poetry Writing In Courtship and Modern Courtship Writing

Josh and I have a new roommate in the 805B household. SHE very clearly does not have antisocial personality disorder, and is not only just a normal person, but much better. She’s a kickass musician. And today, she cleaned the bathtub, which was funny because before she moved in about ten days ago, Josh and I “cleaned the bathtub”, in preparation for her arrival. So we thought we did. Our new roomie, Hope, showed us today what a clean bathtub really looks like. That bathtub was brand spankin’ new. She described the various colors of sludge that were dripping off of her sponge, as she squeezed out the remnants of what she had sponged up in her scrubbing, she educated me on the various cleaning products she employed, her weapons in the fight against the grime, and I listened, I nodded, I looked, and commented, “Man, I didn’t think it was that dirty!” And she said, “It’s your boy blindness.” Boy blindness! My god, are we blind? But we must have been, to think that our bathtub really was clean.

Last night Hope was crocheting, which meant that she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and her ears were free, which meant that she was a perfect target for me to tell stories too. I had tried, many many times to tell stories to Josh and He Who Must Not Be Named (ex-roommate), and never succeeded. (Update: only several days after this post was written I successfully read Josh not only one, but TWO stories: The Sagacious Monkey And The Boar and The Goblin Of Adachigahara. I was up late, creeping, and Josh came out of his room distressed because he was unable to sleep. He has recently been having trouble sleeping. He was so desperate for reprieve that he consented to storytime, and as he laid on the couch and I read him these stories, I noticed that he was vaping furiously. I commented on this and suggested that maybe it wasn’t helping him sleep. Actually, I said something like, “Vaping??? Before bed??? Sleep problems???” It became a gag in the house actually, especially when He Who Must Not Be Named‘s best friend for life that he met a few weeks ago (but we don’t know the truth, perhaps they have known each for years) was over, and I would go into my room, and grab Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Japanese Fairy Tales, and begin reading, and bestie would start laughing, and He Who Must Not Be Named would be triggered and shout “Put that f****** book away right now and don’t read another word.” Actually he would say something more creative and inventive than that, but sadly I’m not able to imitate him. He had a special and charming way with words. But in case you were thinking I was harrassing the poor girl, I was not, and asked her first if she would like to hear a story of my Fortnite escapades, that had happened earlier in the day, and she said she would like to hear it. I will tell it to you now too because it is a good story, and it should be forever immortalized in binary.

Fortnite is a Battle Royale game. That means it’s like the Hunger Games, where everyone has to kill each other and one person is left standing. There is a variant of the game where you can have a squad, which can be up to 4 people. You and your squad are on a large island, running around and picking up weapons and things, and building ramps and platforms and walls, and trying to kill everybody else and be the last squad standing. They actually call it “elimination” in the game, and when you eliminate somebody, they get teleported away by a little teleporter machine. So, you may be comforted to know that actually when you shotgun someone in the face at point blank, or mow them down with your submachine gun, they aren’t actually dying, just being eliminated.

I joined up with 3 random people, and this was my squad. I am not good at the game but I have good tactics and decent reflexes. I can beat the average gamer but not beat anyone who actually knows how to play the game. My moments of glory are few and far between. But on this day, I had what was shaping up to be my most incredible moment of glory ever. My squad had made it all the way to end, fought and ran and battled our way through, until we were against one other squad. I had with me one partner left at this point, and we were separated, and they got taken out. I was the last man standing for my squad. The map is shrinking now, because of “the storm”, that constantly closes in on the island, and gradually forces everyone into a smaller and smaller space. The players left in the game were now all cramped together – there’s no running, except there is hiding, because you can build walls and stuff to protect yourself, or to build a tower and go high up above everyone, but that’s hard to do if you suck at the game. Anyways, it was just me and three other people left. I was in a decent position on top of the remnants of some fort that someone else had made already. In this fort, there were a few weapons. I picked up a sniper rifle, and immediately after that, spotted at some distance away a player under a tree. I looked down the scope, lined up the shot, sniped them, boom, they went down. Already, me landing the shot was a big deal. When a player “goes down”, they can crawl around pathetically like a little baby on their hands and knees, and can be revived by a teammate for a short time, and if they aren’t shot again. A teammate came to revive this player that I had sniped, and did not protect themselves by building walls around themselves (a bold move), and was further disrespecting me by wildly spinning in a circle as they stood next to their teammate (like this was a game or something), so I looked down the scope, lined up the shot, and sniped them too. Boom, they went down, now two players down, crawling around on the ground like babies, and suddenly, in mere seconds, what was a 1 v 3 was now a 1 v 1. There was just the third player to worry about, and sure enough, just like the second player ran up to their downed teammate, the third one came running up too. They were however, lucky enough to be standing behind the tree, obscured, unable to be sniped, and in a flash I realized what I had to do. This was my moment of glory. I was running on instinct now.

My final victory move required to me to use an item called a shockwave grenade. The shockwave grenade will send out a concussive blast that will not hurt you but will blow everything around you apart, and will send you flying in the opposite direction relative to where the grenade is. Players use this blast to launch themselves over to enemies and surprise them, or to blast away to safety. I was going to now do the super-pro Fortnite shockwave grenade move where you launch yourself over to where the enemy is, and blast them in the face with your shotgun. I have been on the receiving end of such a move many, many times. It hurts. You’re cowering in fear, maybe you’re reloading, trying to revive a downed teammate, praying for escape, when you hear the sound of the shockwave grenade going off, or (another nightmare sound) you hear the sound of the enemy using their plunger gun to pull themselves over to you, signaling your doom. The enemy player then comes soaring down out of the sky and guns you down with a shotgun blast to the face. As I said, I have been “eliminated” in this way many times before.. But now the tables had turned. I was to be the grenade user, to be the hunter, the doombringer, here and now.

I prepared my shockwave grenade. All three of my eliminated comrades were watching me, all three of them witnessing my sniper prowess, I’m sure sitting up in their chairs, throwing their hands up, screaming “Yes! He’s doing it, he’s doing it!!!”, praying for me to bring home the #1 Victory Crown, and now they were about to see my true power. I began to run forward, building momentum, and then I threw the shockwave grenade down, to launch myself across the ditch and over to that final opponent, and when I threw the grenade, I threw it too far out in front of me, not giving myself enough time to jump in front of it, and it detonated and threw me 100 feet backwards, in the opposite direction of my doomed enemies, and directly into “the storm”. I was eliminated immediately. The game was over. A big #2 came up on the screen.

This Fortnite failure, to put it into perspective for you, if you’re still not getting it, was like having an open dunk, a runaway dunk for the game-winning basket, that will give you the 2 points you need to win the game because you’re down one. There’s a second left on the clock, and you run up to dunk the ball and win the game and achieve the greatest glory, your hero moment, and when you jump up to dunk that ball and become a total legend, you hit your head on the rim of the basket and knock yourself out, and lose the game. To the shock and horror of your team, of all of your fans, and to the joy and jubilation of your rivals.

This is exactly what happened in my tragic game of Fortnite.

After the telling of this Fortnite story, I asked Hope to rate the story. Her feedback is important for me to better calibrate my storytelling algorithm for her, giving her the high quality stories that she needs and deserves. Hope, for knowing almost nothing about Fortnite, rated this story an 8/10. I was quite surprised at this high rating. Feeling embolded, fired up with this quite high rating of what I felt was, while a good story, a simple gaming tale, I proceeded to tell her another story, the great story of when my Grandpa came down into the basement to avoid the rest of the family at a family gathering (actually he just wanted to chill with the coolest member of the family) and watched me fight an enormous demon-wolf-girl to the death, an extremely difficult boss that I had been trying to beat for weeks in Bloodborne, and how amused he was by this, and she rated it 9/10, because it had a Grandpa in it, and because even though he might not have really known what it was all about it, he was still proud of me for defeating this demon-wolf-girl. Hope has a good rating system. And the third story I told her then, this was a very important part of calibrating the stories for her, in the story-telling algorithm, was the famous Japanese fairy tale that nobody knows, The Jellyfish and The Monkey, and Hope rated that story a 10/10.

A 10/10! This is a good new roommate we’ve got here.

The other bit of writing I wanted to do in this post was inspired by a story that Hope told me recently. I had this thought when talking with my sis about her friend texting with a guy, and how he sent her some poetry, and she didn’t know how to respond, so she asked all of her friends about it. They analyzed it together. “Why did he send this?” “What does it mean?” “What should I say back?” These kinds of things. And I thought, especially because he had actually sent her poetry, that it was just like what happens with the poetry exchanges in many of the stories in the Anthology of Japanese Literature. These are snippets of stories that are all written in the early days of Japan, around 1000-1300 (the ones that I will reference), and many of them deal with romance and courtship, and escapades. In almost every story about romance, the initial courting is done via exchanging messages of poetry, through a secondary person, like a servant or friend, and friends, members of the court, servants, etc. are consulted in the analyzing of the meaning of the poems and messages, and in the response. It’s a team effort, and it’s just like what we do nowadays, over dating apps and iMessage. I’ll give you some examples.

From The Captain of Naruto (late 13th century):

(Context: The emperor sees a pretty lady and wants to get with her.) The Emperor summoned a secretary, instructing him to follow and report the lady’s destination. When the secretary had overtaken her, the lady who understood and meant to mislead him somehow, beckoned him to draw near, and with a smile said, “Tell His Majesty, ‘Of the young bamboo.’ I will wait here, I promise, until I receive his reply.” The secretary, never dreaming that she might deceive him, assumed that she merely wished to arrange a rendezvous and hurried away. The Emperor, on receiving this report, felt certain that she had quoted a line from a poem and inquired what it might be. None of those in attendance, however, were familiar with it, and Lord Tameie was sent for. “It is an old poem,” he said without hesitation.

“Tall though it be, what can one do with the useless lengths of the young bamboo with its one or two joints?”

The Emperor is smitten, and has his secretary track down this woman. He sends her his reply via a letter.

“Was it an empty dream or did I really see the young bamboo, that morning and night I yearn for with a love that is torment? Tonight without fail.”

In response to this letter, the woman replies (she’s not happy because she’s married and doesn’t want to meet the Emperor (hence the sobbing), but her husband (the Captain) thinks she should as they kind of have no choice, because, you know, he’s the Emperor). Sobbing, the lady opened the letter, beneath the words, “Tonight without fail,” wrote in thick black ink the single word “wo”, and refolding the letter sent it by the messenger.

The Emperor does not understand the meaning of this mysterious single wo, and again consults his team of specialists to help shed some light on it.

The Emperor, seeing the letter returned, and no different in appearance than before, was about to conclude reluctantly that it had been without effect, when he noticed that the knot was carelessly tied. He undid it and beheld the word, “wo.” Ponder over it as he would, he could make nothing of it. He summoned several ladies-in-waiting who would be likely to know and asked them about the word. One of them said, “Long ago a certain prime minister wrote the word ‘moon’ and sent it to the daughter of Izumi Shikibu, a lady well versed in such matters. She may have spoken of it to her mother, for she readily understood and wrote beneath ‘moon’ the single word ‘wo.’ That is the allusion, I imagine. ‘Moon’ meant that he would be waiting that night for her to come. And in answer to a summons from above, men should reply ‘yo,’ while women say ‘wo.’ The lady went to him, and he was more in love with her than ever. This lady too will surely come.”

She did go to see the Emperor, and the Emperor loved her, and she wasn’t happy about it, and the Captain (her husband), received great honors and favors afterward. And this story actually comes with a rare explicit moral, which the author writes out at the end.

A prince is to his subjects as water is to fish. However high the prince, he should not be guilty of arrogance or contemptuousness; however low his subjects, they should not be disordered by envy. Emperor Gosaga’s gracious feelings and the Captain’s generous sacrifice in the present story deserve to be remembered as examples of truly noble conduct. It is indeed natural that from the earliest times it has ever been said that between the prince and his subjects there should be no estrangement, but bonds of deep sympathy.

Notice that there is no mention of the wife’s sacrifice, the wife who was kind of blackmailed into getting it on with the Emperor against her will…. Nice.

When Rachel told me about her friend’s story of having the poem sent to her and all of her friends trying to understand what it meant and how to respond, it made me think of these poetry exchanges like in The Captain of Naruto, where the Emperor literally does the exact same thing, summoning his ladies-in-waiting and having them analyze the poem that the Captain’s wife sent, and what it meant. And I just think it’s amazing that 1000 years ago, in a completely different society, and 1000 years into the future, with different technologies, in an entirely new society, we are doing the exact same things. These moments of realization, that humans still be doin’ the same things they’ve always been doin’, is one reason why I love reading old literature so much. Some things never really change. Don Quixote really made me feel that way, because of the humor. Everyone siding with a crazy person (Don Quixote) and deciding to pretend that a sink basin is a famous magical helmet to mess with the owner of the sink basin (who is arguing that his sink basin is not a magical helmet), was funny 500 years ago in Spain, and it’s funny now, 500 years into the future, in Tennessee. That’s just funny stuff.

Only a few days after learning about the sis’s friend story of the guy sending the poetry, Hope shared with me another similar story that actually ended in success. She helped her best friend to land her current boyfriend, because of her tactful message writing on Hinge (a dating app). Hope’s friend had matched with a guy she was interested in, who was a chef, and had written on his profile, “Just a chef looking for his server.” Something like that. Now, the friend wanted to write a message in response to this line, but didn’t know what to say, so she went to Hope for guidance, and Hope came up with a great line. “I may not be a server, but I know how to serve.” Good line, right here. Serving is modern slang, like stunting, or flexing. Looking good. This guy responded with something about making dinner for Hope’s friend, and again Hope had another stellar line. “You bring the dinner, and I’ll bring the dessert.” And the rest was history. They met and are now dating.

Hope told me this story and again I was thinking, this is just like how it was done in the old Japanese days, except it’s with phones, over dating apps. This back and forth, wordplay, banter, via writing, curating the perfect message, asking your team for help, your girls, your homies, analyzing the meaning of the messages.. They be doin’ all that stuff in Japan a thousand years ago, and here we are in the 21st century, and we’re doing it still, over iMessage and Hinge. (Does anyone pass notes in the classroom anymore? That must still be happening.)

Here is another example, of courtship via poetry and writing, in The Lady Who Loved Insects (sometime before the 12th century).

(Context: There’s a weirdo girl who loves insects and natural things and doesn’t like to blacken her teeth because she thinks it’s unnatural. Blackening your teeth with iron filings was a custom in Japan back then, for whatever reason people come up with for doing something like that. I read that it turns out that it was also good for your dental hygiene, so they were really onto something there. This weirdo girl attracts the attention of some guy, and he makes her a fake snake to try and “give her a fright”, and he succeeds somewhat.)

Among those who had heard gossip about the girl and her odd pets was a certain young man of good family who vowed that, fond of strange creatures though she might be, he would undertake to give her a fright.

The girl’s family decides that because this guy went to such great trouble to create a mechanical snake for her, she should write a reply, and so she does. …taking a stout, sensible-looking sheet of paper she wrote the following poem, not in hiragana which she never used, but in katakana: “If indeed we are fated to meet, not here will it be, but in Paradise, thou crafty image of a snake.” And at the side was written: “In the Garden of Blessings you must plant your seed.”

The footnotes say that, about the Garden of Blessings line, The snake must by good behavior get itself reborn in some more dignified incarnation. And she is referring to the creator of the snake.

Now, the Captain of Horse sees the letter she wrote to the snake-maker-boy and wanted to meet this interesting bug girl. He went to the house and saw her gleaming white teeth and was scared, but oddly attracted to her, so he sends her a poem.

…using the juice of a flower stem as ink he wrote the following poem on a piece of thickly folded paper: “Forgive me that at your wicker gate so long I stand. But from the caterpillar’s bushy brows I cannot take my eyes.” He tapped with his fan, and at once one of the little boys ran out to ask what he wanted. “Take this to your mistress,” he said. But it was intercepted by the maid, to whom the little boy explained that the poem came from the fine gentleman who had been standing about near the gate. “Woe upon us all,” cried the maid, “this is the handwriting of Captain So-and-So, that is in the Horse Guard. And to think that he has been watching you mess about with your nauseous worms!” And she went on for some time lamenting over the girl’s deplorable oddity. At last, the insect-lover could bear it no longer and said, “If you looked a little more below the surface of things you would not mind so much what other people thought about you. The world in which we live has no reality, it is a mirage, a dream. Suppose someone is offended by what we do or, for the matter of that, is pleased by it, does his opinion make any difference to us in the end? Before long both he and we shall no longer even appear to exist.”

She writes back to the Captain: “By this you may know the strangeness of my mood. Had you not called me kawamushi (hairy caterpillar), I would not have replied.” And the Captain replies, “In all the world, I fear, exists no man so delicate that to the hairtips of a caterpillar’s brow he could attune his life.”

That’s some good banter right there.

There was one more example I wanted to share. This is from Yugao, a chapter from The Tale of Genji. (Context: Prince Genji is in some outskirt of the capital, in a neighborhood of commoners, visiting his old “wet nurse”, who cared for him whilst he was a young lad (he’s now 17). While looking at pretty flowers he receives some writing, is intrigued, and so is the beginning of a new amor.)

How Genji receives the first writing: There was a wattled fence over which some ivy-like creeper spread its cool green leaves, and among the leaves were white flowers with petals half-unfolded like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts. “They are called Yugao, ‘evening faces’,” one of his servants told him; “how strange to find so lovely a crowd clustering on this deserted wall!” And indeed it was a most strange and delightful thing to see how on the narrow tenement in a poor quarter of the town they had clambered over rickety eaves and gables and spread wherever there was room for them to grow. He sent one of the servants to pick some. The man entered at the half-opened door, and had begun to pluck the flowers, when a little girl in a long yellow tunic came through a quite genteel sliding door, and holding out toward Genji’s servant a white fan heavily perfumed with incense, said to him, “Would you like something to put them on? I am afraid you have chosen a wretched-looking bunch,” and she handed him the fan.

After his visit with the nurse, Genji looks at the fan and notices the message. (I’m skipping ahead here.)

As they left the house he looked at the fan upon which the white flowers had been laid. He now saw that there was writing on it, a poem carelessly but elegantly scribbled: “The flower that puzzled you was but the yugao, strange beyond knowing in its dress of shining dew.” It was written with a deliberate negligence which seemed to aim at concealing the writer’s status and identity. But for all that the hand showed a breeding and distinction which agreeably surprised him. “Who lives in the house on the left?” he asked. Koremitsu, who did not at all want to act as a go-between, replied that he had only been at his mother’s for five or six days and had been so much occupied by her illness that he had not asked any questions about the neighbors. “I want to know for a quite harmless reason,” said Genji. “There is something about this fan which raises a rather important point. I positively must settle it. You would oblige me by making inquiries from someone who knows the neighborhood.”

Genji wonders if it was written by a woman. He writes back: “Could I but get a closer view, no longer would they puzzle me – the flowers that all too dimly in the gathering dusk I saw.” This he wrote in a disguised hand and gave it to his servant.

That’s all for their exchange of writing – Koremitsu delivers the message and arranges a meetup between them, and a new love is born. But again, it starts with writing.

I feel like this is where I could write some kind of analysis about all of this, or share some profound thoughts. I don’t really have any though. I’m just amused by the similarities. You can infer certain things through iMessage, still, just like Genji could infer from the letter he had been sent. What emojis are used, what acronyms, word choice, gifs, references, spelling, punctuation.

(I have deer photos for you from Shelby Park. That’s for next post.)

Visual Stimulation (Sensory Needs)

*Sunday night writing from 805B the home base*

About one and a half hours ago, I wanted to do some writing. That’s what I wanted to do, but when I sat down and tried to do it, I couldn’t. I was feeling restless. I was having a craving for something, a need for something, something stimulating, something fun, something new.. but I couldn’t pin it down. Usually when I want to play, I have an idea of what I want to do – something like joke around with someone, play a sport, go somewhere, take a walk and make some discoveries, play a game – but today, in that moment I wasn’t feeling any of those things. For lack of a better idea, I tried them. I even tried meditating, which does help with restlessness, but I knew that wasn’t what I needed either, and it helped a little, but I still had the feeling of needing something. I asked my new roomie Hope for some ideas, and she fired off a few good ones, and I settled on trying to figure out a Rubik’s cube while going for a walk, which kept me preoccupied for about 20 minutes, and was distracting, but didn’t satisfy the urge, my restlessness either. I didn’t want to play more guitar, and I didn’t want to walk around Shelby Park. I didn’t want to play a game on the Switch, but from the outset of all of this, I’m remembering, is that I wanted to play Fortnite. That was actually my original desire. I couldn’t play Fortnite at that time, but this is important, because after trying all of these different strategies to cure my itch, I decided to watch what is my guilty pleasure, high-level Korean League of Legends gameplay.

Something interesting happened.

I watched my Korean League gameplay video for about 20 minutes, and whatever craving I had had in my brain, whatever restlessness I felt, it was relieved. The video was 33 minutes long, but I didn’t finish it. After 20 minutes I could tell that I was satisfied, and felt refreshed. I felt normal. And then, I found that I could sit down and do the writing that I had wanted to do.

Now, just yesterday my sister was telling me all about her journey with ADHD and what Adderall has done for her, and she mentioned that in college, she had a therapist who suggested that before she tried to study, she should watch a short video that had colors and movement, to give her brain some “stimulation”. Writing and studying don’t seem like they’re all that different, to me. Both are mental tasks that require focused attention and concentration. And what was keeping me from doing my writing here was that I wasn’t able to, in that moment, summon the powers of concentration and mental focus that were needed.

My sister said watching the video her therapist recommended really helped her. I think that watching the League of Legends video helped me in the same way. A League of Legends gameplay video is nothing but movement and colors. It also contains a plethora of exciting sounds and moments. Being an ex-League addict, I can’t and don’t want to play the game ever again – but watching League gameplay does seem to do something positive for me. Before I thought it was just that it was entertaining for me, just like watching a sports match. It’s just like watching a game of basketball. Which, I was going through a period of my life where instead of watching League gameplay videos, I would enjoy watching pro soccer highlights. Once a day or every few days, I would fire up a few Champions League, Premier League, La Liga, videos, and enjoy those. I would get bored after a while, something like 15-20 minutes. I guess that something similar in every case is happening, giving my brain some kind of pleasurable stimulation. Tonight, after watching my League video, it was just really noticable how different I felt, and especially after I had tried several other remedies.

The thing is, I don’t have ADHD. I have taken the tests a few times, and don’t really show any of the symptoms. I don’t forget where I put things, I have no problems concentrating on tasks for long periods of time, I don’t have distracting thoughts, and am able to tune out the environment, such as if I am walking with a friend and having a conversation, I have no problems with listening to someone even if we are in a public place with other conversations around us, I have no problems with waiting in line, or being patient, etc. etc. etc. Yet, it seems that in the same way that my sister with ADHD benefits from watching a stimulating video, I benefit too. So what does that mean?

There’s something else going on there. And it seems that it is something visual. Today I had a lot of mental stimulation – learning how to sing while playing a song, conversating with a friend, writing, and maybe that’s why attempting to solve the Rubik’s Cube wasn’t what I needed. I had also in the past few days had all the fun I could have asked for, and that wasn’t really what I needed either. I think about how my first idea to fix my craving was to play Fortnite, but not the other games that I could have played, like Minecraft, or Legend of Zelda. Fortnite, like League of Legends, is fast-paced, and packed with colors, noises, and movement. So, it seems like that’s what my brain wanted, that’s what it needed. Maybe I needed some exciting visual stimulus.

Thinking about visual stimulus, and a need to see interesting things.. I do like seeing things. I love spotting things in nature, I love going for walks and finding new things, and those new things can be anything like an interesting flower in someone’s yard, an interesting sign that says something silly, a bumper sticker, a cool car, an interesting character, anything out of the ordinary, anything that catches my attention. I also like photography and visual arts, and making visual art, purely for how it catches the eye. As an example, here are some macro photos of drops that I edited in Lightroom. I just tweaked parameters until I felt that the photo was visually interesting enough and was satisfying for me.

I do this just because it’s stimulating and fun for me to look at. There’s nothing else to it, really. It’s a purely sensory thing. But it’s new for me to think about a need for visual stimulation. I wouldn’t have though it was a need before, just something that I enjoyed. But tonight, and seeing how I felt before and after the colorful, energetic, League video, it seems like I really had a craving for visual sensory stimulation.

I did a little Googling, and it seems that that is a real need. The need for sensory stimulation – sound, touch, taste, smell, sight. I feel like I’ve known that babies need that, but I wouldn’t have thought that adults needed it as much. I think about the joy I get in eating an interesting and complex meal, with a variety of flavors and textures, or with something totally new in it, and I think about now how the pleasurable feeling you get is something more than just being delicious. It’s not just the fact that it’s delicious, it’s the fact that you’re getting sensory stimulation, stimulating your sense of taste, and that’s good for your brain.

When I think about this topic, of human needs and identify human needs and identifying our own needs.. we really have a lot of needs. It’s almost tiring. You need to talk to people, you need to play, you have physical needs, for sleep, for movement, for nutrition, you have intellectual needs, you have spiritual needs, emotional needs, and now, what, you have purely sensory needs too. UGH. So many needs!!!! No wonder that everybody’s got problems. How many people are actually getting everything they need?

Official Acts, More Shelby Park

I want to write about Shelby Park. I did a little research and took some photos for y’all. But..

I’m still thinking about our facist Supreme Leader Donald Trump. I talked with my friend Parker about my thoughts, most of what I had written in the last post about comparisons to Animal Farm and Trump, and I woke up the next day wondering if I was being too extreme. I remembered, then, that I have read that many in England or in Europe did not think that Hitler would be so terrible, but Winston Churchill did. I wonder how many in Germany foresaw the disaster that Hitler would be. They did not really have the benefit of reflecting on history that we do now, did they? They didn’t have the same vocabulary, with words such as facist and totalitarian. I don’t know much about the politics and movements of World War 2, World War 1 era, so I can’t say much about that time period, although I wish I knew more. Reading a brief synopsis about Stalin’s takeover of the Soviet Union, to understand the references to Napoleon and Snowball and how it panned out in reality, was very interesting. One major takeaway I had was that Stalin murdered just about everybody, including his own top generals, and his totalitarian rule so crippled the Soviet Union that he had to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler.

Thinking about the debate, the election and politics, just scanning today’s news, right now, July 1st, 2024, I read that the Supreme Court, with the three justices that Trump was able to appoint, has handed Trump a win.

“The US Supreme Court rules former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution for official acts taken while in office, but have no immunity for unofficial acts.”

Absolute immunity from prosecution.

Nice.

Can I have that?

“The landmark decision means the federal election interference case against Donald Trump will return to a lower court which will then decide how to apply this ruling. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor among those opposing the decision. She said she did so with ‘fear for our democracy’ and ‘the president is now a king above the law’.” (From the BBC website.)

Official acts, and unofficial acts. Now pray tell, what are those? In this BBC article, they quote Julie Novkov, the dean of Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, who notes the generality of this language. “Novkov was surprised the court’s definition of official acts is so broad.”

Dean Novkov speaks in polite and proper language. In layman’s terms – “What the f*** is an official act???”

One of the justices had some ideas for what could be considered “official acts”.

“Justice Sotomayor cited several examples of a president’s actions that could now be protected – such as ordering the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival.” (From the article.)

Wow, wow, woah. Assassinating a political rival?? Come on. That’s not the American way, is it? Trump would never do something like that, of course. Trump’s not like that. I mean, the whole thing about, “Hang Mike Pence”, those weren’t Trump’s words, even though they were spoken by good, honest patriotic Trump supporters. Trump would never have wanted them to actually hang Mike Pence, no, of course not. I mean, he didn’t like, tell his good, honest patriotic, foaming at-the-mouth supporters not to try and hang Mike Pence, while they were storming Capitol Hill, trying to hang Mike Pence, but that’s not because he didn’t want them to. He.. had something to do.. Ah yes, I remember.. he had to watch TV?

So what even is an official act? That’s what the lawyers and judges will be debating now.

Is inciting an issurection an official act? Attempting to overthrow the government an official act? Attempting to overturn an election? Well, if such things were done with the intent to protect democracy, and serve the best interests of the nation, I would say that falls under the official duties of the President of the United States, and so could be considered an official act. And by this definition, ordering the imprisonment or assassination of a ~~disloyal party member~~ unpatriotic, corrupt politician, or the imprisonment or assassination of a ~~political opponent~~ threat to American democracy, (only if absolutely necessary, of course, to save America from utter destruction), would also be “official acts”.

What could also be considered an official act, perhaps the most heinous of all.. Imagine this. You are walking down the street, with a nice cone of delicious strawberry ice cream. Donald Trump is currently the president. Trump is out on the street, and he approaches you and says, “Give me your ice cream cone.” You say no. He takes it from you anyway. You later attempt to sue him, charge him with theft. But, his defense is that he was acting officially, as he was on his way to a very important meeting, and he had not eaten all day, and needed nourishment to have a clear head and think correctly in his meeting, a matter of national security. It was essential for him to do his presidential duties, and as such it was necessary for him to take your ice cream. He was acting with the best interests of the United States in mind, and under his official capacities as President of the United States, and therefore he is immune from prosection, and you have no case. And so, he can take your ice cream, and you can’t do anything about it.

Joe Biden could take your ice cream too, under the same reasoning. Any president could.

Wonderful.

Let’s talk about ecology.

Yesterday I went to Couchville Lake with Mr. Parker Junior, and did some kayaking. Kayaking – a – lot – of – work. Parker said, after we were loaded up and in the car, both exhausted, he said, “Well, was it worth all of the effort?” And in that moment, it was hard for me to say yes, because, you know, when you’re at your lowest, most tired moment, and you think about doing work, and doing more work, work in the physics sense, of expending physical effort, the idea of it is kind of offputting, and so in that moment I really felt – NO. Not worth it. But now that I’ve recovered, except for the stinging on my totally burnt thighs and knees, I can say, it was worth it. It was fun. Somehow though, we would have to find a way to, what’s the word, efficiencize all of that loading and unloading. We would have to work on the process. Because I couldn’t go through all of that every time. The straps, the ropes, the knots, the clips, the standing, the lifting, the loading, the unloading, the fetching, the putting back, the items, all of the necessary items.. It would have to be easier.

Thinking about Chinese Privet and invasive species, as we pulled up onto the park grounds, I noticed that the woods around the lake were completely clear in the understory, as Tennessee woods are supposed to be. It was shocking to see just how clear they really are. You can see all the way through, you could play soccer in those woods, you could wear shorts. You could walk through those woods as easily as you could walk down the street. I couldn’t believe it, and I kept saying, “Where is the privet? There’s no privet!!” We paddled all around the lake, and I was scanning, and eventually did see some smaller Chinese Privet plants, but that was it, only a handful, and otherwise, a completely clear understory, acres of forest. I figured there was no way that they hadn’t cleared it, that somehow there just wasn’t privet here, so I was hoping to see a ranger and confirm this, and sure enough, back on land at the parking lot, there was a ranger hanging around, with a pretty yellow corn snake on her arm. I asked about the privet and she said, “Oh yeah, privet and all kinds of invasives. We manage it.” And that every few years they do a sweep, it seems, which is also what Ian, the invasive removal group leader at Shelby, was saying too. The first round of removal being the hardest, and then subsequent phases would be more like weeding, getting the young plants. At least for a plant like Chinese Privet. By comparison, with the Couchville Lake woods being so clear, you can see that the Shelby Park are completely, totally choked.

The Couchville Lake woods looked something more like this, although this woods is even clearer and has more sunlight coming through. This is a pine grove in Virginia, but it shows the clear understory. Photo: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/virginia/stories-in-virginia/va-how-we-work-forests/

I have some photos for you. First, since I’ve been talking about the privet, here it is, at Shelby. This is at the edge of some woods, and it looks like this at the edge of most of the woods. Notice that you cannot see into the woods at all. That is because of the privet. I wish I had a photo of the Couchville Lake woods, to show you the comparison. Just about everything you see below the leaves of the trees in the understory, is Chinese Privet.

*A wall of Chinese Privet, all along the understory here. You can’t see into the forest at all.*

It’s a big problem. This is not how a Tennessee forest is supposed to be. There is a little, open forest roaming box turtle here at the park and in the Tennessee forests called the Eastern Box Turtle. It’s a forest turtle. How cute is that. They don’t like the privet.

I was wrong about the meadow. I said it was full of wildflowers. And look at this. Not a flower in sight. I guess that’s what I wanted it to be full of, so I kind of imagined it, or convinced myself that it was. We see what we want to see, we remember what we want to remember! There are some in bloom right now, but mostly it’s a sea of green. This is also just a portion of the meadow, there’s more to the left, and way more on the opposite side, behind me (where I was standing in this photo.) I thought it was two or three football fields in size, but it’s way more than that. It’s something like, eight? Let’s just say it’s a lot of football fields.

You wouldn’t guess it, but there is a trail that goes through this meadow here, in this picture, winding around the back and snaking horizontally up to where I was standing taking this photo. And way back there, as I followed this trail, I came upon a herd of deer. Two nights ago, in the later hours of the day, when the deer are active. When I went to do this little photography section, it was mid-day, and blazing, and you didn’t see a deer anywhere, in any of their favorite haunts, the meadow, the swamp/bog/fen thing, not even in the pools of water. They lay low. But after around 6 pm, sometime in the later day, they’ll be out and about, all over. I have now had a few interactions with these deer, a charming one being when I was passing through a narrow trail between a woods trail and the meadow trail, and on this narrow trail was a lone doe, munching away on things. I really wanted to pass through here, but didn’t know what to do, and I said, “Hi there, can I come through here?” And she looked at me, and went back to eating, and then she slowly stepped to the side, and allowed me to pass. And I walked within just a few feet of her, a big doe, kind of nervously to be honest, because I’m not used to just being so close to large wild animals like that, even if it’s a deer. I’m used to them running away, or watching them from a distance, but the deer here have no reason to fear people, and are used to having them around. So I was walking through this meadow trail, and I rounded a curve, and found myself approaching a herd of seven deer, and I had to walk through. As I approached, slowly, what looked like a mom and two youngins bounded off into the swamp area, that was close by, one large buck bounded off into a small patch of trees in the meadow, another buck went the other way, and then promptly turned around to stare at me, and then, there was a doe, who just didn’t go anywhere. She stayed right in the middle of the trail, and just looked at me, staring at me curiously, as they do. They flap their ears, and they just look at you, like, “What’s up? What’s goin’ on? Whatcha up to? Whatcha doin’ here? What are you?” And this was something like the last time I had shared the trail with that doe, except now there were deer on all sides, some bucks, all watching me, and this doe, curious, right on the trail. But again, I really wanted to pass through here, and I also didn’t think they would care too much, so I just kind of walked on through, slowly and making no sudden movements. The doe, as the last one did, took a step to the side to let me pass, but she watched me the whole time, and I felt strongly compelled to say something to her. I think I felt a little rude honestly, like I was intruding on their dinner time, blowing up their dinner party, and it would be doubly rude if I didn’t acknowledge her or make any conversation, so I said, as I passed, her staring deep into my soul, “Hi there. What’s your name? My name is Steven. Thanks for letting me walk through here. See you later!”

*Some things you’ll find in the meadow*. I see a lot of cottontail rabbits hanging around the pavillion.

I took some photos of the fen bog marsh swamp, too. I want to know what to call it so I can stop writing all four words. I checked the signs and maps throughout the park but never saw a label. I want to go to their nature center and ask about it because I’m so curious.

*Here is the bog/fen/marsh at the edge of the meadow*

*You can see that it’s grassy. The deer hang out in here.*

*Dead trees. The ground must be pretty firm because the deer can walk around and lay down in it.*

I will get some photos of the deer for you. I promise. And I will find out once and for all what kind of wetland landscape we have here at this great Shelby Park.

Animal Farm and The First Presidential Debate, Napoleon v. Snowball

Well…

Last night I attended the Davidson County Democratic Watch Party for the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

I was inspired to attend this watch party due to my recent reading of Animal Farm, and I told every person who I chatted with at the party that Animal Farm was the reason why I was there. After the debate I was chatting with Aaron, from Cincinnati, Ohio, who had spent 30 years in Miami and was now here in Nashville, and I mentioned to him as we were talking, “I’m here because I read Animal Farm. Have you read it?” And he said, quoting the book, “Sure. ‘All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.'” Later, reflecting on our conversation and the night in general, I remembered that, and then it made sense why we had clicked so well. I had interesting discussions with Aaron, with Dylan, with a Canadian from Alberta, who said that Alberta was like the Texas of Canada, conservative, oil country and cattle raising. All three of these guys impressed me with their political knowledge, and it was interesting to hear their ideas and their take on things.

It can be hard to talk about politics. Many people are immediately set on edge, triggered, when they hear the now loaded words Democrat or Republican. Democrats are triggered by the word Republican, and Republicans are triggered by the word Democrat. I don’t want to get wrapped up in factionalism, tribalism, whatever you want to call it. I want to stay out. So even though I was at a Democratic convention, I really don’t even like saying that, and I wouldn’t like to say that I am a Democrat, because people would then immediately shut their ears, or nearly do so, regarding everything I say now as tainted and suspicious, or, conversely, if a Democrat, they would regard everything I’m saying as correct and true, as long as it is pro-Democrat. I know not everybody has this aversion to the party labels, but many do. It’s hard not to. And it’s hard not to get wrapped up in fervor for your party. So when I was at this event, and they did a little bit of rah-rahing, you know, chanting, “4 more years!!” and “Democrats, are you fired up!!!” I didn’t shout too loudly. I would say just enough that was socially acceptable, because come on, if you go to an event and someone says, “Are y’all fired up!!!” And you just stare in silence, that’s not right. Haha. But this was the first political event I’ve ever attended, actually, even though I have been watching and observing, taking notes from the sidelines, so I really was just here to see what people were thinking, see what was going on, and I was interested in the debate and what the talking points would be. I haven’t been very active in reading the news and don’t know about many of the issues in depth, but I know what they are. And it was a good way to see via the questions asked, what were the real major issues facing American society today.

The main reason why I attended this debate party event was because I was motivated by Animal Farm, but I know I was also hoping to meet some like-minded and interesting people, and hopefully make some new friends. And I think that’s something to remember, as one woman mentioned to me at the event, that she was just there because “it’s better than watching it at home alone.” Like going to church, we partially are motivated to attend these events, or identify with a group just because we want to belong somewhere, and be with people. Many people seek out a group not because they care about whatever cause or ideology the group supports. They simply want to be a part of a group. The desire to belong to a group is an enormously motivating desire in pretty much everyone’s life.

So, with Animal Farm fresh in my mind, I watched our history being written and contemplated the state of American politics today. I’ll try and share some of the thoughts I had about it all.

There was a lot of laughter and smiles at that party. A lot of ridiculing Trump, a lot of fun banter, drinks, mingling, chatting. A woman next to me told me she was playing bingo, and showed me a bingo card, that had phrases such as “drug test” and “34 counts” on it. People were enjoying themselves, and I did enjoy myself too, but on the whole, I wasn’t laughing. I was quite stressed out and concerned.

The demonization of the enemy. The destruction and removal of disloyal party members. The scapegoating and denigration of a minority group. The propogation of blatant falsehoods, and the denial of truth. Revising history, gaslighting. Bullying, outright hostility. Affinity, respect for other authoritarians. Willingness to use force to achieve political goals. Desire to persecute political opponents. Legal trouble. Denouncing of the free press. Proficient use and weaponization of new media technology. Using fear and anger to incense passions and win followers. Attempted overthrow of the government.

Sound like anybody you know?

Anybody, perhaps a few people throughout history who were responsible for the murder and destruction of millions?

Or somebody who is currently running for his second term in office as president of the United States of America?

That’s why I wasn’t laughing.

In Animal Farm, Napoleon doesn’t do much of the talking. Napoleon just issues the decrees, commands. When he talks, he generally says, “This is what we’re doing now,” or “It’s all Snowball’s fault!!!” (Snowball discussion in next paragraph.) His talker, who is something like the media, is Squealer. Squealer manipulates, lies, deflects, deceives, bends, and as a last resort, uses emotional appeals, preying upon fears, to persuade the other animals to support Napoleon’s policies, or to dupe them into thinking they are for the benefit of all of the animals on the farm. He would say, “But, surely you don’t want Mr. Jones to come back, do you?” And that would invoke fear and terror into every animal, as they of course knew that they didn’t want Mr. Jones (the farmer) to come back, and they would then agree that things were at least better with Napoleon. Trump is able to be a Squealer for himself. He has his Squealers too, but Trump the man himself can do the Squealer work. Just from his language last night, I heard both Squealer and Napoleon. For example, throughout the debate I can’t count how many times he repeated that people were coming over the border, were raping, killing, innocent Americans, flooding the border and killing our people. Criminals, bringing over drugs, bringing crime, pouring across the border, flooding across the border, the border, the border, the border. Raping, killing. Like Squealer, Trump is creative, creative and stubborn, and demonstrated it in this debate with his ability to twist the narrative, turn any question on its head, and find or force a way to get back his main points of persuation, and one of his strongest lines, that he repeatedly went back to, was the border, and the immigrants. He used strong and negative language frequently, such as the word “destruction”, mentioning the destruction of cities “like Minneapolis, and.. many other cities” (his words) or the destruction of the country, painting images of cities burning, a country on fire, full of drugs and murderers. Why does he do this? Whether true or not, it can be an effective line, because it plays to fear. At least it works well in Animal Farm. Invoking fear is exactly what Squealer does, generally as a last resort, when his other persuasive tactics have failed to convince the animals. Fear is a powerful motivator, anger is a powerful motivator, and a powerful persuader for the animals. And fear, anger, and anxiety all have a place in the amygdala, one of the most primitive parts of the human brain. So these lines, these images have the power to hit deep, to activate emotions. In Animal Farm, Squealer uses Mr. Jones, and the idea of Mr. Jones coming back to run the farm, as his fear-invoking line. “But, surely you don’t want Mr. Jones to come back, do you?” And in the debate, Trump’s fear-invoking line was about the border, and about illegal immigrants. If a line from Animal Farm, maybe it would look something like this. “But, surely you don’t want an open border, do you?” (Implying that Biden does, and that if did have this, we would have murderers, thieves, and drug-dealers flooding into the country.)

It would make sense then that Trump would not want to support any progress that the Biden administration would take to strengthen border security, even if it was in the best interest of the country. And it does seem that he acted to get a bipartisan border bill from getting passed, a bill so bipartisan that even Mitch McConnell supported it. Even Mitch McConnell!! But if that bill passed, Biden would be able to point to it and say, this is what we’ve done. Not as good for Trump. It would make sense that Trump would want to kill the bill, to give him ammo in this election. And we did see him use that ammo last night, firing away, probably to great effect, over and over and over.

Along with using Mr. Jones as a way to invoke fear in the animals, Napoleon and Squealer both also use Snowball, Napoleon’s political opponent before Napoleon ousted him with force, as a target for the animals’ discontent, anger, and as a scapegoat for the failings on the farm. By the end of the novel, there was nothing so ludicrous that they couldn’t blame Snowball for it. They blamed Snowball for having weeds among the crops, saying that he must have mixed in unwanted seed with the good seed, they blamed Snowball for somehow felling an entire windmill. Anything and everything is attributed to Snowball, and Squealer and Napoleon continually assault Snowball’s reputation and standing until it couldn’t possibly be any lower in the minds of most of the animals on the farm.

Trump uses Biden in the exact same way. Biden is Trump’s Snowball. “You’re ruining this country.” “You are the worst president in the history of the country.” Inflation is Biden’s fault. The border is Biden’s fault. Russian’s invasion of Ukraine is Biden’s fault. China is taking advantage of us because of Biden. Everything is Biden’s fault. Everything is Snowball’s fault. There is a simple source of your frustration, your anger, your ire, and it’s Joe Biden. Biden is responsible for all of it. The windmill that Snowball “destroyed” came down in a storm, because it the walls were too thin. It wasn’t built correctly. This was actually Napoleon’s fault, as Snowball was an engineer, and had designed all plans for the windmill, but by this point Snowball had been chased off and was unable to oversee the construction of the windmill. Napoleon was unable to build it properly, but he blamed Snowball for the fall of the windmill, and said that Snowball had come in the night and taken it down as an act of revenge. Trump even used this line too, in the debate last night. He suggested that Biden had undone some of his policies out of revenge. His words were, “I don’t know why he did it, I think he did it just because I approved them.” Whatever Napoleon says about Snowball, the animals believe, of course, most of them right away, and those that aren’t, after some persuation by Squealer. It’s actually amazing how easily I seem to be able to interchange Trump with Napoleon and Squealer, and Biden with Snowball, here.

What also bothered me was Trump’s language regarding Ukraine, our ally, and the only country right now who is holding back a wave of Russian aggression. They are fighting and dying to keep an authoritarian regime from expanding in power. Supporting freedom domestically and throughout the world is exactly what America is all about, if we profess to be about freedom. Preventing the world from sliding into corrupt, strongman police states, as Russia is, as China has become, as North Korea is. Trump, in front of millions, made demoralizing and negative comments about a country that is so bravely and effectively defying a side that had many advantages, in numbers of troops, in experience, in weapons and technology, and is lead by a war criminal. A country that is a US ally. To the world, Trump claimed that Ukraine was losing, Ukrainians were dying, that we were wasting money in support of them. And he claimed that he would have the war over before he was even the president. If Trump had his way, the war would have been over a long time ago, because Ukraine wouldn’t have gotten a dollar from the US. He was impeached for attempting to change the narritive on election interference, that it was Ukraine instead of Russia, and for using money that had been approved by the Senate as leverage. He was then impeached for the insurrection, impeached twice, if you will recall. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, you should be for freedom. That’s what we’re all about here, isn’t it? Russia is not exactly a free country. Go to Russian and stand on a corner and hold up a sign that says “Down with Putin.” Not even that, hold up a sign that says, “Putin is not a very nice guy.” “Putin farts in his sleep.” How long will you be able to stand there for? Go ahead and try that, let me know how it goes for you. Saying that our ally, a country fighting for democracy, was losing, which is completely not even true in any way, as they have already won, having fought so hard and cost Russia so much, those should have been painful and angering words for every American. For me, but hey, at least there was somebody out there who was quite happy to hear them. (Vladimir Putin.)

As I found when reading Animal Farm, and what I find now, is how easy it is to draw parallels between what happens in the story, and what is happening now. And watching the debate last night, we can easily map Squealer and Napoleon’s words and actions to those of Donald Trump’s, Napoleon, the authoritarian/totalitarian ruler of Animal Farm.

Watching this debate, reflecting on the words of Animal Farm, making these comparisons, has me squirming.

Something else that was news to me, I found out last night – Trumps wants to have a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A mass deportation of immigrants, a group of people who Trump considers to be to blame for the apparent destruction of our country. Hmm.. a mass deportation you say? Is that something like having an immigration force, going door to door, looking up people in lists, hunting people down? Rounding people up, putting people in camps, shipping them away to somewhere? Taking people, neighbors, friends, co-workers away from their families, from their children, from their jobs? How about before we round them up, we mark them in some way, maybe we give them little yellow stars, so that we can easily identify them, those who are responsible for the destruction of the country? And you know what, this is all reminding me of something… Yes, I think this has been done before, to great success. I remember hearing about it once, in school or somewhere. And if I remember correctly, it really worked out well for everybody, that one time when a minority group was blamed for everything, rounded up, shipped off, put into camps, taken care of. I mean, it wasn’t really good for the minorities of course, but hey, they shouldn’t have done all those bad things! And our country will be so much better without them! I can totally get behind that, we should do that for ourselves, here in America.

Between Animal Farm and current American politics, there are more parallels to be drawn. The bleating sheep (meaninglessly spewing pro-party rhetoric), Napoleon’s dogs (the Proud Boys, who Trump infamously told to “stand back and stand by”, and what do you say to your dog? Stand down.), sacrificing Boxer before retirement (killing social security, which would probably happen when Trump eliminates the payroll tax, which he apparently intends to do). Increased hardship and suffering for all via blundering policies (Napoleon’s windmill, as the animals had to work twice as hard to try and rebuild it after it had fallen, Trump’s 10% tariff on all domestic imports, Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Trump killing the payroll tax, Trump deporting 5% of our economy.)

Benjamin The Donkey

Last night I read a story called Yugao, from my Anthology of Japanese Literature. Yugao was a chapter of the great Japanese masterpiece called Genji Monogatari, which is usually (always?) translated into English as The Tale of Genji. It is considered to be Japan’s greatest work of literature, and it was written all the way back in the 11th century. Think about that, people. That’s 1000 years ago. 1000 years ago, and it slaps. And I was thinking, are there any books that we still read in Western literature that are that old? I thought of The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare stuff, but I don’t actually know when they were written. I’m going to guess 15th century. Shall we Google it? (Shakespeare, 16th century, The Canterbury Tales end of 14th century.) Don Quixote, another old Western classic, 16th century. We have Beowulf, and Beowulf is older, between 600-1000 CE. From what I just read last night in The Tale of Genji, Beowulf is really primitive in comparison. Beowulf also slaps though.

All I really wanted to say here is that Yugao was riveting and compelling, and that maybe we should be including The Tale of Genji on our lists of greatest works of literature, and I want to read the whole book.

I dismantled more Chinese Privet this morning. I needed something to get me activated, give me some enthusiasm. Seek, and ye shall find. Every time I look, I find more of it in my yard. I now have an enormous pile of trunks and branches in the driveway.

Last night I read that snippet of The Tale of Genji, but a few nights ago I read Animal Farm. You know, in high school I believe I really did say, in my English class, when we were discussing the book, or at least I definitely thought this, because it has now been ringing in my ears, I remember thinking, “Maybe this book doesn’t have a political message. Maybe there is no symbolism. Maybe he just wanted to write about animals.” Well, high school me was not very smart. At least, I didn’t know much about the world and the machinations and movements of societies. I also remember that I thought Old Man and The Sea was boring, and could not understand how this was a celebrated work of literature. I’ve also recently read that, and of course just like with Animal Farm, feel very differently about it now, but that’s how it goes. We are not always ready for what the books have to tell us, and especially I’m sure when the books are about life, and living, and you’re young and still don’t know much about that. But I read Animal Farm, after attempting again like every single night for the last month, it feels like, to try and go to sleep before midnight, and after attempting this and again laying in bed with my mind whirring, fully awake, for an hour, I opened it up, and I read it all the way through. I have gotten into the habit of testing out books, because I have picked up so many classics from an amazing used goods store here in Nashville called MacKays’s, and when I’m looking for something to read I will just grab one that I have laying around and start reading, and if it grabs me I’ll keep reading, and if not I’ll put it down and plan to come back to it when I’m ready for it. So I just picked up Animal Farm to take a little looksie, and then I didn’t put it back down until I was done. This little book that I had thougth really nothing of in high school, hit me harder this time around.

The thing about Animal Farm is that, after I was done with it, I felt very disturbed. I was disturbed, I can say, because unfortunately, it was way, way too easy to draw parallels between what happened on that farm (I mean some countries right now are fully fledged Napoleon farms, North Korea, China, Russia), and what’s happening in many countries around the world, but most unfortunately, with what’s happening here in America. In such plain and simple language, Orwell shows exactly how a population is tricked or cowed into loyalty to a ruler, the steps by which that ruler is able to establish complete control, and how it ultimately descends into conditions that are just as bad if not worse than any the animals on the farm had experienced before their revolution, in hopes of achieving a more equal and fair society. All of the mechanisms, subtle and not so subtle, the gradual degrees in which the population is subjugated, duped, placated, or cowed, until they are completely subservient to the regime, and the single ruler above all.

In the days since reading it, there’s been one character who’s stayed with me, who I’ve been thinking about, and that’s Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin is the character that really got to me, because Benjamin is exactly who I don’t want to be. Most of the animals on the farm can’t quite grasp what’s happening, the meaning of the events that are taking place, the inevitable outcomes of decisions that are being made. They may not understand at all, or they may have some reservations about changes that they can’t quite express, but their concerns are either relieved by Squealer’s sweet, compelling, and manipulative words, or they are forced into silence by Napoleon’s dogs, or they are steamrolled by the sheep, and never given the chance for public discourse. Some of the animals eventually draw lines in the sand, when pushed too far, but at that point Napoleon (the pig, ruler) has solidified his power, and has the military/police force at his command (in the form of dogs that he bred for the role), and so he can deal with them via force. A few of the other pigs are aware, and dissent, and as they are threats, are killed. Benjamin doesn’t object, doesn’t dissent, but Benjamin is aware. He knows what’s up. Benjamin is old, Benjamin is smart, Benjamin has been around for a long time, and Benjamin is cynical. His expectations are low, and he is not passionate. So, Benjamin is something like an outsider, politically, or inert. He’s not involved, does not lean one way or the other, does not offer any opinions, does not rock the boat. Benjamin is not ignorant, however – he is intelligent, he sees, he understands. He simply chooses passivity. Benjamin cares about one thing, he has no allegance to anything other than his friend, the workhorse, Boxer, and so the only time we see Benjamin show any real emotion or move to action is when Boxer is being taken to his death. Benjamin is so exasperated by the other animals’ stupidity, that they can’t understand that Boxer is not really being taken to the vet, but instead has been sold to the “knacker” to become glue, and so upset that he’s losing Boxer, that he actually does something, and shouts at the all, hey, you dumbasses, that cart says “horse killer” on it, he’s not going to the vet!!!!!! And of course they all try to save Boxer then and fail, and Benjamin goes back to being a passive bystander, now without his best friend, Boxer.

This is why Benjamin has stuck with me. Benjamin is passive, and it costs him his best friend. It probably costs him his happiness too. He’s cynical, and sad. And even though he tries to keep out of affairs and makes no waves, he cannot get out unscathed. The hens die, some of them, because they refuse to lay more eggs for the regime. Their defiance costs them their lives. The pigs die, some of them, because they voice their dissent at the meetings. Benjamin doesn’t die, because he doesn’t dissent – but he still suffers, and he suffers doubly because he loses Boxer, and because he has to live with a cynical, hopeless worldview to justify living his life of inaction.

That begs the question – would you rather resist, risking death for the cause, or would you rather comply, and live (possibly, because Boxer complied, and still he died for it), and suffer? I don’t think that Benjamin ever felt compelled to resist, though, because Benjamin didn’t care one way or the other. I think Benjamin did not really have a belief that things could be any better, as he says, which actually can be perfectly summed up by the words of a cynical friend of mine, “Life sucks, then you die.” Benjamin had no reason to act, because he didn’t think it would matter, whether Napoleon was the ruler, whether a human was the ruler, or whether Snowball, who could have potentially have been a much better ruler for their new society, was the ruler. In Benjamin’s eyes none of it mattered, because life would still suck, life would still be hard, that that was just how life was.

There were other politically inactive, politically indifferent characters, but they weren’t as aware as Benjamin. Benjamin was indifferent, inactive due to his cynicism. Moses, the raven, also didn’t care who ruled the farm, but that was because he had Sugarcandy Mountain. He was a problem for the pigs in the beginning, because while they were trying to fill the other animals’ heads with ideas about their political systems and designs for the society (which they called, Animalism), Moses was out here telling everyone about Sugarcandy Mountain, and how great Sugarcandy Mountain was, this magical place that you went when you died, and got all the sugar you ever wanted. Moses had religion. He was not interested in the movements of the animals or their society. He was outside of it. (Or, possibly, Moses himself didn’t believe in Sugarcandy Mountain, but both governments, Mr. Jones’s and Napoleon’s found his preaching useful, and so they would treat him well.) Moses was useful to Napoleon later though, I think, when things had gotten so bad that he couldn’t give them much else to work for in terms of hope, so if they couldn’t believe in a good life on the farm anymore, they could at least believe in Sugarcandy Mountain. There was the cat, who just didn’t care about anything at all, (classic cat stereotype) and there was Mollie, the white mare, who just wanted to eat sugar and have ribbons in her hair. She wanted an easy life. She didn’t care about politics, but she liked the way she was treated by Mr. Jones, because she got sugar and ribbons, so for her the previous order was just fine, and in the new one she couldn’t have her sugar and ribbons, so she went to another farm where she could.

I don’t want to be a Benjamin.

Immortality and Chinese Privet

*From 805B N 12th Street, in East Nashville my home base as of February 2024, and where I will most likely be for at least another year, until July 2025.*

I read recently about immortality projects. It was a theory by some guy as to why people try so hard to do things. They work so hard, strive in their fields, crave fame, legacy, having statues built in their honor, having works that live beyond them, as a way to achieve immortality. “Immortality” but dependent upon others to carry it on, in their memory, in their consciousness. In some way we are all immortal whether we live on in human consciousness or not, because our atoms will still exist, although independently. Matter is conserved, no matter is created or destroyed. That’s physics. So all of the little atoms that are part of you now will always be here in the universe, probably. So if you think about it like that, you are immortal, and also, you have been around for a really, really long time. You just exist now in your current form, and if you achieve anything that anyone is going to remember after you die, and leave your current form, they will just be remembering you as you were in your human form.

I guess that’s something like reincarnation, or reappropriation. I find that comforting. And also, isn’t it nice to think that you have already been in this universe for billions of years? That all of the pieces of your puzzle (at the most basic level), all of your fundamental components have been floating around and doing things here in this world for billions of years, and they will continue to do so after you die? I think that’s comforting.

It’s interesting to me that this is what I’m writing about.

I have never really had a fear of death. Maybe just because I’m young, and death still feels far off for me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. I have known some loved ones to die, my grandma, my great aunt, uncle Bob. I miss them. Pets, the hardest one being Bonnie, our black lab. I was there in her final moments at the vet’s office with my dad, and we cried like babies. It was a terrible thing, for a while, to be in a world without her, to be in a world without these people. But I guess I have always felt like, that’s just the way it goes. So we live, so we die. It’s just the natural thing. And, in a way, Grandma Marge, Kathy, Bonnie, Uncle Bob, none of them are completely dead. They live on at least in my memory. There are still photos of them, stories of them, out there. There are people still who know about them, and think about them, and remember them.

We live for a long time. Relative to other organisms, we live for a long time. So, I guess we have more time to become attached to life, and to be used to living. Many insects live short, very short lives, relative to ours. As short as 24 hours. Imagine if we lived for 24 hours? What that would feel like? We couldn’t really do it. You would have no time to learn anything, no time to recover from anything, no time to process anything, unless you could do it in an incredibly short period of time. If your capabilities were quickened, and every hour was like for us now, a year, then you could benefit from learning things, from living on something other than pure instinct. That’s what I’m getting at. Because in our long lives, we have the ability to learn, to make mistakes, to fall, and to get back up, to process, and evolve, within ourselves. Insects don’t have time for that. They really just have time for living.

The main reason that I’m thinking about insects right now is because, they are dying every day. Insects, and arthropods, the tiny creatures. Almost every day I am aware of, and even I am the perpetrator of, the death of other beings around me. In one night here, in just about 10 minutes, I killed over 20 earwigs. They were assaulting the house, and they had to be defeated. I could have captured them all, it’s true. I could have released them. I capture and release most creatures that find their way in here, but the earwigs, I won’t lie, I kill them. And I always feel bad about it, and I always apologize, and make it swift and as painless as possible. A few days ago I watched a spider that has been occupying a corner of the house for weeks, which I realize has become a kind of pet to me, and I pass by it and say hi every time I walk into my room, I watched this spider finally catch something, a large ant, and roll it up in webbing, and drink its ant juice. In recent weeks I’ve killed tens if not a hundred mosquitoes. I’ve killed a flea too. All meeting the ends of their lives. That’s a lot of death.

There was a baby possum who died in the street in front of the house. It was run over. I had to walk by its little carcass to get to my front door. That was a sad death.

We want to be immortal. We want to be remembered. To have a legacy. It makes sense. This desire pushes us to do things that are beneficial for our tribe. Creating moving works of art, technological feats, scientific breakthroughs, conquests, inspiring a revolution, being remembered as a good brother, mother, father, all of these things are good for your tribe. Maybe not good for all of your tribe, maybe not even good for yourself, in your life, and maybe not good for the other tribes, but some people outside of yourself will benefit from your immortality project, probably, unless you’re Hitler.

If you died and no one knew, and no one remembered you, so you died the ultimate death to humanity, would you care? What do you think about that? Would you be content to go quietly into the night?

Is an immortality project and the desire for human immortality unnatural? Wrong?

Kurt Cobain is dead, but in a way he is quite alive to me. I actually had to remind myself that “this is a dead man that I’m listening to.” This is a dead man who I’m seeing on my screen, this is a dead man whose voice I hear. And the other members of the band are alive, but they’re not in their 20’s, they’re not the same age as when they played these songs as I listen to them. Time has moved on, but in a way, when I listen to the music, Kurt is alive, Chad, Krist, Dave are all young. Now Kurt as a human is dead, although his atoms are still here, still around on Earth, all of the bits and pieces of him haven’t gone anywhere.

I write for immortality. I write for legacy. I never really decided to do this, I just do it. It is a natural desire that I have. I have many journals now, I’ve kept over the years, and I write with other people in mind, my family, my future. I don’t think I do it because I care about being remembered, but actually, maybe that’s so. I thought I always did it because I just thought they would think it was interesting, this guy, their great great grandpa, or great Uncle, some Swanson in the line, some distant member of the bloodline, this is what he was getting into, this is what he was thinking about, this is what he was working on, and these are the events and details of his life, at that time, as he lived it. History. I think that’s interesting stuff, me personally. I write with the thought that someday, somebody could read all of this and know who I was, in a way, and what I thought about, how I lived, what my struggles were, what kinds of adventures I had.

I dismantled a Chinese Privet tree with my bare hands. I can see the headless, torn trunk from the window. That’s why I’m thinking about it. It’s an invasive species here in Tennessee, (I’m finally getting comfortable spelling Tennessee), as I recently learned volunteering at a local park. A really, really successful invasive species. Our fearless leader, Ian, said that I would see it everywhere now, and he was right. What has been seen cannot be unseen. It’s all over the place, including in my small yard, all along the fence of our driveway, between our house and the neighbors. I pulled it all up, tore it, four or five plants, and then there was the big mamba jamba. Chinese Privet can get big, like 8+ feet tall big, although it’s not thick. It’s lithe and springy. It was interesting that there were no birds’ nests in the branches, I don’t know if they could even support them. I think about that because a tree of similar size right next to this one had two birds’ nests in it, but the juniper had none. The thing about at least this invasive in particular is that it is extremely dominant now, but provides very little ecological value (so I’ve read). It doesn’t really do anything for the environment, it doesn’t feed anybody, and it seems like it doesn’t shelter anybody, and it bodies out other native plants that do. So it’s obviously terrifying to see literally thousands and thousands of Chinese Privets thriving all over Shelby Park, all over Nashville. The last one in my yard, it was a big one, about 8 feet tall, and I just left it there after this first day of juniper removal. A few days later though, I was caffeinated, I was inspired, and I was ready to do some damage. So I twisted it all apart. I had no tools, and just had to use my bare hands, but they did the job, although it was hard work. It takes a lot to get a Chinese Privet to snap. It would probably be impossible to take down in a storm, because it has really nebulous, sprawling roots, and is so incredibly flexible. I found that the branches would break when I bent them all the way back 180 degrees, and only then. But they would break, and that was the way to break them. You just had to keep bending, keep bending, keep bending. The actual trunk of the tree, it’s like an inch in diameter, I’m guessing from looking at it from the window, I couldn’t take down because it’s grown into the chain link fence. It’s kind of weaved in there.

There are other invasive plants here, another one is Japanese Honeysuckle, that is really common. I’m not confident in IDing that one, but if it is what I think it has been, it is also completely everywhere, almost as prolific as the Chinese Privet. I think there is actually one right across from me right now, because I just Googled a photo of it, and looked out of my window, and see what appears to be exactly what the Google has just shown me.

Aaaaand, I found it. Well, I really think I did. It wasn’t what I was looking at from across the window though, that’s something else. I kept scouring and I found it after much hunting, one large vine. It took me about 30 minutes here to decide if it really was Japanese Honeysuckle. Part of knowing what something is, is knowing what it isn’t. If you know what other plants it could be it makes it a lot easier to identify them. That’s why I don’t feel so confident in identifying plants yet, because I just don’t know many plants. So I don’t really know what else is out there, if there are any lookalikes, any trickery. But it seems that there are two native honeysuckles in Tenneessee and neither of them really look like the Japanese Honeysuckle, and it did seem to match the photos almost perfectly. It’s much easier to ID things when there are berries and flowers. If it was in bloom this would have been a done deal in a minute.

In Japan there is a plum tree that looks a lot like the sakura (cherry) trees. Similar leaves, similar flowers, similar size, and for a long time I thought the tree outside of my apartment complex in Ozu was a sakura tree. It was actually a plum tree. You can be easily duped, but there was a good tell if you knew it, which was that the sakura trees have a distinct horizontal striping pattern on the bark, and the plum trees don’t. There are a few tells, but that was the one I looked for because it’s so obvious.

source: https://vcbf.ca/2014/03/27/plum-versus-cherry-trees-how-to-tell-the-difference/

I’m enjoying writing for you. I’m enjoying writing for me, too. I think that if I enjoy it, you will enjoy it too. I feel that way about art. Generally, if you like it, other people will like it too. Your taste probably determines how many people will like it. If you have a broader taste, or more niche, but at least if you like what you’re making, however broad or niche the appeal could be, somebody else is going to like it too. I write this because I do think, as some other creators probably do, “Will anybody actually like this?” Or, “Will anybody care about this?” And I think, if YOU do, then the answer is yes, there is at least one other person out there who is going to like it as much as you do. And of course, if you don’t like it, your creation, still there can be people who will like it. It could be the greatest work of art they have ever beheld. We probably shouldn’t get too hung up on whether anyone cares, or anyone likes our work or not at all, even though you want to. Just do your best, and be authentic, and let the people decide.

I was talking about the local park with all of the invasive Chinese Privet, where I did the volunteering. That park is called Shelby Park, and it’s a really great park. We are blessed to have it here in East Nashville. It’s huge, many square miles, (don’t ask me how many), many football fields, and has a lake, baseball fields, tennis courts, a dog park, walking trails, and one of my favorite parts, an enormous train bridge in the sky, that carries trains with literally hundreds of massive cars. So above your wonderful park with fields and forests and children playing, there is occassionally hundreds or thousands of tons of iron and steel and coal and things chugging across the sky. There are two benches on a hill that face the lake, and sitting on these benches you can see a large section of one part of the park. You can see out over the lake (maybe I should call it a large pond, it’s not big enough for lake status), and to your right you can see some flat grass areas, trees beyond, people fishing, people walking on the path down in front of you, walking around the large pond, and beyond, you can see baseball fields, cars driving around, and then further, at the edge before trees and the more forested section of park, off in the distance, you have a perfect view of the giant train bridge, above it all, and carrying the heavy, long trains. I like to sit on that bench and survey, and one time I was sitting there, and I watched a train pass, and I just marveled at it for what it was, a product of our human ingenuity, our engineering prowess. I felt like I had taken trains for granted, honestly, because you know, they’re not new technology for me, they were already commonplace and in the world when I showed up here, and I think that for the first time I really appreciated what exactly this train was doing, and after what felt like a long time, that one car after another car was passing by, I started actually counting them, because there were so many, and I counted the rest, which was something like 80, and so that train was probably carrying 200+ cars, of coal, gas, whatever else was in those cars. That one engine, all that material, thousands and thousands of pounds, and across that giant bridge, with all of its tresses and beams and metal, able to support all of those thousands of pounds of train, and that was all done by human hands, all designed and built by human hands, and human minds. Incredible.

I brought us back to Shelby Park because I wanted to tell you about the deer in the fields. There is a wild grassland field at Shelby Park that is probably about two or three football fields big. Tall grass, with wildflowers and things. And there is a pavillion there, a small viewing platform that raises a bit above the field, so you can look out over all of it. I had been to this field when I first moved here in winter, and it wasn’t much back then, kind of like a corn field is in winter, with just some leftover dead stalks of corn, the grass being all dormant, but just recently I had gone back there, and it is now completely stunning. And the best part about it were the deer. There were several deer, out among the grass, mostly hidden, but you could see the tops of their bodies, and their heads when they would raise them up, several deer on their own, out there in the grass and the flowers, munching away, and being deer. I’ve never seen deer in an environment like that, and I was there as the sun started to set, in that warm glow. It was special and beautiful. I felt like I was seeing the Earth before humanity. There was a little cottontail rabbit hanging out in the short, mowed grass around the pavillion, at the edge of the tall grass, along with a big ol’ doe, who kept giving me suspicious looks. She was keeping an eye on me, cautiously, but when people came by with their dogs, she would freeze, and kept her eyes on the dogs until they were out of sight. I’ll have to go back and get some photos of this meadow for the blog.

I’ll also have to photograph the little swamp that borders the forest and the meadow. There is a variety of interesting terrain at Shelby, truly. Between the edge and meadow, and again on the other side, there is some swamp/bog ground, with dead old tree trunks, my guess is dead from the roots drowning, and tufts of bushes and things. There was a family of deer splashing around and grazing in the swamp too.

Actually I’m calling it a swamp but I don’t think it is a swamp. I just did some Googling and now I’m sure it’s not a swamp. But is it a fen, bog, or marsh? That’s the million dollar question.

*After thinking about honeysuckles I noticed this one on a walk. One of the native honeysuckles, called Coral or Trumpet Honeysuckle (I hope I IDed it right)*

Thoughts From The Cubicle: Honking, Homicidal Urges, Jewish Man Parts the Vehicular Sea

*Bored at my cubicle. Writing from 1700 Broadway, Manhattan. 1/11/24, 3-something pm.*

I’m going a little crazy here. I need a wheel. Like a hamster wheel. I need that thing. I would be running on it right now. I would be running so fast. Then, I would get tired, and I would go over to my water tower drinker thing, and drink some water, and then hop back on the wheel, and run again. What could be more fun than a treadmill? A giant, circular treadmill. I’m so into that. Someone design that right now. Cubicle hamster wheels. For humans. I’m so in. Give me 10% of the profits for the idea. For just one year. You can keep the rest. I don’t need a lot to live on. Just enough. Just enough from my human hamster wheel invention. And people will say, what did you do for your monies? And I’ll say, I proposed the idea of the human hamster wheel, the now world-wide office phenomenon. And they’ll say, that’s great. That was a great idea. Thank you for your great contribution to society.

(I’ve had a lot of coffee.)

I would settle for a treadmill. A standing treadmill desk. I proposed that many times to my senseis in the teacher staff room, when I was teaching in Kumamoto. I once piled up books and actually did stand at my desk, and of course it was awkward and attracted a lot of attention. I was the only teacher standing at their desk in a room of 40, 50 people. And those desks are not cubicles. There are no barriers. You are side-by-side. So there I was, lording over everyone, with my laptop quite precariously placed on a tower of books, typing away. That experiment didn’t last long, I have to say. Too risky, too distracting. I was always doing something to attract attention in that office, not that I was trying to. It just so happened that often I would do things like build a standing desk tower out of books or eat large raw carrots at my desk (like “Bugs Bunny”). It just happened that way. But I enjoyed that brief stint with my standing desk. It would have been even better if I was walking at the same time. Even better, if I was running, on a giant circular wheel. The human hamster wheel.

I have to write comedic material. I have to exercise my imagination. It is very important for my soul and spirit. If I am a very sick man, comedy is the only thing that can save me. I have to laugh. Otherwise, it is great suffering. That must be why New York is famous for comedy. It makes a lot of sense. You have to have some laughs or you’ll lose it. (Your sanity, that is. If you ever had it.) You just can’t take it otherwise.

Last night on my walk to the local grocery store Shoprite, I witnessed another insanity inducing spectacle, as I do on every walk. This absurd spectacle was a thick Jewish man, in full black navy suit, nice shoes, little round hat (kippah), talking on the phone, a man of business, a man who clearly has some sense. This man was across from me at THE most dangerous intersection on my walk to Shoprite, which is fraught with dangerous intersections, because every intersection in NYC is dangerous – but this intersection in particular is dangerous because it’s underneath a train, with pillars that can obscure view of pedestrains, and with many pedestrians, with small lanes separated from big lanes by pillars, and with 5 streets going into it, with one of them coming in diagonally, so the cars have to fork left or right.. There’s a lot happening at this crazy intersection, a lot of ways for it to all go wrong. Ladies and gentlemen, I could spend hours, hours upon hours upon hours reguiling to you the amazing and extraordinary things I have seen these New York city drivers do. There’s almost nothing they won’t do. No action too outrageous, nothing too disgraceful, and nobody to stop them. First, it is horrifying. Then, it is astounding. It is fascinating. But mostly, it is horrifying.

They will honk at the drop of a hat. They will honk not at the drop of a hat. They will honk at you for parking. They will honk at you for turning. They will honk at you for stopping at a stop sign, they will honk at you one single millisecond after the light turns green and you haven’t slammed on the gas, they will honk if they can’t go anywhere for any reason, say, an EMT car that has stopped for a medical emergency and is loading someone in a stretcher onto the ambulance (saw this two nights ago), and they will honk as a form of personal expression. A beautiful, poetic expression, of anger, of joy, of love, of life. On a normal Thursday, last week, over a 24 hour period, I estimated that there were between 200-300 honks happening in the streets around my apartment on Avenue H, south Flatbush, Brooklyn. Between 200-300 honks. With that, you are also guaranteed at least one car alarm a day, and no less than 10 total minutes combined of sirens. I hear every one of these honks, every one of these sirens, and every car alarm. Peppered throughout, there are also random explosions that sound like gunshots or fireworks, but they aren’t – they’re just people’s motors, you know, exploding. That’s fine though, because that makes those people feel special and powerful and cool, and what, am I just going to say someone is an asshole because they make little explosion gunshot noises every day so that they can feel powerful cool and special? No, no. I wouldn’t deny them that, and I wouldn’t deny anyone their little teddy bear that they need to snuggle up with at night to keep the loneliness at bay.

The average length of a honk varies, depending on their purpose, just like with bird calls. Mainly, length of honk corrolates with rage/exasperation level of the driver, and can be used as a guage of the strength of the offense of the offender. (My hypothesis, at least.) Between 0.5-2 seconds is the average, but is not uncommon to hear a honk that is over 5 seconds long. If you get that far with it, that means the offender is really messing up, and/or the honker is really angry. Now, a 5 second honk may not sound that long, guys n’ gals, but let me tell you – it is, and if you don’t think it is, and even if you do, I want you to count to 5 for me right now. Count the Mississippi way, count properly. 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, 4 Mississippi, 5 Mississippi. Ok. Now read that again, and play a honk sound in your mind. Imagine that someone is honking that entire time. Time is a relative thing. When you hear someone honk for 5 seconds, you realize that 5 seconds is a very long time. In honk time, 5 seconds is long. I hear 5 second honks often, probably every other day. And I can truthfully tell you that I’ve heard honks of up to 15 seconds. When it’s that long, anything over 5 seconds, you can only help to marvel at it. How angry can they be? How long will they go for? When will they call it? What a honk, what a fucking honk! There is something marvelous about it.

Now, why do these Brooklyn drivers do this? It’s a good question. If they’re here driving in Brooklyn, chances are that they live here in Brooklyn. They must know that there are potentially hundreds of people around who will hear their honk. They are certainly aware of the great detriment to everyone that is rampant, unchecked noise pollution. They undoubtedly have read all of the many scientific articles that have been written about the effects of noise pollution on human health, on child development, on mental health, on stress and anxiety levels, blood pressure, and such. I am positive that they are well acquainted with the facts. And knowing all of this, still, they honk. This is really an incredible thing. What could explain it?

I will tell you, my hypothesis. After careful consideration, and much contemplation, I can say that with high probability… They’re angry. Yes, they are in fact angry. They don’t always have to be, they may just be annoyed, they may even be trying to be helpful, but I would say in most cases, these honks are laden with rage. That is part of it, yes, but there is something else yet, that plays a bigger part. More than rage, I suspect, is that fundamentally, these people are unintelligent. Yes, unfortunately they may just be dumb, downright stupid, plain and simple. It may be general unintelligence, or it may be anger-induced stupidity, as anger does shut down your prefrontal cortex, and prevents you from having any logical, reasoning thought – however, whether they are all the time stupid, or just stupid while the horn is on, at the time of them honking that horn, they are in most cases, dumb. It is a sobering fact, yes, because it means that of course, many of these people that I share this community with, my brothers and sisters of America, don’t have much going on for them in the brain department, but it’s important to know, because then you can understand them somewhat better, and you see that honking isn’t entirely their fault. Like a baby that craps in its own diaper, it just doesn’t know any better. It can’t understand. And the anger, the anger is understandable. There is quite a lot of anger here. Really I have never witnessed so much horrible screaming, shouting, swearing, and fighting in my life. Crushing poverty, abysmal living conditions, and rampant mental illness may have something to do with it, but surprisingly there haven’t been any studies done to link these together, and so we just can’t say for sure. My roommate played for me a recording he took of a couple fighting at his last apartment complex, also in Flatbush, only a few streets over from where I was living. It sounded like they were right outside the door, but he said they were in their room, one floor up. I have never heard such horrible screaming and fighting in my life. And, what would you know, the man murdered someone the next month! Now you know, if that man gets behind the wheel, he’s honking that horn. He’s honking that horn all day and all night.

I was at the apartment one day, it was 10 o’clock sharp on a beautiful, crisp Monday morning, and for thirty solid minutes, there was an extraordinary, unparalleled and unprecedented honk-fiesta happening down in the street outside of my window. I had a wounded leg, or I would have gone down and witnessed up-close what was happening. I had to satisfy myself by watching from the window. I observed this spectacle from my sixth floor window perch, and upon looking out into the street, saw immediately what the problem was. Someone seemed to have either abandoned their car in the middle of the street, or was just sitting in it, parked sideways, completely plugging the street and preventing anyone from getting through. In some other places where there are rules on the road and people know about them, this may be a surprise, but here, that is nothing out of the ordinary. I wouldn’t bat an eye at that. I wouldn’t expect any of the other drivers to be stymied by such a conundrum either, but alas, several cars on either side had been caught in this trap, and were sitting there, throwing up their hands, and honking. Honking frequently, honking aggressively, honking exasperatedly, at this inanimate object that we aren’t even sure if had a human in it or not. I’ll assume there was a human in there, but they were clearly unresponsive. This sideways car was so exasperating, so styming for the drivers of south Flatbush, Brooklyn, that they spent an hour honking at it, honk, honk, honking away at the problem, chipping away at it one honk at a time. I don’t know how the situation was resolved in the end. I couldn’t stand there all day. But I’m sure that with certainty the car was moved only because of the great courage and vigilance of the Brooklyn honking army.

In defense of the drivers of Brooklyn, along with acknowledging their anger, and their low intelligence, I think they don’t actually know that there are any laws, rules, or regulations related to driving at all. Again, like babies crapping themselves, they’re just ignorant. They probably just bought a nice shiny car from the car store that they can’t afford, grabbed the keys, started it up, and drove it right off the lot onto Coney Island Boulevard, and are having a grand ol’ time parking on anything that is pavement, slamming the big button in middle of the wheel that makes a fun loud noise, stopping the car and turning around wherever they are the instant they realize they’ve made a wrong turn, and all of those other fun things you get to do when there are literally no rules on the road at all. But it’s not their fault. They simply don’t know any better, or can’t understand. And who’s going to tell them? Not the gov’ment. The gov’ment has bigger fish to fry. I don’t know what they are frying, exactly. But don’t worry folks, they’re frying something big, don’t you worry about it.

I have never had homicidal rage before. I can tell you that honestly. I am a mild mannered individual. I have never wanted to kill anybody. That is, I had never wanted to kill anybody before I moved to New York City. Oh boy, the fantasies I have now! What I would do to these honkers. What wouldn’t I do to these honkers! Rocket launcher, RPG, car bombs, grenades, AK47, just a straight up katana to the heart, death by shuriken. Climbing onto the hood of the car, smashing through the window, and stabbing them in the chest with a beautiful gleaming katana. I know, it sounds horrible. I don’t like writing this. (Ok, I do.) Drop a grenade from the window, watch it fall with glee, blow them all up. That’s one of my favorite fantasies. Stand in the street, wait a few seconds for the next honking offender, and just unload on them with your AK. I would really love to fire a predator missle at them, you know, from Call Of Duty. You get a 5 kill streak and you get to fire a missle from a Reaper drone, 5000 feet up, a missle guided by thermals, but in this case, it would be guided by sound, and go straight to the worst offender. I know, it’s bad. But you have no idea how much satisfaction it brings me to write this. Well, unless you live in Brooklyn, and then you do. You just don’t understand until you’ve been there. It’ll drive you insane.

It’s not that I want them to die. Well.. I do. But it’s not like I want to kill them. But.. dammit, I do want to kill them. Mostly, I want the honking to stop, immediately, and preferably, violently. To send a message. What I’m trying to say is that, I think, at a certain point you revoke your right to live. Do you know what I mean? Nobody by default deserves to die. They have to do something that is bad enough to warrant their death, like honk for 5 seconds straight, or engage in and perpetuate an infuriating and abominable honking culture. You honk for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, just honk too much, when you really, can’t be honking anymore, and.. ok, yeah, you can die now. You are now eligible for dying. Someone has basically every right to kill you. Honestly, it wouldn’t be unwarranted. What else can they do? If you push people far enough, they simply don’t have another choice. The gov’ment is frying other fish. They aren’t going to stop you. It’s up to me and my sonic predator missle. It’s vigilante justice. Most Brooklyners would have no problem with it, I can tell you that. My roommate told me a story of a lady in the neighborhood dropping her air conditioning unit onto the hood of a maniacal honker’s car from her window. Everybody cheered. Such a heartwarming story. Send that woman a box of grenades.

My homicidal urges always pass, and are replaced with pleading. “Please, stop honking, please. Please, stop, please, I’m begging you. No more honking, please.” I have also tried to mandate a no-honking time. These appeals and mandates are decreed from the window. “Hey, no..! No..! Bad! This is no honking time!” I have also shouted words of encouragement. “Yes, good!!!! Keep honking!!! It’s working!!! Woo!!!!” It’s cathartic for me. Just like honking, you may say. I know it, god dammit. I know. Once upon a time, after a particularly homicidal urge had passed, and I was still fantasizing about vigilante justice, the great idea of Anti-Honk Man entered my mind. Like Spiderman, fighting crime, Anti-Honk Man fights honking. He is the superhero that New York City desperately needs. He would be an enormous viral success. We could have Anti-Honk Woman, gender-neutral, whatever, it could be a dog, Anti-Honk Dog, whoever, whatever is willing to rise to the occasion. Anti-Honk Dog can be the sidekick, and has incredible powers of stopping all honking offenders from ever honking again, by tactfully placing car bombs in serious offenders’ cars, and leaving death notes that say “Death 2 Honkers!!!”, or, less homicidally, slashing tires, paintballing cars, etc. There are many ways that Anti-Honk Dog can carry out vigilante justice to the benefit of all Brooklynites. I had another great idea, (unfortunately, again homicidal) that I believe could immediately reduce honking in NYC by 99.9%, and potentially be a great and subtle form of eugenics, which would be that every car be outfitted with a bomb, that will explode upon the horn being held down for more than 2 seconds at once, and/or more than 3 honks a week. Everyone could have two warnings, like a three-strikes you’re out type deal, where the first time it would say, “Strike one: Your car could have exploded right now!” and then, “Strike two: Next time, you’re dead!” And then the third time, “Say goodbye, motherfucker.” Explosion. Oh my god, it would be great. Except it might kill me, an unoffending pedestrian, so we would need another creative solution. The driver’s chair is blasted with 1000000000 billion volts, instantly vaporizing the driver. Yes, that’s great. Maybe a little too painless for a Brooklyn honker, but yes, it would work.

My god this city has turned me into a sick and twisted individual. I have to get out of here.

I have to finish my story about the Jewish businessman crossing the intersection. I think you will really understand how amazing this is, now that you know about how horrible the honking is, and let me say again, I am a mild-mannered individual, NOT homidical. Brooklyn has made me so. I hear honking when I’m sleeping. I am honked awake, in the middle of the night, in the morning. Honking is my alarm clock. Honking tucks me in at night. Honking while I’m pissing, honking while I’m showering, honking while I’m eating, honking while I’m thinking, honking while I’m strolling about the neighborhood. 200-300 honks a day, remember that number people. 200+ jarring, sonic attacks daily.

Our Jewish businessman was crossing this 5 road dangerous intersection, while on the phone. This guy, as he casually chats, swaggers right up to the intersection. I’m watching him from the get go. He starts to walk out into the street. The cars are coming, full on, but so far he’s only walked on the side street, separated, still where cars could go, but not like it’s the main street, which most cars coming from the diagonal are now barreling through. As he comes to this larger street, he does not glance up, he only somewhat slows his stride, and I’m watching in awe, because it looks like, what this man is about to do, is he’s about to attempt to walk through full traffic, like it’s nobody’s fucking business. And you know what? That’s what he did. This man parted the Red Sea. He waited for a small break in the cars, and he walked out, raising his hand up, casually, keeping it low, like he was saying, “Hey bro, just a heads up, I’m crossing now. Thanks.” And he never dropped his conversation on the phone. This man just halted the world for himself, ground at least seven cars to a stop so that he could cross the intersection on a green light, and that’s a crazy thing. His audacity, his power. I envied him. I watched, jaw agape, watched him walk away, like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just pulled off the most impressive feat in Brooklyn that night. This event alone was amazing to witness, but there was something about it that made it even more so. The truly unbelievable thing was not watching a man simply waltz through a high traffic intersection so casually and confidently as this Jewish businessman did. No, the amazing thing was this. In this situation, of a man halting all traffic, thrusting himself out in front of cars moving through a green light, forcing an unpredictable stop from the drivers, putting his own safety at risk, with at least seven cars involved, witnessing, being inconvenienced – in such a situation where honking is actually, 100% justified, and reasonable, and useful.. There was not a single honk.

This event marked a paradigm shift for me. It’s a different set of rules, out here in New York City. It’s a different world.

On the way back from Shoprite, I was waiting for a truck to stop at and pass through a stop sign. Of course I never expect anyone to actually stop at a stop sign, and never to let me walk through a crosswalk. I understand, this is a different set of rules. But the guy in the truck, he didn’t go through. He had the window rolled down, and he was looking at me, and I looked up at him, and he said, with kindness, “Go ahead.” I was shocked. Like a loser kid who a girl has noticed on the playground, or a beaten-down dog that gets a pet. I could hardly believe it, it was like a dream. “Thanks,” I said. And I crossed, and he didn’t run me over.