Who is the You that thinks It knows Who It is?
By Billy | June 19, 2011
I love reading about how people don’t do enough for themselves and for the world. I absolute adore getting fired up and hating a system, loathing a process, or grinding my teeth in the general direction of some backwards thing nobody (but me, of course) realizes or cares about. I freaking eat that up.
I haven’t written much lately because I have been making games, playing with dolls, dressing up like women from the 1900s (that was only once), building a banjo, writing plays, and reading. I just started to read an article online about how the environmental movement needs to change because it has become stale, and I actually managed to click the little X and back away. I’m not going to elaborate more on what needs to change or why I didn’t like myself reading that damned delicious article.
I’m going to go put my pen to paper and make things happen. In the past I have usually waited for ideas or poems or words to strike me, and I hope to Gods that I have a pen nearby, and then I decide if it’s good or not and take it or leave it. This trend is coming to an end. Most of the stuff I make and love, and most of the stuff I see and love, I hardly believe came from me or any other human I know. You can find innumerable quotes by masterful artists who say they are merely the mouthpiece of the art, which seems to exist outside of them. Michelangelo said that David existed in the marble, and his job was merely to bring David out. Is he possibly saying that David existed in some ethereal realm and Mikey happened to stumble on him? I think so.
Ancient Indian thought considered humans to have 6 senses. The extra one (extra only according to us in the Occident) was the mind. I have read of thoughts being like radio waves and the mind / possibly brain being like radios. I’m going to go grab a coat hanger and stand in funny positions until the image and sound come in perfectly clear. You can’t stumble onto (or over) anything worth while if you’re not taking a walk.
Topics: This is my life, Utterly Random | Comments Off on Who is the You that thinks It knows Who It is?
Harald and Ausland part 1
By Billy | June 1, 2011
This is Tale of Harald and Ausland as it has been handed down. The events in the Tale seem to take place shortly after where The Story of Rumble and the Iron Phoenix had left off.
It was in the Long Days, when the world was Small. Even in the first few adventures upon the Small, it is said that Ausland had been struck by lightning. Naturally, he became removed from time and upon his body came a deep sleep. Although he was of different mettle than most, even Ausland had been left troubled by this time divorce; and ever after he had a changed demeanor. There lived in him seeds of thoughts he did not plant (which, of course, is frequent among those pricked by Thunder’s bolts) and older trees of thoughts no longer bearing fruit. It wasn’t long after that one could catch, even if only with ones eyes, the young Ausland wandering aimlessly, possibly frantically, through the streets and streams of Small, blade drawn and unaware of what he saught.
It was in this manner that Ausland came upon the House of Harald. Harald was none other than the Earthghost’s Army King. (To read more about the Earthghost social structure, read the Stronghold of Logmoss) No one knows what course Ausland would have followed had he known who Harald was, where Harald lived, or even that Harald was, as the strange inhabitants of Small had correctly and frequently explained, indeed a real being. This story is not about what Ausland didn’t know or didn’t but might have done, rather it is about what has happened, or at least what is said to have happened.
Blade in hand, Ausland came upon the Fortress of Harald, the King of the Earthghost Army and found it rather to his liking. He believed he could use it for his purposes and whims and thought little of the effort involved to take it by force. This he set up camp at the base of the Fortress, drew his quick and nimble blade, Augusta, and began cleaving with both hands both upon any living creature and the very Fortress itself. It wasn’t clear to him who was friend or foe, who was ferocious and who was fearful, or who was fighting and who was fleeing. These were of no consequence, it seems, because Ausland had his mind made up; whatever thoughts were growing in him had him believing he was entitled to this object of his desire.
There seemed to him to be no coordinated counter defenses. Rather, it seemed that everyone in the place was self interested, and motivated for different reasons. This, in particular, seemed to Ausland to be a good reason to bring about a new sense of order in the region. Thus, he cleaved and killed, sliced, and hacked through whatever he could to accomplish his goal. Dragons of many different breeds found their way to the stage, and yet Ausland prevailed and was not bested. Eventually the day grew tired, and so did Ausland’s whims. Thus he buried Augusta beneath the battle field and marked her resting spot with secret runes, waiting for the opportune day to come and pursue the siege. It was with joy and back ache of a day well spent that Ausland returned home to his adoptive family, just in time for dinner.
Topics: Works of Fiction | Comments Off on Harald and Ausland part 1
You’re not going to die tomorrow
By Billy | May 27, 2011
Lately I’ve been having deja vu like experiences where I get to vividly imagine being where I am at some moment, but to watch it as if it were hundreds of years before. Yesterday, for example, I walked along the city wall with the smell of horse shit and the sounds of children laughing, the Lainsitz rolling, and dogs barking filled the air. I am certainly not the first person to ever stand exactly where I stood and experience exactly those sounds. In fact, since 1292 when the wall was built, I bet more people than I could count have experienced these things right in that spot. As I stood there, I chose to experience joy. But as I have been exploring this old world and contemplating the past, I often come to the thought that it might someday get boring. Especially when I am mentally time travelling from 1311 to 2011, I think of how long that wall or tree or house or place that people usually drink beer at has been there. I occasionally imagine being there for all of it and thinking that surely I’d get tired of it someday. Today as I read JRR Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion,” I began to contemplate the existence of the immortal elves in Tolkiens cosmology. Elves can live forever, and even after their death they are gathered up at the end of times with a different type of life. I suppose a little like some types of Jews. For this reason, they experience living in a vastly different way, often finding it difficult to understand why humans find a single year of their life so important.
This got me to pondering.
You’ve probably been told once or twice to live life like there’s not tomorrow. Aside from that alliteration being difficult to type on the first try, the message in this advice is probably never fully contemplated. Even if we were to analyze it to its fullest, I don’t think we’d end up with anything worth participating in. Usually when someone chooses to live like there’s no tomorrow, they’re really choosing to live like tomorrow doesn’t matter as much as today. That means you can drink more, spend more, eat more, sow your emotional or sexual energy less responsibly, or whatever other form of indulgence you prefer, all at the expense of tomorrow. It’s all ok, though, because tomorrow’s opinions, feelings, thoughts, and ideals are less valuable than todays, we say. We choose to value today’s pleasure more than tomorrows debt, hangover, relationship trouble, etc. It’s a world of constant inflation; spend now because the currency (time, energy, actual money, etc.) is getting less valuable as we degrade it every day.
Now I’ve beaten the inflation of value into the ground, let’s consider the exact opposite of living like you’ll die tomorrow. What about living like you’ll not die in a very long time, which is more realistic than the option of dying tomorrow. Moreover, what if you live like you’ll never die. How would you live today differently if you knew you’d be around in 200 years. How would you live today if you’d already been around for 200 years. Let’s not even think about the possible torment of immortality. 200 years is enough.
Two hundred years. That would mean I was born in the 1780s. (By the way, I was exploring my friends newly purchased, very old farm house in eastern Kentucky about a year ago and we found a box filled with letters written during World War 2. Among other cool things there was an invitation to a “Nineties Party.” At such a party, guests — living in the 1940s — were to dress up as if they were living in the 90s. [think about it for a moment] Themed parties are a very old tradition, aparently.) Today I drank coffee outside a shop sitting under a great big umbrella in the rain on a supposedly dreary day in Weitra, Austria. It was nice to sit there and hear the rain, it was nice to struggle with a new words (nothing says foreigner like snapping your fingers while trying to remember the word for “pay.” I’d like now to…uh..uhh.. ), it was nice to read about made up legends of love and hate that touch the soul in stirring ways. Was I living my life to the fullest today? Was I living like it was my last day?
I think if it were my last day, I’d be pretty darn happy with it. No, I didn’t experience sublime euphoric feelings due to a flood of endorphins in my brain from doing something exciting, and I wouldn’t make a very good movie right now, but it was still a good day. Even more than that, since all probability and every day of my life so far leads me to believe that tomorrow will be another day, I don’t have to pretend I need to cram every good experience in to this short 24 hour period. In a way, living like today is not anywhere close to your last day, you have the opportunity to honor this very day even more. You allow today and tomorrow to actualize to their full potential, and will probably grow to learn from yesterdays more fully than if you looked at yesterday is an experience to top with todays thrills.
When you have a long life ahead of you, tomorrow is not a deadline, but just another one of the infinite stepping stones you have. There is no pressure to dramatically change your life in radical ways and check it off your list before you die, but there is total freedom to do so. This way, you’re going places because you want to rather than because you must.
After being around for hundreds of years, you’ll probably get tired of action movies, good computer graphics, and the so called accomplishments of human beings. I’m just thinking. You’ll probably be much more interested in things that are completely out of control of a single human. I think of my life in terms of years, and sometimes in terms of 5 years, and very infrequently in terms of decades. My church homegroup in Harrisonburg had several people who were 60+ years old and told their life story. There were a few times when they said, “so for that decade I lived in such-and-such country. Then we moved to…” That was it. 10 years summed up in a single sentence. The same space on the timeline took me an hour to talk about took them less than a minute! I imagine after hundreds of years one would begin to think in processes. Eras would turn like seasons. Processes would begin to show themselves everywhere. Seeing how things change over hundreds of years would be a project worth studying.
I think there is something to this. I don’t think it matters that we wont be able to see how the garden will look in 300 years, I think it’s still possible to enjoy the processes that happen everywhere. Our 100 years are simply a microcosm of the infinity that the Universe has existed. You’ll get through a thousand years of living by learning to love every raindrop, and I think you’ll get through your 100 years by learning to have the same awe as if you’d seen them for a hundred hundred years.
The other thing about living as if you’ll live forever is that you’ll probably keep your space a little neater than if you were just going to drop out soon. Although your body may come to an end tomorrow, it almost assuredly isn’t the last day for everyone else. You will continue on well past your last day with the legacy you leave. Do you want to leave one that says, “I don’t care about anything but what my body experiences while my brain can function,” or do you want to leave a legacy that stands for something more than your brain and your body.
Tangentially, I really love that children can play with a toy motor cycle and upshift their imaginary gears eternally.
Also, as promised:
Moskauer Muffins. Muffins, by the way, is a loan word pronounced exactly the same in German as in English. Thank god.
With rose schnapps.
Topics: This is my life | Comments Off on You’re not going to die tomorrow
Die Besten Muffins
By Billy | May 23, 2011
I discovered a book yesterday titled, “Die Besten Muffins.” I am having a hard time saying the title because I’m pretty sure it should be pronounced, “dee best in moofins.” I can’t say moofins instead of muffins. That aside, the pictures in this book have rekindled my love of muffins. I used to eat so many muffins a week. I have eaten so many pounds of muffins in my life. I don’t even want to think about it. Actually, I do, because those gigantic Price Club muffins are damn fine.
Mmm.
Ok, done thinking about muffins for now. It’s time to think about moofins. I have been looking for things to do here in Austria, things I will feel rather good about as I look back on my year, my life, and my day. Moofins are a funny starting point. Let’s go.
I have been doing quite a bit of research on quite a few different topics over the past few weeks. How to turn areas that humans have accidentally turned into deserts back into forests, how to turn wood and rotten vegetables into perfect gardening soil in half a year, how to play a C Major 7 with a supended 4th on the guitar, what the German word for precipitious is… things like that. During my stumblings through this information, I came across a funny number. I think it was on a TED.com talk about the chemicals in our brains that help us feel motivated or unmotivated. Anyway, the number is 10. 10 years.
It takes 10 years for somebody to become an ‘expert’ in something. This is, according to a supposed ‘expert’ talking on the internet, a number recognized by many people who are ‘experts’ when it comes to brains. After 10 years with something, you might be an expert. Expert in this case is defined as having the ability to contribute new and innovative things to the fundamentals of the craft. You can innovate while improvising on a guitar while you’ve only played it for 5 years, but perhaps after 10 years, you will be able to really innovate the entire playing experience. You’ll throw in turns and changes you couldn’t purposefully add before. I don’t know how it works since I’m not an expert at music, but I suppose I can see a difference between myself, and say, John Mayer or Jimi Hendrix. I don’t think I’d say I am an expert at anything, but I have been doing stuff for more than 10 years, so I do believe I have the ability to innovate and create.
Anyway, I think that 10 year idea might match up with Malcolm Gladwell’s idea, based on a study by Anderes Ericsson that basically says if you’re going to be an excellent-at-anything-person, you’ve got to practice for 10,000 hours.
Strangely, 10 years is easier for me to contemplate than 10,000 hours, even though 10,000 hours is not even 20% of 10 years. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a choice to participate in 10 years. Wayne Gretzkey didn’t play ice hockey for 10,000 hours straight, he probably slept at least while the ice was getting resurfaced, since he played pretty much constantly all the time forever as a kid. Maybe he’s a bad example. Anyway. You have 10 years ahead of you, hopefully, so what are you going to gain expertese in while it happens? That’s what I figure. (I did the math just now, which I probably shouldn’t have. But it really comes out to about 3 hours of work a day for 10 years to amount to 10,000 hours. So instead, I’m just not going to worry about it.)
What do you want to be an expert at 10 years from now? Right now, I’m living with Austrian kids who are about 10 years younger than I. Their parents are a bit more than 10 years my senior. I see these kids spending their time playing computer games and wish I could put the weight of wasted years of computer games in their souls, to motivate them to invest time in something else. Kids rarely think in terms of 10 years in the future, so I don’t quite expect them to make plans now for when they’re 20somethings. But then again, playing guitar with Sophie is inspiring. She has a really natural knack for playing the guitar, and when she’s my age she’ll be amazing at it, if she keeps it up.
The juxtaposition I live in the midst of has me wondering: if I could go back and meet my 12 +(11/12) year old self, what would I tell him to become an expert in over the next ten years. And when I travel back in time to meet my 22 + (11/12) year old au-pair in Austria self when I’m 33, what will I tell myself to study for the next ten years.
Are there any similarities there? Do I wish I had become an expert in something for today, or do I wish it for the next ten years. And is my plan to become an expert in the next 10 years because I want to be an expert in that thing now or because I think I will want to be that expert in ten years. For the same reason I didn’t start becoming an Expert at some acoustic instrument 10 years ago, I don’t have an easy answer about what to invest in now. We never know what we want want our lives to amount to 10 years from any part of our lives, with the exception of possibly someplace in the very last 9 of them.
I have goals right now; things I want to be really great at. I don’t know if I want to devote 10,000 hours to them in the next ten years (3 hours a day, every day, no exceptions!), but they are things I want to invest in nonetheless.
I want to be a good story teller, for example. I secretly wish that I could convey intense emotions about how I feel, or how I want other people to feel, in a memorable story that I don’t perform an intense exegesis on afterwards.
I want to know how nature works more intimately. I want to train my mind to notice subtle differences in plants and animals, be able to identify animals by their bones, plants by their leaves or flowers, and know what is edible and inedible. I also want to know how to find water and track animals. I want to be experienced in grafting, transplanting, breeding, and sowing.
I want to be a polyglot. I don’t doubt that this will be accomplished in the next 10 months, actually. My real goal is to be an excellent language learner. I have earnestly set a goal to be able to learn words and their meanings after only reading (and writing?) it and it’s definition once. It is interesting to note that since I have defined this goal so delicately, written it down in my journal, and written out the steps it will require for me to reach this goal, I identify it as a goal I have “set” rather than just one I “have.” The other goals listed are things I “have.” Hm. After I accomplish the specific goal I’ve set, I “have” the goal of using that accomplished skill to learn Spanish, French, and possibly Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Russian, Chinese, Sanskrit, and Hindi or Urdu are also someplace on that list.
I want to make money playing a musical instrument. I’ve in some way contributed to the money the Petrol Free Gypsy Carnival Tour earned last year, and that involved playing some musical instruments… and one time somebody gave me a 20 while I was practicing the fiddle on the side of the road, and I played the washboard at Bonnaroo and earned a handful of bills from rich drunk people. I don’t consider those to be on point with my goal. I want people to pay to see me, or choose to pay me because they genuinely enjoyed my music — and most likely also because they support whatever cause I’d be playing to fundraise for.
I want to understand wood better. I want to hold wood and tools in my hand and create something new and useful from it. I want to sit in something I made out of wood I found on the ground; I want to proudly give presents to friends — musical instruments I have made specifically for them with my own two hands. I want to know what woods are best to support heavy roofs (heavy because they have edible gardens on them) and what wood grows the fastest, resonates the best, looks nicest as floor, etc.
I want to learn to make excellent moofins. I want to open up a friend’s kitchen cabinets, and make delicious baked goods from scratch without opening a cook book. I want to walk into a grocery store (or better yet my own back yard) and select the ingredients I need to make an attractive and tasty treat — a healthy treat. I want to have a head full of ideas about what to cook. When someone says, “what should we make for lunch,” or “what should we bring to the potluck,” I want to have a head full of delicious ideas that I know how to make, or at least know that I can make well.
I think that array of skills is wide enough I can proceed with all of them — throw a wide net, as it were — and reasonably hope that I will catch something that I will be pleased with for a very long time. This Muffin (moofin) book is going to be a start for me. I am going to make things that I don’t think I’ll like, and I’m going to make them exactly as the recipe calls for. I am going to read every damned recipe and translate all of those small details from German. Hopefully I will remember them after writing them only once. The German word for ingredients is Zutaten, which I remembered after writing it only once, by the way.
I am setting the goal right now. I promise you pictures of moofins that I make by the end of this week. (5/28/2011)
Holy crap, two months ago I was getting on an Airplane.
Topics: This is my life | Comments Off on Die Besten Muffins
I Walk the Lain(sitz) [River].
By Billy | May 21, 2011
The walk of shame. It’s not hard to find. They’re those people walking bleary eyed across college campuses across the world at an hour in the morning earlier than they’ve ever been up for class. They’re the people wearing last nights clothes but not so fancily anymore. They’re the people who slept where they partied and hadn’t planned on it.
I have yet to experience a walk of shame in Austria. Last night/this morning was the closest I can say I’ve come, though. Last night/this morning involved a stumbly, mumbly walk home at an early hour — earlier than I’ve ever been outside in Weitra. The difference was that I hadn’t slept anywhere, and the sunrise walk through the beautiful Gabrielental valley along the Lainsitz river was completely planned into my evening/morning. It was my job last night to send people into oblivion by handing them uncountable alcoholic beverages. Last night I was a bar tender.
Bar tending is an incredibly fun thing to do — at least, it was one time. I don’t know if I would enjoy it hundreds of times a year, but just once is quite lovely. At the cost of my voice, any semblance of smelling nice (it takes a while for cigarette smoke to wash out of dreadlocks… send packages of baking soda, fast!), and an entire night of sleep, I earned €16,31, one contraceptive, a t-shirt and church-key with the local radio station’s symbol on it, a few new potential friends, and a whole mess of Austrian vocabulary. People in this part of the world actually pride themselves, by the way, on speaking incomprehensibly. Also, I learned that German has no adverbs. Weird.
The hardest part of the evening was recognizing drinks I’d never heard of. A rum and coke, for example, is called her “ein Bacardi cola,” which is simple enough, but offers insight into why it’s so difficult to learn a language — even if you know the vocabulary. I noticed that those words turned into one huge word, and I couldn’t figure out immediately what a bakardkol was. It was interesting also to note when the words became conceptualized; soon certain words the customers spoke to me turned into ideas more than words. When I heard certain sounds, I immediately thought of the drink, rather than the components. One drink was a Cuban rum mixed with some weird Orange Juice. It was called a Cappy-somethingorother. All I know is when I heard those words I never heard before, I put those two things I’d never heard of before together. It was fastinating to watch as sounds began to mean something in my mind totally independent of their actual meaning. Perhaps it was a little like Archetypal thinking. I think this sort of thing was going on.
Anyway. I don’t quite think I can explain why, where, or what I was doing last night. It’s not because of the a-a-a-a-a-a-alcohol, it’s because I don’t understand things here so good. I gathered that I was at the firestation, I gathered that a radiostation was DJing, and I gathered that people give better tips when they enjoy watching you struggle to speak their language than the ones who frighten you and make you feel as though they may strike you out of frustration. Yeah, I’m thinking of you, you twat. I volunteered for a friend I met at a dancing class to get paid to drink and have a good time, really. That’s what happened last night.
Hum. Well there’s some about my day. In other news, Mountain Justice Summer Camp is officially starting and I am missing my extended family right now. I talk about the mountains in America most of all. This exact week in Kentucky was one of the big reasons I wanted to stay in the States until June. Things didn’t happen that way, so that’s ok.
Uh. Yeah, I guess now I’m going to click the ‘Publish’ button and find my new Facebook friends.
Topics: This is my life | Comments Off on I Walk the Lain(sitz) [River].
A Slow Day in Austria
By Billy | May 17, 2011
I haven’t written in quite some time. So, I’m just going to spend some time spouting words out.
This past week I’ve reached a point — a boiling point? a le grange point? a critical mass? a terminal velocity? I don’t know. It is some point where I feel quite ready to explode or change. This point comes primarily in reference to the way I spend my time entertaining myself. I’ve spent hours and hours reading interesting things, having good conversations, and creating things I’m proud of; it’s all felt wonderful but it’s all been online. As I typed that, I mispelled it and wrote “on lone.” It’s all been solo, despite the illusion the internet creates of connectivity.
Although I enjoy and feel justified in how I spend my time, I also experience a discenernable twinge of “I wish I had done other things today” when I go to bed. I have a lot of things I wish I put my time into, but they are vague and somewhat whimsical, and they tend to flee from my mind when I’m trying to think of things to do. Learning to make uber tasty Pad Thai seems a lot more exciting when I have to go to bed and am looking forward to the next day, than when I’m bored in the house looking at the prospect of walking to the store, struggling to find the German version of the ingredients I want, then making and cleaning a mess in the Kitchen while trying to make a dish that there’s a good chance nobody in the house but me will eat. It’s easy to look for a TV episode to watch when that is the prospect. It’s easier still to check the news or get into a good discussion about Hegel, Communism, and the Occidental notion of Femininity. What do you use Facebook for? Cuz that’s what I do on Facebook is discuss those things.
So yesterday I deleted you all from my newsfeed on Facebook. Now when I log in, there’s no news. If I want to know about your life, I’m going to actually have to think about you, look for you, and learn about you. Gasp! And if you expect me to know something about what’s going on in your life, you’re going to have to… TELL ME ABOUT IT YOURSELF. Holy crap. It’s crazy to think like this.
I feel good about it. I feel like it’s something I need to do in Austria. I feel like I need to work more on living in Austria, so that’s what I’m doing. Yesterday I took a broken file in Alex’s factory, I grinded it into a chisel, and I took a broken hammer and made it a new handle with scrap wood and my pocket knife. Now I have two tools that I don’t know what to do with, and I’m going to learn things to do with them.
I’m interested in learning how to make two pieces of wood stick together. Interested means that I once had the idea that it would be cool to know how to and actually do it. So now I’m going to. My arbitrary goal: to make something a grown human can sit on and eat dinner on that uses no rope or glue. That might happen some day.
So I’ve taken to writing a lot. I have these notions that come in my mind like a fly through the window. Sometimes they come and leave quickly, and sometimes they stick around forever and annoy the hell out of me. I have decided to take note of all of them — writing them down on paper. Sometimes the ones that stay in the room are useless and impossible, and some of the fleeting ones are really golden. Writing them down helps me judge which is what sort. The other thing that helps me is to write down some goals for tomorrow tonight. I am much more likely to actually do something if I make it a goal, and especially if I make it a goal for tomorrow. It makes getting out of bed easier, it makes getting my shoes on to go accomplish the thing easier, it makes everything easier. It also helps to go to sleep when it’s down on paper; much easier to stop thinking about things when it’s saved someplace. (Sometimes the bedside table jots are weird like: “research time travel. If you choose to live in the reality where you did it, your future self will help you figure it out again.” and other times it’s more practical: “learn the German word for “inarticulate.” [It’s undeutlich. Un-meaning-ly.])
My frustration with the guitar has vanished. Since my last post about how frustrating it has been, I have sat down and taken the babiest steps possible and stopped seeking the end of the process and found a lot more joy in it.
J.R.R. Tolkien taught me how to live life. Since I started reading about the happenings on Middle Earth, I have learned some of the most important lessons I have needed in life. Sorry Drogyam Trungpa, but I didn’t understand your book until I read Tolkien’s. The Hobbit, not so much, but The freaking Lord of the Rings trilogy is so freaking long. Not just because they have so many freaking pages, but because entire (long) chapters have nothing to do with plot development whatsoever. If you read The Lord of the Rings with the intention to finish the book and know what happens next, you’re reading it wrong. Plain and simple. The point is not to find out what happens next, but to read exactly the word that you’re reading on the exact page you’re reading. The only way I’ve found to enjoy the series is to just jump in and be there for a while. You need to acknowledge that you can’t see the end anywhere in sight, and just experience it. It’s going to be lonesome, ugly, frustrating, or whatever those damn hobbits are experiencing — and that’s the point. Be frustrated, and be amazed that you’re holding old dead trees and they’re somehow stirring your soul.
How does that relate to anything in Austria other than the fact I’m reading the Silmarillion? Because the things I’m embarking on in Austria are as tedious, if not moreso, than reading Tolkien. I have been making prayer beads out of sticks I find on the ground — do you know how many times I’ve made the same motion of pushing my pocket knife away from me and shaving off another piece of wood? Jesus. It’s fun as a kid to carve a random stick on the ground with your Swiss Army Knife. You know why? Because you made the rules up. Your goal was to get the most flawlessly pointy stick. Your goal was to make the perfect no-bark branch that nobody could ever tell you put a flat blade to; it looks like a machine sanded it down to be a perfect dowel… AND it can roast 17 marshmellows at the same time without catching fire.
If Mr. Pennies, that annoying adult in your boyscout troop, suddenly thought it was a great idea to make whittling into a game that the whole troop must play before they can even light the fire, and every tip has to be impossibly pointy, and every branch has to have fewer than 0.0001 molecules per square inch of bark on it before the marshmellow bags will be opened… then we have a problem. Now every kid is only thinking of which eye to poke this dumb adult in, using their adequately pokey stick, and only because using their Swiss Army Knife will get them a corner of their Totin’ Chip cut off. You can’t make me do something I enjoy, or else I’m going to stop enjoying it. Maybe even to spite you. I have to do it because it’s just what I am doing. The only way to enjoy something is to do it just because you get to do it. So when I want to make a Pad Thai, or to make a chair out of wood I find on the ground, or when I learn German words, or when I strum the guitar for hours on end hoping my brain will figure something out it didn’t know the first 10 strums, I know that I need to keep on doing it with the intention of just doing it. We need to play the guitar like we have to read Tolkien — only existing at that particular moment.
If you pick up a guitar and want to be John Mayer right away, you’re gona hate the damned thing. If you pick up LoTR and want to magically absorb the plot without just enjoying the walk in the woods, you’re going to hate the damned author. I have effectively started talking in a circle after having made my point. Thus, I am going to stop, click the post button, put on some pants, and hit stuff with a hammer. Because that’s what I want to do right now.
Did this end where I thought it was going to go? Nope.
Is that OK.
I choose yes.
Topics: This is my life | Comments Off on A Slow Day in Austria
Osama bin Laden
By Billy | May 3, 2011
If I were better at drawing, I would post a comic here. This is how it would go:
Frame 1: A crowd of young adults stands outside the whitehouse. They are drawn to be hyperbolic ‘college age hippies.’ Dreadlocks, tiedye shirts perhaps, at least one forearm tattoo displaying a cross or silhouette of a crucifix. They are at a protest holding signs that say things like, “USA and Capitalism Value Oil Over Human Life!,” and “Bombing for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity,” and “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” and “There Are Thousands of Causes I’d Die For, but None I’d Kill For,” and “US Government = Terrorists,” maybe someone sitting in the full lotus position on the ground in good view is sitting with a sign that says, “Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, End the War.”
Frame 2: Someone runs to the middle of the crows with a handheld radio in hand. They say, “Wait a minute, everyone! Listen!” The radio word bubble says, “…The United States has conducted an operation that has killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Queda, and a terrorist…” Maybe a caricature of President Obama in the corner of the frame to show whose speaking on the radio.
Optional Frame 3: Everyone looks at eachother confused
Frame 4: Everyone pulls out their pens and markers and frantically scribbles new slogans on the back of their signs. Big X’s scratch out their old sign’s words.
Frame 5: Reuse Frame 1 with new signage. Signs now read, “God Bless our Troops,” and “History in the Making in the Fight Against Hate,” and “Proud to Be an American,” and “Got Him!” and “Great Day for America,” and “Epic Win.” Foam #1 hands are raised, maybe I would depict music and dancing and 5 jets starting to do a flyby or something. I don’t know what to do with that guy sitting with the sign because he may be autobiographical. And frankly, I don’t know what to do with myself.
I’ll start out with acknowleding that politics can’t possibly be simple or black/white, no matter how hard people might pretend that is the case. I’ll also acknowledge my resentment of the critical culture we live in and my displeasure with the fact that everyone knows what isn’t a solution but nobody offers or contributes to what is a solution. I acknowledge that writing a blog post is what every other frustrated extrovert does to contribute to the “solution” side of things, and I am not under the illusion that I am instigating or helping bring about change by vocalizing what I think. I am writing because I am beside myself with hurt and sadness; I am writing because it’s what serves me at the moment.
The other thing I’ll clear up right away is that I am not even going to go into: What we should have done with/to Osama Bin Laden if we had the chance to take him without killing him, whether or not he has been alive for the last 10 years, whether I think he was behind 9/11 or not, or whether it’s ever reasonable to kill one person to spare others. What’s done is done, and what’s known is known, and what’s knowable is knowable. What I mean to say is that our responses can be immature or mature regardless of what precisely they are responding to. Maybe 9/11 was an inside job and Osama bin Laden has been dead for 10 years. (Type that last sentence into google if you’re don’t understand why I could propose those things.) I don’t really have an opinion about it. It shouldn’t change the way you act.
What I am going into is bloodlust and vengeance. I am talking about dancing in the street — dancing on the graves of our enemies. I am talking about retributive justice and this idea that we can fix things with guns. I am talking about “do I get my privacy back? Will you stop looking at my junk now?” I am talking about the unbelievable buzz I have heard burning holes in my ears from my friends and countrypeople. Yes, another frustrated blog post floating in the ether.
Maybe you’re curious about my overarching views on violence. Maybe.
At first I was happy. I was content, at least, and the news of Osama bin Ladens murder did not change my mood too profoundly. Then I saw a picture; a picture which happened to be photoshopped and quite obviously fake. A photo of a different human who had been murdered; a photo of a different lifeline stopped prematurely. Then I started thinking about the humanity involved in war. I started really thinking about the human beings pulling the triggers, and the other humans paying those humans, and the humans who pay the humans to pay the humans to murder other humans. That’s you and me. Someplace in that chain. Do I feel safer now? No. Do you? I hope not. If we were safer now, maybe TSA wouldn’t have to check our 5 year old brother’s junk. Maybe if the world were safer now, we could pull out of a few of our endless wars. Right? No. We’ll stay in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’ll still get strip searched in the airport, and worst of all, we’ll forget the joy we felt while we danced in the streets of DC thinking about this supposed victory.
Bin Laden’s death can’t possibly be that big of a deal. Because of this very simple dilemma: If Osama bin Laden represented a force of nature worth reckoning with, (i.e. fear, insecurity, hunger, etc.), his bodily death would do nothing to extinguish what he stood for. If his legacy cannot live past his life, then he wasn’t even worth the lead, or maybe he wasn’t worth the 10 years, thousands of lives, oil, bullets, explosives, capital spent on secrets, etc., etc..
Did Jesus’ murder end his legacy? Did Socrates’s murder stop his corrupting the youth? If the Chinese exterminate every Lama and Buddhist monk in Tibet, will Tibetan Buddhism die with them? Has Hitler’s death marked the end of oppression and fear forever? Nope. These people are physical manifestations of things that extend way beyond them. Things so deep you cannot shoot them, and you cannot nuke them. Things so deep you can only find them with time — more time than you or I can ever hope to span. Why do we even attack the symptoms?! Your back hurts because you have bad posture, not because you haven’t been taking enough Advil. People want to blow you up because they don’t see you as an all, not because you haven’t shot the right people.
Our country is drunk on the satiated bloodlust that she has lived in the throes of for a decade. How many of us were young and impressionable when we saw the towers fall over and over and over and over again on the news? How many of us thought at that time that it was as simple as Counter Strike made it seem? It was playground rules. If you threw rocks, you sat out, if you were bad enough, you got expelled.
I am saddened by my friends and collegues thinking we have “won” something, and I am hoping the hangover is not so severe. I’ll dance in the streets when the last soldier comes home, thank you. And until then, I’ll put my energy into celebrating victory over real struggles, with standing up for what you believe, dancing when nobody else can find joy, and being able to experience joy or comfort in a way that won’t make me uncomfortable a couple years down the line. My life in this old place, Austria, has already taught me that America is just the teenager of the world, and right now she’s partying on spring break and all the cameras are on her.
Someone pointed to me that us not murdering bin Laden is for a good man to do nothing and allowing evil to triumph. Somehow, I can’t shake the feeling that not decrying this celebration of war is for me to stand and do nothing, thus allowing evil to triumph.
Are you free because of his death? Or are you free and he is dead? I was free and joyful before he died, and I was proud to be an American, despite the attitude my country has about things like this. I am tempted allow myself to feel less proud now, but I resist it. What’s really terrifying is that we choose not to be joyful unless we have a tangible reason to.
Topics: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Osama bin Laden
Quitting Music Forever. (not)
By Billy | April 27, 2011
Music. Music is amazing. You can hear it and feel it but can’t see it. (I can’t believe I keep linking to this song. It’s just so funny though) It’s a fairly universal language (although an A is considered 443 or 442 hz here in Europe, though its 440 in America…) and it’s beautifully mathematical. You can, and usually must, use the same couple of pitches to express triumph, joy, sadness, confusion… blah blah blah. And I am so freaking frustrated by it right now.
I have been spending a lot of free time strumming a guitar, tapping my foot, counting to four in both German and English, and doing everything I can to not throw the guitar across the room. Not really. My frustration is directed at me, since I know the guitar isn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, when someone else picks it up, it sounds rather lovely.
I have been trying to learn, and trying even harder to enjoy learning, how to dance, how to strum the guitar and sing at the same time, and how to play the piano with my left and right hand syncopated. I can’t do it. (Yet. Some frustrating part of me won’t even let me be miserably discouraged right now. He screams for me to realize that I am simply frustrated at this moment and will later look back and not even remember this frustration. Shut up, you, and let me rant!) I am so horribly frustrated with myself at the moment.
I think I have tried too hard to break things down into their simplest universal algorithm and I have bogged down my thoughts and stifled my ability to be. I don’t know. Right now, I’m trying to analyze why I can’t stop analyzing the rhythm when it’s time to dance. Last time I tried to waltz I realized that I literally can’t hear that music is happening if I try to measure/meter my steps AND actually move my feet. I can move and count, hear the music and move, or hear the music and count, but never all three. I can strum a simple down,down-up, up-down-up pattern for many many minutes perfectly. Then I try to sing and by the 3rd syllable, I have ruined my pattern. Every time.
Huh. Well maybe I should make baby steps. Maybe I need to try a letter in the alphabet with every strum, or every beat regardless of strum, and if I can do that, skip every other letter, or every 3rd, or do simple math, or list primes consecuatively. I guess singing is just too much to ask.
Why do I do this to myself? I literally want to cry and pout and promise myself never to try again when I start dancing, or when I earnestly attempt to sing a song while playing it on the guitar. I wish I could just sit and watch or listen and find happiness in that, but I don’t work that way. Instead, I push myself to tears, spend time recooperating by venting on a blog, or learn the German word for melancholy (it’s truebsinnig, in case you were wondering) or take a walk. I wish I could play the guitar to exhale all my frustrations.
My dad used to joke that if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying. The jury’s still out on that one for me, but I really think there’s something else to trying. I don’t know what it is, but it involves being overwhelmingly frustrated. Perhaps if you haven’t completely failed at something in a while, you’re not trying anything worth while. Maybe I’m just saying that to make myself feel better. It works, so we shan’t press it further.
Topics: Utterly Random | 2 Comments »
Kinder Games
By Billy | April 26, 2011
Topics: Uncategorized, Utterly Random | Comments Off on Kinder Games
Space Pirates! A History of Buddhist Physics.
By Billy | April 22, 2011
Austria is magical. (OK, so everything is magic) Austria!
The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika school of Mahayana Buddhism struck my Buddhist Mind and Reality class quite dumb after elaborating on his proposal that there is no absolute truth, and by stating so, he was not proposing an absolute truth. This is quite frustrating in a philosophy or religion (both exist in Buddhism, and sometimes they are mutually exclusive) whose founder proposed The Four Truths.
(Sometimes Mahayana is considered the Protestantism of Buddhism, so I guess people on that string of thought should consider Nagarjuna the Martin Luther of Buddhism. But. I am not those people. Those people probably have never heard of Nagarjuna, or read the Mulmadhyamikakarina. So, since Protestantism grew out of politics and Mahayana grew out of logical necessity, and since I think Protestantism and Catholicism and the whole she-bang, especially during the Reformation, have often completely lost touch with the actual message of Christ, and since I also think that Buddhism’s inherent flexibility allows for a wide array of things to all stay true to the original form, I think it’s unjust to compare Christian history and Buddhist history in such bland and unhelpful ways. So why did I mention it at all?)
Buddha proposed the Four Truths. Often the first one is translated using the word “suffering,” but that’s because unatisfactoryness is an ugly word. The first truth is that sometimes unsatisfactoryness exists. Nobody’s not experienced the unsatisfactoryness that exists in potential in every moment.
The second Truth explains that experiencing the unsatisfactoryness that doesn’t have to be experienced comes from an attachment to desire. Often, and I think it’s due to something I think I call ‘Christian Guilt,’ blame is shifted from “attachment to desire,” to “desire.” Every follower of the Buddha that I’ve ever met has tried to destroy their desires at some time in their journey. I am sure the Buddha would explain to you that such a thing is unhealthy, unnatural, and unhelpful. Desire keeps us alive, desire keeps us happy, and desire is the thing that motivates us to become enlightened and to share that enlightenment with the rest of the world. Desire is wanting an apple and appreciating it when you finally get to eat it. Attachment to desire to eat an apple is wanting an apple beyond your just deserts — believing you are entitled to an apple or that you need an apple to be happy or complete. Attachment to desire of an apple leads to not seeing the apple for what it really is. Really, it’s a bunch of molecules that used to be a tree, that used to be dirt, that used to be cow poop, that used to be grass, that used to be sun. And as you bite into that conglomoration of goodness, you are participating in the infinite weaving of existence. You are nothing more than a link on the chain — infinitesimally small in light of how long that apple has been in the mix. So when you start to believe that apple, or you for that matter, exist as anything else other than a flash of lightning, you are attaching yourself to a desire. You are pretending that the apple is inherently yours, or that you are inherently deserving of an apple, or some other twisted notion that denies the fact that the apple and you are infinitely vast. Nonetheless, you may want the apple. You are made of sunlight and trees and plants you’ve eaten and dinosaur poop that’s been burnt in coal plants and you’ve breathed it in — you are made of the universe, and part of that composition is that you have a brain and a central nervous system and a digestive tract… and when all of that comes together, sometimes you feel hungry. You’re supposed to feel hungry. Desire is not bad, it’s the most natural thing.
The third Truth is painfully simple. If unsatisfactoryness happens because of attachment to desire, unsatisfactoryness ceases when attachment to desire ceases.
The fourth Truth is a recipe for ceasing unsatisfactoryness and in my opinon, it is the obvious starting point for a Buddhist religion. The fourth truth says that in order to end unsatisfactoryness, you’ve got to practice: “Right understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration.” I have never been terribly interested in the Eightfold Noble Path, so I don’t know how to expand those points for what they mean. Right Effort, for example, seems simple enough. But I’ve read a hundred pages on the Eightfold Noble Path and still don’t feel like I grasp it. Were I part of a Buddhist Sangha, I might care to study and discuss and preach and be preached to about it. I’m not so I don’t.
Fastforward a few centuries and we’re now saying that Buddhism doesn’t have any Truths. There is no truth, and that’s it. As my friend Liz puts it, time doesn’t exist, there is only the eternal Now. Quantum physics agrees with what Buddhists have been saying for centuries (millenia…?) and Shrodingers Cat both agrees and disagrees, but Buddhists don’t mind.
The tricky part is objective reality. We love to pretend that we exist in it, but we don’t. We exist in a reality (namely a collective, or consentual reality) that exists like this. If you are standing on the side of the road and a car drives past you at 10 mph, the car has passed you at 10 mph faster than you. Now if you start to move 1 mph with the direction of traffic and another car passes you moving 10 mph, that car has passed you moving 9 mph faster than you. If you and your friend are having a race on the sidewalk, you’re moving 1 mph, he’s moving 2 mph, and a third car passes at 10 mph, that car is moving 9 mph faster than you and 8 mph faster than your friend.
Now. All this is taking place at night. So the cars have their headlights on. When the light comes out of the car’s lamps, it is moving at the speed of light, go figure. That’s about 670 million mph. I rounded, but photons don’t. A photon travels through a certain medium at exactly the speed of light. Always. Light will always pass you at the speed of light. So as you run next to the car, the light from the car’s headlamp comes out at the speed of light, but since you’re moving at 1 mph, you’d think it would pass you at the speed of light minus 1 mph. But no. It will pass you at exactly the speed of light faster than you, regardless of how fast you’re moving. That’s true for your friend, too. The light will pass your friend not at ‘speed of light minus 2 mph,’ but at exactly the speed of light. The very same photon will pass you and your friend at exactly the same time at two different speeds. Actually, it is going at more than two speeds simultaneously, because the driver is going at 10 mph, so the light is going ‘the speed of light’ faster than he is, too. Anyone watching out the window, or existing on the other side of the planet, will have a different ‘speed of light’ relative to them and their perception of those photons.
Please start working your argument about why you still think we live in a single, unitary, solid, objective reality.
Let’s pretend this race happened in outer space and you were moving not at 1 or 2 mph, but at 500 million mph. More than half the speed of light. You’re moving half the speed of light, your friend is moving more than half the speed of light. And now space pirates want to jack your sweet space ships, so they shoot photon cannons at you. Luckily, every time they shoot, they miss. But! Those photons whiz past your ship at the speed of light. The speed of light faster than you. Even when you’re moving at half the speed of light, the speed of light is 670,000,000 mph faster than you. But for a bystander who’s not moving at the speed of light, neither one of you is travelling faster than the speed of light. It’s not like the speed of light went from 670 million mph to 500 million + 670 million just for you. The top speed of light is the limit of speed that we can concieve of. You can’t make light go faster than the speed of light for a given medium.
So now you have a solid, realistic example, of why we more probably exist in our own reality than in some reality that would exist without us. Think for a second about what the speed of light is if those photon cannons shot at empty space and nobody was there to percieve it. If light moves faster or slower relative to how fast the observer is, how fast does it move relative to nothing. Hm. The most common argument for objective, solid, reality-independent-of-us/the-perciever, reality is this: if I didn’t exist, this apple would still be here. I don’t need to see the apple in my hand for it to be real.
Nagarjuna would argue that it’s not the same apple as the one in your hand if you’re not there to hold it, Shrodingers Cat would be disinterested and overinterested (both in typical cat fashion) at the same time, and I would just take the apple from you and bite it and ask you to tell me when the apple is “gone.”
I was going to write a lot about why I belive Austria is magical, but instead I wrote nothing about Austria. Hm. I watched the 5th Element in German last night, which is where my space pirates scenario came from. Tune in next time for application of this philosophy and how it relates to Magical Austria.
Topics: Philosophy | Comments Off on Space Pirates! A History of Buddhist Physics.
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