A Philosophical Interlude

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers. - D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism

Looking at this world, we see right and we see wrong.  Good and evil.  We see ignorance and understanding, we see potential, we see life and death, and we see freedom and oppression.  We see rivers and mountains.  We can be quite sure that we see problems in the world and the social, political, and military solutions needed to correct those problems, even as others seem to see the exact opposite.

But when the distinction between the observer and the world that is observed drops away, as happens in meditation among other experiences, then there is no ignorance and no understanding, no freedom and no oppression, and no life and no death.  Suddenly, there are no problems and no solutions to problems. No one's right and no one's wrong.

Two different points of view - the absolute ("this is this" and "that is that") and the relative ("this is this" only from one perspective; since "this" is "that" from another perspective, "this" and "that" have no real meaning).  From the absolute point of view, there are myriad pairs of opposite conditions, while the relative point of view does not distinguish between those dualities.  

But "absolute" and "relative" are themselves just another duality, two opposing POVs. Therefore, we have a third POV that transcends the absolute and the relative.  We'll call this the "transcendental" POV that rises above choosing one position or the other, and simultaneously accepts both the relative and the absolute.  "This" is indeed "this," and "this" is also "that" (as well as "neither this nor that").  From the transcendental POV, there once again can be ignorance and understanding, liberty and oppression, and life and death (as well as the absence of all three).   

But this all becomes a philosophical argument and an exercise in semantics.  From a fourth and final POV, the practical, we cay that while it is like this, flowers, while loved, fade, and weeds, while despise, flourish. 

Day 35

Reasons I'm Not Going To Talk About Trump's Taxes

1. I don't care.
2. Everyone else is talking about it and everything that  can be said has been said by someone, somewhere.
3. Is anyone even surprised by this?  Did you think it was any different?
4. It won't change any minds in his base.  They're already spinning it as "He's a smart businessman using the bankruptcy laws and tax loopholes to his advantage."
5. We've talked and heard enough about this egomaniacal windbag already.  THerre's other things in the world worth discussing, you know.
6. I don't care.

 

Day 37

Whatever.  Nothing I can do about it, so I don't care.

Day 38

To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Day 39

 

Day 40

You know, it's finally gotten to me.  I just don't care anymore.  I just don't.

The Republicans are going to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat 40 days before the election, when four years ago they said ten months before Election Day was "too soon" to even hold hearings on a nominee? Whatever. I don't care.

They're going to take away the pre-existing conditions clause from the ACA?  I'm on Medicare now - doesn't affect me.  I don't care.

They're going to encourage more barriers to if not outright bans on abortion?  I'm a guy and therefore don't have a uterus.  I don't care.

I don't have kids in the school system, I don't own a small business, and I'm not a war veteran. So I don't care about all the politics surrounding those issues.

I'm also white, so there's a whole lot of other things coming down the pike that don't affect me so I don't care.

Lou Reed once said "Show me an issue and I'll show you a tissue, and wipe my ass with it."  I don't care.

Our democracy has been hacked and the electoral process perverted?  I always doubted elections were "open and honest" anyway, and would only have lived through so many presidential terms and election cycles anyway, so I don't care.

The coronavirus is raging out of control and Americans are armed to the teeth?  Fanatical evangelicals are turning our government into a theocracy?  The entire western US nearly burned to the ground, the south will be uninhabitable in a few years, the coastline's rising, and more hurricanes are on the way? What can I do about it?  I don't care.

Call it "compassion fatigue," call it "crisis burnout," call it whatever you want.  I don't care what you call it, cause I don't care about shit anymore.

Enjoy the shithole you made of our country.  Or don't.  Your choice.  I don't care. 

Day 41

It's kind of an exciting day here in Quarantineville.   We finally finished our build on a new power-house computer, a hyper-powerful PC to meet the rigorous demands of modern video gaming.

And when I say "our build," I mean I paid someone else to do the actual assembly.  My contributions to the build were more in selecting the specifications and paying for the parts and labor. Someone with a lot more experience than I actually put the beast together.  

But I did assemble the desk, and went and got new speakers, keyboard, wireless mouse, and power strip to complete the setup.  That has to count for something, right?

For you techno-geeks out there, it's got an Intel I5-9600k CPU, a GeForce RTX 2070 Super CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB solid-state hard drive.  For you non-geeks, that means the improvement on performance from my humble lap-top computer is pretty dramatic.

Here's some hardware porn of the beast's innards.

 

This was not an inexpensive undertaking, but given my retirement status and given the crazy world of 2020 covid lockdown, it's a good investment to help me make the best of staying at home.

I'm still using the laptop for everyday computer uses, including this blog, web browsing, and music, and will more-or-less dedicate the monster PC to video gaming.  At least that's the plan for now.

I had to transfer all my games to the new computer, which actually was pretty easy as they're all stored in the cloud.  For my first game, I downloaded The Outer Worlds, which I already had played late last year but has a new DLC available.  The difference in graphics and motion in the game between the old laptop and the new PC is pretty remarkable.

That's my splurge for 2020, my combined Christmas and birthday present to myself.  Now, if you excuse me, I've got some games to play.

Day 42

Happy St. Vincent Day

We should set aside September 21 of each year to recognize actor Bill Murray's birthday.  In consideration of one of his films, we could call it St. Vincent's Day.  Annie Clark, who records under the name St. Vincent, was born on September 28, so perhaps we should compromise and set the third Monday of each September aside and call it St. Vincent's Day for both Bill Murray and Annie Clark.

Day 44

The days pass one by one, each blurring into the next.  It's getting hard to tell them apart.

Last night, after watching the Boston Celtics beat the Miami Heat in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Championship, I made the mistake of opening the game ARK: Survival Evolved.  "Mistake" because the next thing I knew, it was 3:45 a.m.  I slept until 9 a.m. and got on with my day.

Per my usual Sunday routine, I tortured myself by watching the morning news shows (Meet The Press, Face The Nation, etc.).  Don't get me started on the politics - I'll save that for a future post.

I went outside and walked ¾ of a mile - three laps around our ¼-mile block.  I finished my pot of coffee.  I answered some emails.

I played some more ARK on the computer, basically eating up most of the afternoon, and then went back outside and walked another one mile (four more laps around the block).

I completed the NY Times' Sunday Crossword Puzzle on my phone ("surprise party/undesirable").  I'll probably walk another ¼ mile after I feed the cats tonight to meet my 2-mile daily goal.

I'm still undecided if I should watch the New England Patriots-Seattle Seahawks football game tonight or my Sunday-night HBO shows (Lovecraft Country, The Vow, John Oliver).  I will try to avoid firing up any video games after whatever it is I settle on watching.

There were meals in there somewhere -  a bagel and some fruit for breakfast, a sandwich and chips for lunch.  Unless I get creative, dinner will probably be the fourth and final portion of a casserole I made earlier this week.

Such are the days lately.  Idly passing time, waiting for this coronavirus pandemic to finally pass.  Waiting for something, anything to happen next.  Waiting for 2021.

Day 45

It's been six months now.  More than that, really.   I started practicing some level of social distancing beginning in early March (not shaking hands, avoiding close contact), but the real lock-down self-quarantine began for me on Friday the 13th of March.  That was the day I saw the supermarket aisles bare and empty of toilet paper, pasta, rice, beans, and most cleaners.  The NBA had already paused their season, as had all other major-league sports, but it was that day, that Friday the 13th when the supermarket shelves were empty, that it started to feel like a genuine panic.  

It was shortly after that the Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, declared a shelter-in-place order for all but essential workers.  Despite the empty shelves, I had already amassed enough food and staples to hold me over for several weeks, a month with a little ingenuity, and I hunkered down to ride out the pandemic.

The infections and deaths from the virus continued from March into April.  Here in Georgia, the first wave of the pandemic peaked in mid-April, with an average of almost 1,000 new cases and nearly 50 deaths per day,  The number of new cases gradually declined in May and June, with a few distressing spikes in the data, and the daily death toll stayed between 25 and 40 fatalities a day before finally starting to subside.

But in late April, the governor reopened the state prematurely and while the numbers remained plateaued in May, in mid-June the number of new cases began rising again, peaking around an appalling 3,500 new cases per day in late July.  Fatalities rose too, with about a two-week lag between the peak of new cases and the peak of deaths.

Even though Georgia was "open for business," I and many of my fellow Georgians stayed hunkered down anyway.  What I initially thought was going to be two weeks in March became all of April, May, June, July, and August as well, and is extending into this month of September. The numbers are starting to come down again, both new cases and daily fatalities, but in both cases we're still well over twice as high as things were at the mid-April peak of the first wave. Out boldest aspiration now is for things to be as bad as they were back in mid-April, when everyone was under order to stay at home.  That's the goal, that's our highest hope.

Of course my initial provisions from March 13th ran out and I was forced to go back to the supermarket.  It took a while to get used to gearing up for food shopping - putting on a face mask, preparing my eyeglasses with a soap solution so they wouldn't fog up, washing my hands and de-conning my groceries when I returned home.  It was a harrowing experience and I'd watch myself for the next several days for any symptoms of the virus.

I'm an old man now and a half-year of my life is proportionally much shorter than a half-year of many other people's lives.  But still, six months is a long time to remain in quarantine, isolated, home alone with only the company of two cats.

I've not gone out to hear live music since mid February.  I've not gone out to watch a game at a sports bar or socialize with friends (although Britney, my adult daughter, has come by and visited a few times).  I've not gone out to lunch, even to dine alone at a fast-food joint.  I've postponed a dental appointment three times now and I've not been to a doctor, an optometrist, or anything since this all began.  I suspect I'm starting to grow more than a little peculiar and strange, but with no one around to benchmark my behavior against, it's hard to know for sure.

I know I'm not unique in this, and I know there are others who are suffering far more than I. Fortunately for me, I'm retired now and living on a fixed income - I haven't lost a job or have to worry about how I'll feed my family.

And I'm not complaining.  I'm just journaling this experience here now to help me remember in the future.  There are the times and this is the record of those times. It helps me to just write it down and get it out of my system.

At this point, I honestly suspect things will continue like this for at least another six to nine months.  If this country can hold it together that long, that is.

Day 46

America was founded on the twin principals of slavery and genocide.  European settlers enslaving Africans and European setters exterminating the indigenous population.

Both sins are rooted, obviously, in racism, as well as greed.  And both racism and greed, in turn, are rooted in the delusion of self and other being different.

In the centuries since our discovery, we have exploited and despoiled the continent to the point where it's becoming near inhabitable.  After slavery finally ended, we turned to a system of economic exploitation where the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and had to accept whatever labor the ruling class deemed appropriate. And it's too heartbreaking to discuss what's happened to the original natives of this land. We huddle in our homes trying to avoid viruses, even as cancer rots us from the inside.

Is this the darkest hour just before a spiritual re-awakening?  Or is this just the darkest hour?

Sally Was Here

Sally transformed Spring Valley Creek from a sluggish drainage seep into a torrential white-water river.

The incessant rainfall last night kept me awake, but strangely I never lost power except for a few short flickers after which the power came right back on.  

Day 48

 Here comes Sally!

Ecological Services

"Ecological services" are the benefits provided by natural ecosystems.  Examples would include crop pollination by bees and other insects, water filtration and storm-surge protection by salt marshes, oxygen production by rain forests, and carbon sequestration by woodlands and grasslands.  

There is no monetary cost for these ecological services, but there is a societal cost for not exploiting the ecosystems.  The "cost" for providing wildlife refuge, oxygen production, and carbon sequestration, say, is the loss of potential revenue in not clear-cutting forests for timber.

But in late-stage capitalism, those who want to hoard commodities for their own personal wealth can't see the value of ecological services over the potential revenue to be made from exploitation.  Why let carbon sit in deep storage beneath the ground, when you can mine the coal by mountaintop removal for profit?  Why preserve the habitats and species diversity of National Forests when you can clear-cut the timber? And why not drain the swamps and let urban sprawl extend into the Everglades with cheap, transitory suburban housing developments?

I can't believe I'm saying this, but our so-called "president" is right about one thing - if there were no forests out West, there'd be no forest fires right now.  Of course, there'd also be no slope stabilization to reduce landslides and other catastrophes, no clean rainwater catchments for our Western cities, and no bird habitats to control populations of mosquitoes and other insect pests, but that's another matter.

When someone like our so-called "president" sees the horrific wildfires ravaging the American West right now, all he can see is the failure of not exploiting the ecosystems for short-term profit.  The value of ecological systems, since they can't be monetized, have no worth to someone like our so-called "president."  From there, it's an easy next step to blaming the current catastrophes not on climate change as science indicates, but on the lack of exploitation.  As I said, if there were no forests, there's be no forest fires.

Only you can prevent forests.

Day 50

 This is real reason why the MAGA supremacists are so worked up right now.

From the Sports Desk

 I think one thing we can all agree on is that 2020 has been a trying year.  So I, for one, was glad to see sports finally resume, even if in delayed and shortened seasons, seasons that are sure to forever have asterisks next to whatever statistics are generated.

The Boston Celtics just triumphed over a gritty seven-game series against the Toronto Raptors, last year's NBA champion, and are looking like contenders for the Championship Series, if not the championship itself.  I was on the edge of my seat right up to the end of each game (and don't get me started about the end of Game Three).

The NFL resumed today.  It was nice to see Cam Newton have a good game in his debut as the New England Patriots new quarterback, my old job (just kidding, it was Tom Brady's).  Cam had 75 yards rushing, more yards than any other player on either team.  Meanwhile, Tom Brady's looking a little shaky in his debut at Tampa Bay - at halftime, his Buccaneers trail by 10 points, and he is 8 for 12 and has only 76 yards with one interception.

The distraction of sports is a pleasant relief from all the other concerns of this virus-begotten year of the plague.  I'll take all the entertainment I can get, even if it's just tracking Naomi Osaka's face masks in the U.S. Open.

Day 52

So I foreshadowed this post a couple of days ago.  Enormous quantities of my free time (of which this ROM does indeed have enormous quantities) have been going into the game ARK - Survival Evolved. It's not a great game.  It's not bad, but its not one of those upper echelon, prestige games either.  It's glitchy, there's way to much grinding involved, and there's no coherent story line or quests to follow. But like its spiritual sister, Minecraft, those shortcomings become its attributes.

It's basically a survival game.  Your character wakes up on a beach, naked and unarmed.  Oh, and you're surrounded by dinosaurs.  The game basically involves trying not to get killed by said dinosaurs, and take my word for it, you will get killed, a lot, especially early in the game.  

Like Minecraft, you have to craft your own tools out of wood and rocks and then build a shelter for protection.  You have to hunt for food, and you have to find a water source.  Eventually, you get more sophisticated, smelting metal to craft better tools, building more aesthetically pleasing buildings, and then refining oil from off-shore seeps into gasoline to power small engines.  And probably the most attractive feature of all - you can tame individual dinosaurs, outfit them with saddles and ride them, and use them as beats of burden to carry lumber, rocks etc., and as combatants to fight off other, untamed predators.

It;s not rocket science and Russian literature has nothing to fear by way of completion, but gameplay becomes so addictive because there's always something that needs to be done.  Before long, you have a farm to grow berries to feed your herbivore tames, you need to hunt to feed your carnivores, you constantly need to forage for more resources (timber, rock, metal, etc).  Even after you tame a dino, you need to continue to "train" it to raise its health statistics so it doesn't die the first time it encounters a hostile dino, You can hatch dino eggs to raise new tames from infancy, you can explore caves and the ocean, you can craft rafts to navigate the world, and you can even fly on the backs of pteranodons.  

There's always something to do and there's always something that needs to be done (have you emptied the compost bin to fertilize your crops today?).  As a result, once you enter the game and start playing, it's hard to ever stop.  I have literally started playing at x o'clock in the morning, and continued until the same hour in the p.m. And vice versa.

I know that I'm playing the game "wrong."  You;'re supposed to play as part of a team.  There's so many tasks to keep up with that it's recommended that you form a tribe, either with your friends or players that you meet on-line, and divide the work.  One person tend the farms, one person be the blacksmith, one person care for the tames, etc.  In this multi-palyer mode, there's also combat with other, hostile  tribes of on-line players, that would just love to destroy your base to grief you, as well as steal all your precious loot.  

But I'm not interested in all that and the game does allow single-player mode.  One person to try to keep up with the million-and-one tasks needed to establish a base, all while trying to avoid raptors,  rexes, and worse.  At this point, I have a comfy house built of bronto-proof stone, two separate berry farms to feed my herbivores, three dino pens for small, medium, and large tamed dinosaurs, and a separate crafting workshop for forging tools and weapons.  

I'll put it this way - it may be escapism but it beats living in Trump's Amerika two months before Election Day.

Day 53

 

Is This Racist?

 

Trump Is Over

 

From The Atlantic's revelation that Private Ouchie-Feet called our dead soldiers "losers," to Michael Cohen's revelations about the extent and degree of his treachery and perfidy and racism, to Bob Woodward's bombshell today that Trump fully understood the danger of Covid-19 and admitted to deliberately misleading the American public about the threat, the reign of Donald Trump, the so-called 45th "president" of the United States, is over.

Let freedom ring, comrades.  We're victorious.

Day 56

Happy Desolation Day

Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited was first released on August 30, 1965.  Containing classic Dylan songs such as Like A Rolling Stone and Ballad of a Thin Man, as well as the nearly 11-and-a-half-minute, stream-of-consciousness epic, Desolation Row, the album captured the political and cultural chaos of contemporary America.  Author Michael Gray has argued that, in an important sense, the 1960s "started" with this album.

Thirty-four years and 10 days later, the world premier of the movie Fight Club was held on September 10, 1999. With a theme of conflict between Generation X and the value system of advertising, Fight Club was cited as one of the most controversial and talked-about films of 1999. The Guardian saw it as an omen for change in American political life, and The New York Times dubbed it the "defining cult movie of our time."

Instead of Labor Day, perhaps we should commemorate these two definitive artworks documenting class struggle and alienation and with a combined holiday on the first Monday of each September.

Day 58