Essays October 8, 2018

Here in Milano, on Columbus Day 2018

Here in Milano, where my daughters attend an American school, which observes American holidays, they will have October 8^thoff as their school celebrates Columbus Day.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator and colonist who sailed for Spain, who we were told in elementary school, discovered America.

And by America, we mean he discovered the Bahamas, South America, Central America, and Cuba. The only parts of the United States we can truthfully say Columbus discovered are the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

And when we say discovered, we need to mention that Columbus was absolutely convinced he had made it to the Indies, calling the inhabitants “Indians,” a mistake which requires continuous clarification to this day. There is, in fact, no consensus amongst historians that he ever understood that he had landed on a continent that was previously unknown—unknown, that is, to Europeans.

Video: Here in Milano, on Columbus Day

Because when we say discovered, we must exclude the voyages of Lief Erikson, the Norse explorer who set foot on the Americas about 500 years before Columbus landed on San Salvador.

And when we say discovered, we must definitely exclude the inhabitants of the islands whose ancestors had lived in the Americas for well over 13,000 years.

The Arawaks were curious about the Columbus and his men, and as it has been noted in multiple reports, they very open and very generous. In his captain’s log, Columbus wrote, “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever one wished.”

And so Columbus subjugated them. His men took women and children as slaves for sex and labor. He forced the men into the mines to dig for gold. If they did not reach their quotas, his men would hack off their hands. When the terrified Arawaks tried to escape into the hills, the Spaniards sent their dogs to hunt them down and kill them.

Historian Howard Zinn writes, “Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords and horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards.

“In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. . . . By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were 500. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.”

As a kid, the explorations had been my favorite part of American history. I loved the maps of the voyages. I loved the early maps that showed the Americas as barely recognizable landmasses, that grew more realistic as more explorations were made, as more information was gathered.

While Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic may have been the 1492 equivalent of Apollo 11, I now think the whole thing makes for a wildly inappropriate national holiday for the United States.

And by inappropriate, I mean for the enlightenment-inspired “all men are created equal” United States; the United States that was founded on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, equality, and religious tolerance; the United States that fought against the Nazis in World War Two, the United States that welcomed immigrants with open arms, especially, especially those fleeing existential life-threatening situations; the United States that was founded on the belief the government’s primary purpose is to protect the rights of its people, that all people are entitled to certain rights by virtue of simply being human. For that America, celebrating Columbus Day is totally inappropriate.

As opposed to the other America, the one that decimated the Native American population, put citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps, that not only stands by but stands in the way as women are shamed after coming forward after being raped or sexually harassed; the America that sits by today while law-abiding African American citizens are murdered by police officers who are not held accountable, who are not even safe in their own homes.

The America that does not welcome immigrants seeking asylum, but actively destroys families by taking their children.

Now for that America, celebrating Columbus—who not only initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but also engineered the first genocide of indigenous people in the New World—for that America, celebrating the mercenary sailor Christopher Columbus is totally appropriate.

———————————————————————————

An earlier version of this column appeared here a year ago

Sources, Notes, and Further Reading

A People’s History of the United States
By Howard Zinn
https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-ebook/dp/B015XEWZHI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1537112246&sr=1-1&keywords=howard+zinn

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
by Bartolomé de las Casas
https://www.amazon.com/Short-Account-Destruction-Indies-dp-1539797724/dp/1539797724/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1537112362
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomé_de_las_Casas

Common Sense
By Thomas Paine
https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486296024/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1537113037&sr=8-3&keywords=common+sense+thomas+paine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet)

book review May 19, 2018

You Must Change Your Life

My Favorite Sites for Book Recommendations

I am continually looking for books to read and Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” carousel doesn’t cut it. Because I am living in Italy, I cannot simply pad down to the nearest bookstore and lose myself for a bunch of hours—there are a couple stores where I can lose myself for a half-hour, forty-five minutes every once in a while. So online it is. My go-to sources for book recommendations are Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings site, Ryan Holiday’s email book list, and James Altucher’s and Tim Ferriss’ podcasts.

Brain Pickings
Maria Popova

Maria Popova’s love of literature, of books, of physical books, is palpable. A post on her Brain Pickings site will usually focus a single book. She interacts with it, gives her own impressions, and lets us know what books, articles, essays, stories, it reminds her of. She brings in other writers to elucidate and complement the topic. A post will usually include up to 10 links to other subjects she’s written on, all potential rabbit holes of reading. I find it hard to keep up with her impressive output.

Her posts tend toward the timeless, rather than the quick-hit rise-and-fall stories most of the internet presents us with. She spend, by all accounts, incredible amounts of time in the public library, finding worthy books we may be overlooking.

In an interview with the Guardian, she says:

If something interests me and is both timeless and timely, I write about it. Much of what is published online is content designed to be dead within hours, so I find most of my material offline. I gravitate more and more towards historical things that are somewhat obscure and yet timely in their sensibility and message. We really need an antidote to this culture of “if it’s not Google-able, it doesn’t exist”. There’s a wealth of knowledge and inspiration offline, ideas still very relevant and interesting.

You can get a weekly email notification with a round up of the week’s posts, but start by simply going to her site and getting yourself lost.

Books I’ve read (or am currently reading) on Maria Popova’s recommendation:

Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Agnes de Mille
A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner
The Journals of Andre Gide
The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday is a voracious reader. Part of the success of his books—in particular, The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy—comes from Holiday’s huge email list of people interested in his book recommendations who then became fans of his books.

Holiday writes:

“I’ve always devoured books. Why, exactly, I’m not sure. Obviously a big reason to read is because it’s fun. As Petrarch, a famous book lover observed some 700 years ago, “books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones.” But if I was honest, I would say the real reason that I’ve spent so much time with my nose inside this book or that book is because I have been searching for something: a way to life. There is a Latin expression: liber medicina animi (a book is the soul’s medicine). That’s what I’ve been after.”

You should sign up for his monthly reading recommendations, but the best place to start is with his Books to Base Your Life On list.

Holiday’s recommendations tend toward the edifying. Marcus Aurelius tops the list. Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180, the book Meditations was not meant for publication but was written as an evening journal for his eyes only. Here’s Holiday’s take on the book:

The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. To me, this is not only one of greatest books ever written but perhaps the only book of its kind. Just imagine: the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, admonishing himself on how to be better, more just, more immune to temptation, wiser. It is the definitive text on self-discipline, personal ethics, humility, self-actualization and strength.

Books I’ve read on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
48 Laws of Powerand Mastery by Robert Greene
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh

The James Altucher Show

James Altucher is the Columbo of podcasting. He often comes off a little ditzy, claiming to not know much of anything, coming forward continually with his mistakes and failures, except . . . he has terrific guests and he asks terrific questions. He’ll really get down to details on things like what Dan Harrisfelt like while having a panic attack on Good Morning America, discussing authenticity with Wynton Marsalis, or the Apollo 8 mission with Robert Kurson, author of Rocket Men.

Books I’ve read on James Altucher’s recommendation:

10% Happier by Dan Harris
Own the Day, Own your Life by Aubrey Marcus
But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

Tim Ferriss
The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast
Tribe of Mentors Podcast

Tim Ferriss entered the internet’s consciousness with his book The Four-Hour Work Week. His mission is to hack learning and his main way to do that is to interview, via his podcast, high-performing individuals and learn their secrets. In his podcasts, he seems humble and appreciative of his progress in life. He will often ask his guests about significant failures and how the failure was leveraged to bring about personal growth.

He does not hoard information but shares it, loves sharing it, sharing it has become, in fact, his mission. He seems like a very likeable every-man. He’s had his personal issues—including a very relatable brush with suicide. His Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors books are a great collections of productivity hacks from his guests, who are amongst the best in their fields, as filtered by Ferriss.

Books I’ve read because of Tim Ferriss:

The Obstacle is the Wayby Ryan Holiday
Principlesby Ray Dalio
The Art of Learningby Josh Waitzkin
The Gifts of Imperfectionby Brené Brown

If you like Ferriss’ podcast, sign up for his weekly email, 5-Bullet Friday.
Here’s his description:

“Every Friday, I send out an exclusive email with the five coolest things I’ve found (or explored) that week. . . It might include books, gadgets, experimental supplements, articles, new hacks/tricks, and — of course — all sorts of weird stuff I dig up around the world.”

Here’s two of the five from a recent week:

What I’m listening to —
Malemolência by Céu (@ceumusic). This has been one of my favorite songs for 2-3 years, and the entire album is stellar (Lenda is another standout for me). The sexiness of the vocals is otherworldly. The album cover pic ain’t so bad, either. Oh, and her videos, too.

Quote I’m pondering —
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” – Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet.

I love finding this in my email on Friday. Amongst all the crap I delete and unsubscribe from, I always read this. It takes no more than a minute to read. Sometimes, I follow a link and check out the song, or quoted author, and sometimes I don’t. I look forward to reading this on Fridays.

If you have a favorite source for books, please share the link in the comments section. Thanks!

Essays April 15, 2018

You know what would be great?

You know what would be great? If we could have a country where people could just be people. Color of skin?? Really? Really? Sorry if this sounds cliche but I want you to think about it: the color of your heart is fucking the same—a purplish reddish color. Our brains are grey. And if you think your soul has any sort of color you are fucked up. Period.

I am 100% behind these kids who are speaking out because their friends were killed, because they could have been killed. These high school students are brave and articulate. They are Gandhi and Malcom X and Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

I am in my mid-fifties. It is hard enough to deal with my friends who have cancer, my friends who have already had a chance to live a life that, a century ago, would have been considered incredibly long.

But these kids saw their classmates killed. In high school. And they have their identities called into question. They get called crisis actors. The most intense day of their lives.

Most of us will not have something as crazy and intense happen to us as these kids have had happen to them. Yet, because of the media, the NRA, the GOP, the political system that makes the country bipolar, these kids who have been through a hell that in times past has been reserved for soldiers in war. They get attacked by the press, the pretty petty press who are subsidized by the incredibly rich. Look, a capitalistic society needs to be wary of ways in which money will undermine their government.

So you’re in this high school and you see your friends get mowed down in front of you. Kids that had their whole life in front of them. Maybe you liked them, maybe not. It doesn’t fucking matter. You may have been irritated by them. They were jocks. They were nerds. They were popular. You know what? I have more friends from high school now than I had in high school. We have a lot of shit to work out. Our worst enemy may turn out to be our best friend twenty years from now.

These kids are brave. They are taking their situation, and universalizing it. They are faithfully telling their story so that we, if we are empathic enough to understand it, are able to be in their shoes, in the terrifying place that they were in.

Can you imagine yourself in their shoes, in their school, your friends being shot and killed before your eyes? Can you imagine what that must be like? Because if you can, I don’t think you’d make fun of them for getting rejected from colleges. Or be so threatened by them that you’d photoshop them ripping up the constitution.

Really? Her friends were shot dead and you’d spend time creating an image of her to discredit her as a citizen of the United States?

We are being divided and conquered. We are being separated. We are a country. We are supposed to be a family, a tribe, a country. We are supposed to work together, stand by each other.

And furthermore, as humans, it is in our best interests to band together, to seek out common ground, to be friends. I have friends from all over the world. Our governments may not be kind to each other but we are.

Maybe I am feeling up against the wall because the government of my country looks to be totally off its rocker. Maybe it’s not just the current administration, maybe it’s been building up to this for a long long while.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not okay. Your skin color doesn’t mean shit. The amount of money you make, doesn’t mean shit. Things are totally out of balance. And if we don’t figure out a way to set the balance right, all these dystopian sci-fi novels are going to seem quaint by comparison.

We are continually being put on our heels. This does not help us to be our best selves. And our best selves are necessary to pull our country up by the bootstraps.

Essays January 15, 2018

The Once and Final Frontier

Brentano’s Bookstore. Westlake Center. Seattle. Mid-Nineties.

I was up front, stocking the poetry section, momentarily resisting the urge to crack open some Robinson Jeffers or Theodore Roethke and read a few lines. A man came through the doors, making a beeline for me, announcing: “I need a book about space.” He was in his sixties. He had been wearing a hat as recently as ten minutes before. I guessed his wife was shopping in the mall, and instead of spending his purgatorial sentence parked on one of the mall benches, he decided to put his time to use. I suspected it was his first time in a bookstore in years, maybe ever.

Books on Space. I’m on it. I am always willing to channel my inner nine-year-old and dig through the science section. I grew up in the sixties when space was the current frontier.

Kennedy at Rice University — JFK at Rice University, September 12, 1962

In 1961, John F. Kennedy got up and got behind the space program. Inspired by cold war competition—the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik in 1957, and sent Yuri Gargarin once around the planet in 1961—Kennedy spoke powerfully, intelligently, persuasively about flying Americans to and from the moon before the end of the decade. In his 1962 speech at Rice University he said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” Project Gemini and the Apollo Program were soon all over the news.

The cultural notions of space and future were significantly recalibrated in that moment.

Rocketships were out. Rockets were in. The 1950s style space sit-com Lost in Space gave way to the tech savvy Star Trek, its set infused with updated realism, its plots frequently dealing with the ethics of space exploration. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was closer to us in time than Star Trek. Its special effects, its themes of evolution, existentialism, and artificial intelligence are so well done, that when the millennium approached, we were all disappointed by the discrepancy.

The toy aisles filled up with rockets and astronauts. The Major Matt Mason action figures, spacesuits, rockets, and rovers were designed based on actual NASA concepts. And finally, at the end of the decade, as promised, we had the moon landings.

We watched Apollo 11 launch and land in the summer of 1969. 94% of the homes with television sets tuned in. Later landings would be shown in schools. In my classroom, a huge black and white television set was wheeled in on a cart. This was a big deal at the time—a lot of our multimedia experiences in school still involved a Filmstrip Projector—a combination slide-projector/record player that beeped when it was time for the AV assistant to advance the strip.

We sat at our desks, watched them walk on the moon, and collect rock samples. It didn’t matter that the images were low-resolution, and high contrast, or that the astronauts were moving in what seemed like slow-motion. It was exciting, memorable, and cool—and certainly more interesting than the usual curriculum.

The magazine stands filled with beautiful, powerful, color cover photos. The intense blue of the Earth set off by the rich black of space. After seeing the Earthrise photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote:

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

Earthrise. Taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, December 24, 1968

As I walked the guy back to the science section, he began getting more specific about what he was looking for. “I need a book about the moon,” he said. Then, getting more animated, his brain switching gears, he said, “You know how they showed the moon landings on TV? Well, I was thinking—there’s no air in space. So how could we hear it? How could we hear any of it? At this moment, he somehow became both solemn and excited. “Sound waves need air to travel in! In space no one can hear you scream—right?”

A bit stunned, I showed him some books while he elaborated on his theory. I gave a go at explaining that television transmissions, both video and audio, were sent via electromagnetic waves, which did not require air as a medium, but what he heard me say was: “blahblahblah.”

I actually met the astronaut Jim Lovell in that very bookstore. He had recently released Lost Moon, the book that was the basis for the Apollo 13 movie—he was the astronaut portrayed by Tom Hanks. He was thoughtful and friendly and did not strike me as a man harboring a gigantic secret.

Space-Book guy continued, adding the cherry to the top of his conspiracy cake: “That’s why they went after OJ—because he made that movie.”

He was referring to Capricorn One, the movie about the government faking a Mars landing, starring OJ Simpson. The movie’s other stars—Elliot Gould, James Brolin, Sam Waterston, Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, and Telly Savalas—seem to have been spared persecution for their parts in this cinematic revelation of government conspiracy.

I wished him good luck, and walked toward the front of the store, fully intending to pull out the Yeats I had just shelved, and read The Second Coming five or six times as a tonic.

Epilogue

Russell Schweickart
Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 9
His thoughts on orbiting the Earth
March 1969

“But up there, you go around every hour and a half, time after time after time. You wake up usually in the mornings, over the Middle East and over North Africa. As you eat breakfast you look out the window and there’s the Mediterranean area, Greece and Rome and North Africa and the Sinai, that whole area. . . . And you identify with Houston and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix and New Orleans. And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you’re identifying with North Africa. You look forward to it, you anticipate it, and there it is. And that whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing. And that makes a change. . . . And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, the Earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, ‘Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?'”

Essays October 14, 2017

Here in Milano, on Columbus Day

Here in Milano, because my daughters go to an American school, where American holidays are observed, there was no school today because of Columbus Day.

Columbus, an Italian sailing for Spain, who discovered America.

And by America, we mean he discovered Central America, South America, Cuba, and the Bahamas.

And by discovered, we mean he was convinced he had made it to Asia. There is no consensus amongst historians that he ever realized he had landed on a continent previously unknown (to Europeans).

And by discovered, we don’t include the Vikings and the continent’s inhabitants whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. Columbus wrote about the first natives he saw: “With fifty men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.”

While this may have been the 1492 equivalent of Apollo 11, the whole thing still makes for an inappropriate national holiday for the United States.

And by inappropriate, I mean for the enlightenment-inspired “all men are created equal” United States of America—not the one with slavery, Native American genocide, Japanese Internment camps, and Trump.

Note:
In 2018, I expanded the text and recorded a video version. In 2019, I updated the sound.
Watch it here:
https://scott-taylor.co/wp-admin/post.php?post=1504&action=edit

Essays September 4, 2017

All I Really Need to Know I Learned . . . by Driving in Italy

First off, this is not a primer about the various gestures and “hand signals” Italians use to wordlessly communicate to other drivers here in Milan. Although, trust me, I have had plenty of those aimed in my general direction. Avoiding accidents is good policy no matter where you are, but as a driver new to the country, I’d prefer not have to use my limited Italian language skills to describe any incidents to the polizia. Also, one tries to avoid being part of the flashing-light street-side spectacles that the Italians are famously fond of—they last for hours, and require a stack of paperwork decipherable only by old-money Italian lawyers.

I drive about two hours a day in Milan. After couple of months of this routine, I decided I didn’t want to resent my time in the car, that I needed to consciously improve my driving. I would try to pay more attention, to put my ego in the backseat, and get into the flow of driving in Milan.

“When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help.” —Marcus Aurelius

The first thing I heard about driving in Italy was from my wife’s boss who stated that lanes and lights are “suggestions.” He added later that there are intersections with cameras so some suggestions should be considered more strongly than others.

Lanes are fluid here. At some intersections, two lanes become three or four, and sometimes disappear altogether, looking like the bottom of an airport escalator after five planes have landed.

There are crazy amounts of scooters and motorcycles. The riders have all been trained in stunt-riding, possibly at a circus. They weave their way through the maze of cars stopped at a light, then on green, begin zooming in and out of lanes. They pass trains and buses by veering temporarily into oncoming traffic. Being on a scooter somehow renders them fearless.

Here’s where I’ve had to up my driving game with payoffs for the rest of the day.

Be Present/Pay Attention

With all the opportunistic and creative lane-changers, the acrobatic scooterists, some incredibly complicated intersections involving up to five streets, two train routes, and possibly a canal, you have to pay air-traffic-controller-like attention. Defensive driving taken to a new level is necessary here. You must be present, very present grasshopper. Set your mirrors carefully. Assume that there’s someone in your blind spot.

Let’s talk about pedestrians. No one crosses the street here without concurrently interacting with their phone somehow. Everyone is reading texts, or talking. I will sometimes see groups walking and talking together. But just as often, everyone’s on their own phone. Given the crazy traffic situation here, not paying attention as you cross the street is, to my mind, putting a lot of faith in the universe for protection. I am not familiar enough with the Catholic religion to know if it’s included in the Catechism.

I very rarely rock out while driving because it’s too damn distracting. Also, because one tries not to look like a dork. On the highway, I may put on jazz and star in a European film from the 60s for a bit, but in town I need to be as much like the Buddha as possible.

Don’t be in a Hurry

It is very unpleasant to be in a hurry here while driving. You start thinking about how to make up time, you go too fast, you are no longer present, no longer giving driving your full attention. When you are in a hurry, anxiety is your copilot, navigator, and backseat driver all rolled into one. I prefer Google Map’s Lady Robot as my navigator and copilot, even if she, while directing me in English, butchers the Milano street names in hilarious fashion.

Plus, if you are not in a hurry, you are more likely to

Be Generous

If you have enough time, you can let people onto the street in front of you without worry. If I’m in a hurry, I absolutely do not want to lose a few spots in the driving line—getting through a light a couple streets down could save 5 minutes! There are streets here that feed into very busy streets that are not regulated by traffic lights. In the United States, these people would wait several forevers.

If you find yourself on one of the streets, you have to nose your car out when there’s a gap in the traffic coming the other direction, and then hope your confidence springs a gap so you can make your left turn. I try to let one of these cars through when I’m able to do so. Despite my appreciation of Buddhism, I do not believe in any sort of karma-magic. Personally though, I do feel better about inserting my way into traffic if I’ve been on the other side of the equation a number of times. Possibly, this is what karma is supposed to be about anyway. When you have time, and can put yourself in that person’s shoes, it’s an easy decision to make.

Acknowledge mistakes/no reactive gestures

Sometimes you screw up and because of the grace and awareness of another driver, there wasn’t a crash. Flipping them off because, somehow, it’s their fault (?) doesn’t help. In fact, I feel shitty after being a prick. There’s no reason to add to the anger on the road just because your little ego can’t admit fucking up. Wordlessly confess your crimes and drive on—and hope the driver isn’t dropping their kids off at the same school as you.

Don’t be Anxious

If you’re driving to, say, a doctor appointment, don’t worry about parking until you’re there. Sure, it’s busy, and you’re heading into a crazy part of town—or maybe you’re heading home, you live by me, it’s Friday night, and the theater down the street has a production and so parking will be challenging.

Relax. First worry about getting there. When you arrive, you can

Improvise/Be Creative

If you can get onto the sidewalk without blocking pedestrian traffic or park in another car—do it—park there. I actually don’t know if it’s legal. I’m assuming it is—maybe it’s just decriminalized. Italy has streets that come into at an angle to each other and so there’ll be a triangular zone marked by white paint —park there. Pull up on the curb a bit. You likely will not get a ticket. If you’ve parked like this fifty times and you finally get one—whatever—that’s still cheap parking.

There are plenty of ways to park creatively. As long as you’re not in a spot designated for a weekly street market the next morning (not that I would know anything about that), or you haven’t parked anybody in while sidewalk parking, you’ll very likely be unticketed and untowed.

Finally, we are all in this together

Driving in Italy is chaotic and requires you to pay attention to get where you want to go. Cut other drivers some slack. If enough of us cut each other some slack, be a bit generous from time to time, then we’ll all get to where we want to go as efficiently as possible—which is the goal, right?

To sum up: give yourself enough time, be generous, and keep your ego out of the driver’s seat. In fact, if you can tie your ego up, put it in cement shoes and drop it into a deep body of water—all the better. At the very least, lock it in the trunk while you are driving, and if you forget and leave it in there after you’re home, I seriously doubt anyone will complain.

Essays May 24, 2017

Chance Encounters: Improving the Odds

Two friends have recently reported chance encounters with friends in unlikely places. Cindy ran into an old friend at the Keflavík airport in Iceland, and Megan ran into a friend while traveling in Jordan.

Cindy asked in her post, “What are the chances of meeting a dear friend at an airport in Iceland?” Just this side of impossible to calculate, I’m guessing. The number of the variables alone would explode exponentially in no time. The odds of running into someone are different if you’re at the Keflavík airport, the Guggenheim Museum, or walking on the Great Wall. We might very well have been within a few feet of each other at Grand Central Station, but the sheer number of people there surely diluted our chances of meeting. And what number of friends, dear or otherwise, would you choose to plug into such an equation?

To sum up what happens to make these unlikely meetings possible:

You are at the same place—which ideally is wildly out of the context you know them in
You’re there at the same time—and the longer it’s been since you’ve been at the same place at the same time, the better.
At least one of you needs to be aware of their surroundings—if you both have your noses pointed toward your phones, forget about it
You need to be able to recognize each other—how long has it been after all?
You both want to be seen—some of us aren’t so keen on getting a blast from the past

So being away in an exotic locale and running into an old friend happens pretty rarely. But I’m wondering how many times we just miss one of these chance encounters.

How many times are we just a block away from each other? Or maybe one of us was there in the same place, having their photo taken in front of the same landmark, an hour earlier.

If we were to expand our range from “same place, same time,” to “same block, same hour,” then the chances must go up considerably. The odds that there could be someone we know with a block or an hour of us, would have to
be greater than the odds of running into them—since this happens only occasionally—and it would stand to reason that more often we just miss people we’d like to run into. Maybe we’ve walked right by each other because at least one of us is looking at a map or a view or a Kandinsky.

Louis Pasteur once wrote that “Chance favors the prepared mind,” so maybe we can look at what we can do to improve our chances of running into an old friend somewhere.

Short of having Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map (it would have to be specially enchanted to filter out creepy intentions) to identify friends in the immediate vicinity, or neurotically checking in to places on Facebook, we’ll just have to count on luck—which makes for better magic anyway.

Our best chances then lie with noticing people already in the same place at the same time.

So first things first, you need to put your phone away. I know, I know. But really. All the world is made apparent to us via our perceptions. It’s already being filtered through our senses and brains before it reaches us—the world isn’t going to seem bigger and more interesting if you send it through more funnels—the news as interpreted, written, edited, published, shared, and finally viewed on your phone on the steps of the Taj Mahal, while your best friend from 6th grade walks by, googling for a restaurant on her phone.

“All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.”
—Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

I was recently at the Linate airport in Milan, waiting to pick up my daughter. As I looked through the faces, ready to pick out hers, people coming through the gate started reminding me of friends and acquaintances—this person’s eyes, that person’s hair, the way that guy walked. One woman looked so much like a nanny the girls had a few years ago, I had to do a double take—it was not her but it absolutely could have been an older sister.

Our brains are wired to recognize faces—one of our oldest skills, in fact. “At as early as four months,” Max McClure writes on the Stanford website, “babies’ brains already process faces at nearly adult levels, even while other images are still being analyzed in lower levels of the visual system.” So even if a few decades have passed since we last saw a friend, our face-recognition ability gives us a very good chance of spotting them, but you have to put down your phone and pay attention. Even if you don’t spot anyone you know, people watching is way more interesting than anything up on the Huffpost right now.

book review April 15, 2017

Short Lists: Books April 2017

Books I’m reading

1. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
2. Zealot by Reza Aslan
3. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
4. Strategy by Captain B.H. Liddell Hart
5. The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe

Books I’ve Read More than Once in the Past Year

1. The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
2. Tiny Beautiful Things, Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
3. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tszu
4. 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
5. Do the Work by Steven Pressfield

Recent Favorites

1. Tiny Beautiful Things, Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
2. 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
3. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
5. Vox by Nicholson Baker

Recent Favorite Audio Books

1. The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
2. The 50^th Law by 50 Cent and Robert Greene
3. But What If We’re Wrong by Chuck Klosterman
4. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
5. Getting Unstuck by Pema Chödrön

Books I need to reread

1. Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
4. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
5. Vertigo by W. G. Sebald

Books currently on my nightstand

1. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
2. The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
3. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
4. The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour
5. Start Where You Are by Pema Chödrön

Last five books read

1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays
2. This is How by Augusten Burroughs
3. You are a Complete Disappointment: A Triumphant Memoir of Failed Expectations by Mike Edison
4. Brave Enough by Cheryl Strayed
5. Seducing the Demon by Erica Jong

Last five books read on kindle

1. 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
2. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
3. Levels of the Game by John McPhee
4. The Art of War by Sun Tzu
5. Tiny Beautiful Things, Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

Last five poetry books I’ve read from

1. On the Pulse of Morning by Maya Angelou
2. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver
3. When One has Lived a Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell
4. Inferno by Dante
5. The Captain Lands in Paradise by Sarah Manguso

Graphic Novels

1. Maus by Art Spiegelman
2. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
3. Cages by Dave McKean
4. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
5. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Books currently on our coffee table

1. The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari
2. Exactitudes by Ellie Uyttenbroek and Ari Versluis
3. Cy Twombly: Centre Pompidou
4. Luigi Ghiri: Pensiero Paesaggio Thought Landscape
5. Jean-Michel Basquiat: Mudec

The Next Five Books

1. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
2. The Ending of Time by Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm
3. Against Everything, Essays by Mark Grief
4. Dry by Augusten Burroughs
5. All Art is Propaganda by George Orwell

____________________

Essays April 11, 2017

Intimations of Immortality

Recollections of Early Childhood (after Wordsworth)

— • —
My father fainted when the doctor began stitching up my tongue. I was four.

— • —
I remember lying on the grass one summer day, watching the clouds drift into shapes, and seeing this huge Chinese head lean over the edge of a cloud and look directly down at me. We looked at each other for . . . minutes . . . hours . . . days?

— • —
When you’re five and it’s cold and Christmas Eve and you’re driving to your grandparent’s house—the moon following beside your car over the frozen wheat fields of the Idaho panhandle is such magic that you try to capture it in poem for years and years and cannot ever quite.

— • —
My father took me rock climbing with his buddies. They had a rule: If you stepped on the rope, you got spit on. That day, I was wearing a light-blue short-sleeved Idaho Vandals sweatshirt. I was 7.

— • —
In my 30s, I was putting together a book of my paternal grandfather’s memoirs for him to give to the family. I was stunned that it taken me so long to realize that he was actually horrible, insecure little prick.

— • —
My uncle, when he was a teenager, got into a fistfight with my grandfather. I often weigh this against my own experience of not having thrown a punch at my father.

— • —
I started walking at nine months—which I’m sure was a nuisance to my eighteen-year old parents. I got my first stitches shortly thereafter—it involved a vase at their friend’s house and I got them just above my left eye.

— • —
When my paternal grandfather found out that his son had impregnated my mother—both were 17—he shamed my father so hugely and so completely, I think he never recovered. I heard this story for the first time at my father’s funeral.

— • —
My family story is a train-wreck occurring for generations over decades. Did I jump off in time?

— • —
When I was four, my mom and my aunts took me to a drive-in movie. I was supposed to sleep in back. I did not. The movie: Rosemary’s Baby.

— • —
I remember very vividly scraping the living bejesus out of both knees at the age of five, while riding a pedal fire-engine at a friend’s house.

— • —
When I was five, my mom would put me on the bus in Moscow, Idaho and my aunts would pick me up in Lewiston.

— • —
I would spend weeks of summer at my grandparents house—the single A night baseball games were well-attended, totally electric, and it was the best temperature of the day. I’d go with my grandfather. I’d take my mitt.

— • —
Best summer memory of my maternal grandfather: going out at night with flashlights to catch earthworms in the flowerbeds we had watered before dark. Honorable mention: Driving the golf cart at the country club and bowling at the alley he owned.

— • —
My grandmother tried to teach me how to whistle with a blade of grass (I still cannot do it, alas).

— • —
When I was very young, I spent a lot of time in Lewiston with my Grandmother. Those moments were totally lived in the present. I wish I remembered more. I think my mind has become too organized by time since then. But I still have these memories of walking to the store to buy licorice and Mountain Dew (back when the bottle had hillbillies on it).

— • —
I have a very distinct visual memory of touching a hot stove burner the first time. It was totally a science experiment. Lesson learned.

— • —
When I was six, I dropped a rock over the fence onto my friend Bryce’s head. It was also a science experiment. I am stunned over my lack of regret at the time.

— • —
When I was nine, and at school, someone entered our house—he didn’t take anything but he did pee on the floor.

— • —
In second grade, I told Tami that she was my favorite girl. She proceeded to march me around to her friends to have me repeat it. Lesson learned.

— • —
In second grade, at recess, I found myself surrounded by 4 or 5 girls. Lisa Sanders kissed me. I had a crush on her for years after that. Maybe even still.

— • —
My grandmother kept a stash of JFK 50-cent pieces in the freezer. She gave them to me on my eleventh birthday so I could buy a 10-speed.

— • —
It took me ten times to pass beginner swim lessons at Mission Pool in Spokane.

— • —
Elementary and Junior High Crushes: Peggy, Tami, Lisa, Shari, Denise, Joette, Debbie, Cindy, Teri, Yvette, Debbie, Suzy, Tari, Annette, Donna, Wendy, Anne, Sue, and JoAnne.

— • —
In elementary school, I ran home from the bus stop everyday one year. I cannot remember why.

— • —
In elementary and junior high school, the male teachers had hack paddles. Some of them lovingly carved in the school’s shop to leave special marks—initials in many cases— on young boy’s asses.

— • —
In sixth grade, I was often found sitting in the hall for being a smartass. I know, big surprise. I always just avoided the hack-paddle.

— • —
In ninth grade, I was 5’2” and weighed 100 pounds at the first of football season. I weighed 92 by the end of it.

— • —
To hell with the time-space continuum—if I could go back in time I’d beat the shit out of at least 9 people, including my father and several teachers.

— • —
Fights were held after school at the pump house. The fierce recess passion had usually died off by then, but word had gotten around, it’d became a spectator sport, and the show must go on.

— • —
My brother launched a perfect toss of the bat from home plate toward first base where I stood after an easy out. The bat spun in slow motion like the bone tossed into the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cut that followed was not as famous as Kubrick’s.

— • —
You cannot line-item veto shit from your past. Alas.

Essays March 27, 2017

Why I am Not a Christian: Aphorisms

Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian was the first philosophy book I bought (in 1980 at the University of Oregon Bookstore) for my own edification.
Illustration by Gustave Doré: Dante’s 9th Circle of Hell.

— • —

I am certain the ego does not survive death.

— • —

Consider how surprised we are when a pope acts like a follower of Christ.

— • —

There’s nothing like the verbal contortions of the rich as they try to explain what the “camel through the eye of a needle” verse of the Bible really means.

— • —

I can totally imagine Jesus throwing up a little bit in his mouth every time Mitch McConnell utters the words “Christian Values.”

— • —
Yes, I know there is unlikely to be many cases of acid reflux in Heaven. Think of it, if you can, as symbolic.

— • —
If the Republicans could rebrand Jesus, would they keep anything?

— • —
Would the Democrats rebrand him?—or does the hippie-Jesus thing just work for them?

— • —
The Democrats are surely as uncomfortable as the Republicans with the story of Jesus expelling the merchants and money changers from the Temple.

— • —
Jesus has been rebranded many times, of course, as it seems unlikely that he, a jew living in Middle-East, was a pale, flaxon-haired, proto-hippy with an adorable little gentile nose.

— • —
Think of baptism as a ceremonial washing of the brain.

— • —
You cannot demand a literal interpretation of the Bible, and then cherry pick verses to suit your needs, all the while, praying to high heaven that no one notices the embarrassing parts you’ve wrapped in plastic and hidden in your basement freezer.

— • —
If, in the year 325 AD, a tree fell and took out the building where the Council of Nicaea took place, killing every participant who could pronounce Christ divine, would we still have all these damned Christians around today?

— • —
A conception considered immaculate occurs without mess or pleasure, thus considered by Christians to be optimum.

— • —
Christianity = Victim Worship.

— • —
The self-righteous are generally repugnant bullies, but the ones who speak threateningly about eternal hellfire might as well be dipped in shit.

— • —
What a god-fearing man actually fears is what his neighbors will think.

— • —
Christianity bestows power to the victim. Or at least gives them some material to mouth off with.

— • —
If someone put a gun to my head and made me choose a religion, I would pick Buddhism—but perhaps I’d make that choice because—living in the US for most of my life—I generally have not been exposed to that many self-righteous Buddhists.

— • —
I think reincarnation is more ridiculous than Christian Heaven, although more interesting as a literary conceit.

— • —
The afterlife is procrastination’s big imaginary friend.

— • —
Will Heaven lose some of its luster for the most judgmental of Christians? Or will they simply adjust their range to include what’s available?

— • —
What kind of ratings would a reality television show based in Hell, shown in Heaven, get? Off the fucking charts, right?

— • —
Anything lasting an eternity is bound to become hellish sooner or later.