What I found interesting is that the red moon looked like a ball, but the white new moon looks like a disc.
Zenella is more interested in reading about space than she is in experiencing it. I suppose that an eclipse just happens too slowly for a child, and I could not communicate why it struck me. Mrs Zen was not interested at all. She prefers ground level.
I cannot say she is wrong to feel that, because I often think that life would be better if I didn't lose my head in thinking about space and our place in it, in dreams that are insubstantial and pointless.
You know, the moon circles the earth at 2300 miles an hour and both circle the sun at about 60 thousand miles an hour.
I can walk at 4 miles an hour. It would take me more than 58 thousand hours to walk to the moon, were it possible. Nearly seven years.
***
Sometimes I regret having had children. I can't help thinking of the pain they will suffer in this life. Yes, I know there are compensations. But also life will end, and I have condemned them to that.
"Regret" is not the right word, but I don't know a better one. "Regret" implies that I do not want them, and that is never true. In that sense, I never regret them for an instant, and I am sure that I never will.
***
I still believe in magic. You'd think you'd grow out of it, but I never have.
I dream that I will wake up tomorrow and be really good at poker, so good that I become free. It's just a lottery dream, a reach for the moon dream.
It's not real.
But real is a drag sometimes, don't you find? Even deeply cynical realists have to dream; there has to be a moon to reach for.
And when you have it, sitting in the palm of your hand, and the blazing disc that you thought you would have is nothing but a rubbery red ball.
But imagine. Just imagine. That when you reach out to grab a rubbery red ball, you have been fooled by an optical illusion, and what you have is a blazing sun, wonderful to hold.
***
Maybe they will live forever. Maybe we all will. Maybe I have been wrong about everything, except for love. I will never believe I am wrong about that, because without it, we are no more than apes tortured with the ability to think about our own demise, and how bad would that feel?
What I found interesting is that the red moon looked like a ball, but the white new moon looks like a disc.
Zenella is more interested in reading about space than she is in experiencing it. I suppose that an eclipse just happens too slowly for a child, and I could not communicate why it struck me. Mrs Zen was not interested at all. She prefers ground level.
I cannot say she is wrong to feel that, because I often think that life would be better if I didn't lose my head in thinking about space and our place in it, in dreams that are insubstantial and pointless.
You know, the moon circles the earth at 2300 miles an hour and both circle the sun at about 60 thousand miles an hour.
I can walk at 4 miles an hour. It would take me more than 58 thousand hours to walk to the moon, were it possible. Nearly seven years.
***
Sometimes I regret having had children. I can't help thinking of the pain they will suffer in this life. Yes, I know there are compensations. But also life will end, and I have condemned them to that.
"Regret" is not the right word, but I don't know a better one. "Regret" implies that I do not want them, and that is never true. In that sense, I never regret them for an instant, and I am sure that I never will.
***
I still believe in magic. You'd think you'd grow out of it, but I never have.
I dream that I will wake up tomorrow and be really good at poker, so good that I become free. It's just a lottery dream, a reach for the moon dream.
It's not real.
But real is a drag sometimes, don't you find? Even deeply cynical realists have to dream; there has to be a moon to reach for.
And when you have it, sitting in the palm of your hand, and the blazing disc that you thought you would have is nothing but a rubbery red ball.
But imagine. Just imagine. That when you reach out to grab a rubbery red ball, you have been fooled by an optical illusion, and what you have is a blazing sun, wonderful to hold.
***
Maybe they will live forever. Maybe we all will. Maybe I have been wrong about everything, except for love. I will never believe I am wrong about that, because without it, we are no more than apes tortured with the ability to think about our own demise, and how fucking bad would that feel?
The speech also contained the implicit desire on Mr Bush's part for regime change, calling for "an Iran whose government is accountable to its people, instead of to leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons".
Accountable? Like, when your oversight body subpoenas your officials, they turn up? Like, when a jury of his peers finds one of your officials guilty of perjury, you commute his sentence? Like, when more than half your nation wants you to end your illegal occupation of another country, you say that you're never leaving?
Pursuing nucular weapons? Like the ones you are refusing to say you won't drop on targets in Iran?
So we are in the Pig & Whistle after the game, and I've just about forgotten that I was even at a football match. We are watching West Ham play Wigan, or M is. I am watching Chelsea at a distance on the other screen. We are talking about this and that. I can't really remember what. But I am boring myself, and I know I should shut up.
There is a really nice-looking fat girl. I'm not being unkind but if you prefer plump, then she's plump. If you prefer men not to sexualise women, you've come to the wrong blog, because I don't know how to help that.
I'd fuck the fat chick, I say to M. He demurs.
You're choosy, I say. He doesn't say anything.
She's pretty, he says.
She is more than pretty. I am not saying she is one of those women who would be good to look at if only she lost a few pounds. I don't view women that way because I don't have a target weight I think they should be at. I mean she is fuckable.
I do not mean by that that she is just fuckable. Let's face it, most women who aren't positively unfuckable are fuckable. I mean she is sexy.
I don't mean she is sexy like Natalie Portman is sexy. I watched Closer last night. It features Natalie Portman, and I suppose you could say she is sexy. I dunno. I didn't find her very fuckable because she looked a lot like someone had moulded her from plasticine. Closer, I have to say, is a film I hated in every way it's possible to hate a film. The script was awful, and the praise Marber has had for his writing just bemuses me. The dialogue was clunky, the plot simply unbelievable and the characterisation risible. People just do not say the things they said in that film, and they don't do the things they did either. All of the characters were hateful. It's hard to watch a film in which you don't sympathise with any of the characters. Hard for me, I mean. Maybe you enjoy hating what you're watching. I imagine Marber is a working-class boy made good, and he enjoys making the bourgeoisie look like shits. Which of course they are, just not in the way he writes them.
I would choose the fat chick over Natalie Portman. I know that this disbars me from ever being allowed into the geek club, but you don't choose what makes you drool.
It was a combination of being just the right amount of woman, a pretty face and smelling good. See, it's not about fatness or thinness. You can be too thin; there is just too little of you, and it's hard to imagine rolling around in the hay with you. You can be too fat; it can just not suit you (although, in my view, you are far better off to be a healthy weight than diet down to an ugly angularity).
It was also that she was wearing a nice dress, and you don't see that too often. Women mostly wear horrible clothes here, which do not suit them at all. Most of the women out on Saturday night had gone full out for hooker chic, and, well, given that they were mostly quite young, I had father anxiety. I couldn't help picturing my own girls dressed in the same way.
I know, you are probably thinking, yeah, but you are a lecher, judging women on their fuckability, yet you wouldn't like it if men leer at your girls. How wrong you are though. I would be far more concerned if no men leered at them. Attracting the opposite sex, or the same, whatever, is not actually a bad thing. And in this world, your path is that little bit smoother if you're easy on the eye. (You know, 20 years ago, I would have never said that, because I still thought that conversing in ideals was fitting for an adult. I may not have abandoned the ideals but I've at least grown to have the sense to accept that however the world should be, it is how it is. Prettiness should not matter, true, but you need to convince the rest of the planet of that, because they currently believe that it does.)
And if you are thinking, how awfully misogynist to characterise women purely as sex objects, you've leapt to a conclusion. I don't think of women purely in that way, but it's part of how I view them. If any man tells you he does not do the same, he is a/ lying or b/ gay. (b) is self-explanatory, but (a) is interesting. Why would a man make out he doesn't think about fucking women he meets? I suppose that he would say it because he doesn't want to seem to be supporting the patriarchy and oppressing women.
But the patriarchy did not invent sex, even if it perverts and abuses it. And women are only oppressed if I treat them any differently because they are fuckable.
Sisters, I do not. You'd never even know what I thought. I don't even drool much. I am not insensitive. I know how hurtful it is to feel judged for your looks. If someone does it to me, I feel hurt. (I don't mind that they do it, but the crassness of letting me know is inexcusable.)
Anyway, the fat chick did not even look at me, so far as I know, and she and her friends were scared off by clownish skinheads singing West Ham songs. (Hilariously, the skinheads' ringleader is an Asian guy -- a south Asian, I mean -- who would, were he trapped in a pub with real skinheads in the East End, be keeping very quiet, not chanting and carrying on.) Sometimes I wish I were less shy, and could speak to people I don't know. But I know I am a boring, insubstantial person, and wouldn't know how to interest the fat chick or anyone else. It's a failing of mine that I am entirely reactive. I never begin conversations, or email exchanges, or any type of communication, because I never have the urge, or even if I feel I might like to talk to someone, unless I have a subject in mind, I don't know how to do it. You'd think I'd have learned, at the very least by observation, but like many failings I have, this is not something rational, just how I am.
I wonder sometimes whether a woman whom I look at and think, she is nice, whether she might think the same of me. How would I know? When you are a withdrawn, hardshelled type, it's impossible to know. I assume they don't. I know it is another failing that I never quite grasp that they might find it just as hard to talk to strangers as I do. Being reactive is a terrible thing. You are always waiting for the world to reach out to you, to peer inside your shell. But why would it?
Part of the reason you have a shell in the first place is that you do not believe you are worth looking at or peering into.
The game? It was very poor, although I had fun watching it. I have a season ticket and stand in the home end with M and K, who is Zenella's tennis coach and often chats with me about football on Tuesday evenings when I take Zenella for her coaching. The Roar had a man sent off, which looked harsh (although on TV it was quite clear he deserved it), but Adelaide weren't at all adventurous and a 2-2 draw was a fair result. It would have been better had Reinaldo, the Roar's lazy, slow, clueless Brazilian striker, not skied a sitter from six yards and missed another almost as easy. Best on the pitch was probably Danny Tiatto, who applied himself with his usual vigour.
It's not simple, not easily resolved and I don't care what Bono thinks about this or any other issue. I do not have answers. All I know is that here is a question that anyone with a heart needs to be thinking about. And call me a bleeding-heart librul, but I truly believe the people of Darfur are my kin. One hundred, even fifty years ago, we could turn our backs on suffering, because we didn't know it went on -- or could pretend it didn't -- and we knew that there would be no means of ending it.
Now we know. We can't pretend. We can't pretend it is right that some of us are obscenely rich while children die in the dust. We can't pretend that the system that has created both rich and poor is the best we can do. I refuse to believe that that is the best we can do for our kin.
Rather than blog about depressing stuff like how the US has gone batshit insane and the people of Iran will be the next victims of the psychopaths running the place, I will indulge in further laughing at the Wikipedia Review fucktards. (Before you run off, going "no way am I reading another TLDR post about your stoopid trollisms, I promise that it will quickly devolve into the usual ill-directed rambling.)
Check this out. Apparently, I owe world Jewry an apology for someone else's illuminating a nasty piece of Holocaust denial.
Well, I'm not sorry. I think Holocaust deniers and their facilitators should be help up to opprobrium and ridicule, as appropriate. I don't have a high opinion of people who slag others off and refuse the right to reply either (naturally, "Somey", one of the crusaders for accountability at Wikipedia Review who curiously does not post under her own name but feels it is reasonable to "out" others, has blocked me from their site -- which means she intends that I cannot even read what she writes about me! Can you imagine being that cowardly? These are people who criticise Wikipedia for unfairly banishing idiots and not allowing them to whine eternally about it, yet when handed power themselves, they abuse it in exactly the same ways as the people they excoriate). Naturally, my comments remain open for "Somey" to state her opinion, if she wishes. I won't hold my breath though.
What people like this want is a pulpit, not a discussion forum. They want to express their views and have them applauded, not contested.
Well, that's the way the world used to be, before Al Gore invented the interwebtubes. The only really widespread media for commentary were the print media, radio and television, which had very limited and controlled means for the message-receivers to respond. But now if you say something fuckwitted, someone will come along and call you a fuckwit about three minutes after you finished typing it.
Which, I think, is fantastic.
I don't like blogs that don't have comments. It really misses the point of bloggetry, or misses an important, and sometimes fun, aspect of it. I like engaging with people, taking them on, trying out ideas with them, infuriating them, maybe making them think, and I like it when they do those things to me. The most hurtful thing anyone has ever posted in my comments (bearing in mind that I have been called a cunt so often I just don't mind it that much these days) was the suggestion that I only wanted people to agree with me. Now I'll vehemently batter you if you disagree with me, that's true, but I have always believed, will always believe, that chaos, discord, uproar are the media for creation, and harmony rots.
Also, if there are no comments, how the fuck can we linkwhore?
Thankfully, the huge outcry made the ADL reverse its position, although it still opposes legislation to recognise the genocide.
I can see arguments for not pursuing the legislation, but I do not think that realpolitik should trump simple truth-telling, and if the Turks don't like it, well that's tough. It's long past time they faced up to their past. Germany has had to, and has become normalised as a sibling nation to others in Europe. That Turkey wants the same outcome is notable. So Turkey might be "infuriated" that Congress marks the Armenian Holocaust, but you have to say, that's just tough shit. It has no basis for fury, any more than my country would were it brought to task for the famines it purposely caused in India, or the many massacres it perpetrated in its pursuit of other people's wealth.
As for the ADL, I've long felt that this rightwing smear machine should be taken a lot less seriously. The protection of Jews is important, I do not doubt that, but we do not need to leave the job to arsewits like Foxman. I note that his justification for taking no position on the legislation is that if passed it will have an adverse effect on Jews in Turkey. To which I say, why? WTF do Jews in Turkey have to do with the US? Is Foxman suggesting there is some merit to the belief that world Jewry controls Congress? I thought only lunatic antisemites believed that. Maybe Foxman knows something I don't, or maybe he's just another kind of lunatic.
When you try your best, but you don't succeed When you get what you want, but not what you need When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep Stuck in reverse
We are in the kitchen, me and Zenita. I am clearing some stuff up. The first bars of Fix you are coming from the stereo, and she jumps up into my arms.
And the tears come streaming down your face When you lose something you can't replace When you love someone but it goes to waste Could it be worse?
She has a huge, irresistible smile. She spends a lot of her life smiling, a life full of joy.
Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try to fix you
We are dancing in the kitchen. She leans back, stretching out her arms when I spin her round.
For a moment, there is only us, and her song.
When high up above or down below When you're too in love to let it go But if you never try you'll never know Just what you're worth
For a moment, she will not grow; she will live forever here with me, untouched and untouchable, safe because I am here to keep her from harm.
No one will break her heart and the man she will love will always be me.
Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try to fix you
She wraps her arms around my neck, her face close to mine.
And I am wondering, who is keeping whom safe?
Tears stream down your face When you lose something you cannot replace Tears stream down your face And I...
Tears stream down your face I promise you I will learn from my mistakes Tears stream down your face And I...
Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try to fix you
I love you daddy, she is saying. I have a moment of pure wordless joy, inexplicable, impossible to sully or break. This is the most untouchable thing I have, that anyone can have, to be just you and your child, and the song that sings their name to you.
When you try your best, but you don't succeed When you get what you want, but not what you need When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep Stuck in reverse
We are in the kitchen, me and Zenita. I am clearing some stuff up. The first bars of Fix you are coming from the stereo, and she jumps up into my arms.
And the tears come streaming down your face When you lose something you can't replace When you love someone but it goes to waste Could it be worse?
She has a huge, irresistible smile. She spends a lot of her life smiling, a life full of joy.
Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try to fix you
We are dancing in the kitchen. She leans back, stretching out her arms when I spin her round.
For a moment, there is only us, and her song.
When high up above or down below When you're too in love to let it go But if you never try you'll never know Just what you're worth
For a moment, she will not grow; she will live forever here with me, untouched and untouchable, safe because I am here to keep her from harm.
No one will break her heart and the man she will love will always be me.
Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try to fix you
She wraps her arms around my neck, her face close to mine.
And I am wondering, who is keeping whom safe?
Tears stream down your face When you lose something you cannot replace Tears stream down your face And I...
Tears stream down your face I promise you I will learn from my mistakes Tears stream down your face And I...
Lights will guide you home And ignite your bones And I will try to fix you
I love you daddy, she is saying. I have a moment of pure wordless joy, inexplicable, impossible to sully or break. This is the most untouchable thing I have, that anyone can have, to be just you and your child, and the song that sings their name to you.
It is a warm afternoon. I am listening to On the way to the club by Blur. I have been rediscovering them recently, after realising that I have all their albums but rarely listen to them. So sometimes I burn a CD of favourites, so that I can make a tape for the car, and this is the song I chose of theirs. Do you know the song? I love singing along with it. There is something truly uplifting about it.
That's Albarn. Thinking back on the Oasis/Blur thing (about which I was completely neutral, a fan of both), it seems that the Stones/Beatles comparison was rather accurate. On the one hand, underpowered copyists; on the other, genuine talents -- the posturing of hardboy rock against the quality of adult, literate pop. The first gives you a thrill, sure, but it's the thrill of a kneetrembler, a back-alley blowjob. The second is the kiss you remember a week later, a touch from someone you had not realised wanted to touch you.
Oasis are real enough, but Blur are with-a-big-R Romantic. Real will never stir my soul the way the slightly unreal will. Well, it's to be expected: souls themselves are not real.
The tape will be a belter. I lead off with Heartbeats by the Knife. At first glance, it sounds like the bastid child of Ace of Base, but there is something slightly dark about it. It's very retro, although you couldn't have made music like this in the eighties. It's curious that a lot of backward-looking stuff just wouldn't have been possible back in the day. On that same tip, I followed Blur with Song 4 Mutya by Groove Armada, which is the greatest eighties song evah. It sounds like Belouis Some crashed into New Order and Pepsi and Shirley and instead of screeching grinding noises, a monster tune issued forth.
Next up is Do it better by the Happy Mondays. It's easy to believe, these days, that Shaun Ryder never did actually live up to the hype, and was always just a boring cunt who'd done too many drugs. But no, once upon a time he really was the answer. Of course, we were all so fucked then that we couldn't remember the question. Still, it makes me happy, if I don't listen to them too often, to listen to the Happy Mondays.
Next is Good times by the Hoodoo Gurus. Of course, you own this. You at least have a compilation of their hits, because you recognise that Dave Faulkner is one of those great indie talents whom the mainstream never quite pick up on, don't you? Don't you?
Speaking of which... well, I suppose that Jake Burns was talented in his way, but Stiff Little Fingers were better when talent was not needed (a laboured way of saying that like most punk bands, they were better before they mellowed). But what Jake did very well was describe life in a small town (even bigger towns can be small towns, IYKWIM, and his Belfast sounds a lot like my Brisbane, or my home town, but with more bombs). Gotta gettaway is the quintessential small-town anthem, and man, I'm still singing that shit!
Crystal is the obligatory New Order inclusion. Look, we're not going to debate this: New Order are the greatest pop band evah, end of fucking discussion.
One criticism of the Maps album that I've read is that every song is the same. Which is true. Luckily, it's a good song. Its incarnation as It will find you is a wonderful instance of Maps' breathy pop. This isn't quite as singalong as some of the other stuff on this tape but it will give the kids a break from my tuneless squalling.
Is it not time that Paul Weller got his big gong? Okay, his solo work has mostly been dire, and the Style Council defined meh, but the Jam are the kind of band you don't often listen to, but when you do, you are like fuck me, this is fantastic. I could have chosen any of a ton of great songs on the hits thing I have, particularly personal favourites such as Going underground or Eton rifles, but I opted for That's entertainment, because it is simply one of the greatest lyrics you're ever going to hear. If you have lived the life Weller is singing -- and I have -- you will feel it in your heart (if you have one).
Not quite such a revelatory band, Space nonetheless made some nice tunes. I stumbled across a few because I'd filled up a disc that I'd burned, of all things, Fresh fruit for rotting vegetables onto with some of their better songs. Female of the species is practically a novelty record -- by which, I mean it is self-consciously quirky, but I have to tell you, I have a soft spot for novelty records. I suppose that's for two reasons: first, that a novelty record is by definition something different, and I always craved the different; second, novelty acts rarely hit twice, and I like that notion of once tasting it but never again. It seems gloriously sad. The picture of a faded neverwas singing their one hit, to rapturous acclaim, at Butlins or some other very downmarket venue appeals to me as a lesson in hubris. Or pathos. (And if you're thinking, yeah, and bathos too, you're not far wrong.)
I end the tape with Can't be sure by the Sundays. Why? Because it sounds like hope. And it sounds like England, almost more than any other thing I've heard.
PS. On the subject of Blur, you tell me that this is not fucking wonderful! I'm including it for P, because if we ever walk a mile together, this will be the soundtrack.
I am afraid that I am a *mumbles*-year-old father of three living in Brisbane suburbia.
I have not written anything in, well, so long that I can't remember how long. A year, maybe. And that was a short story, the work of an hour, or a poem.
I hate writing about things like this on my blog. Because I know I am inviting well-meaning, but clueless, comments on how I should submit my writing here or do this or do that or whatever the fuck, none of which addresses the problem. Or some prick will take the opportunity to be spiteful, which only makes me wonder, why are you bothering to read my blog every fucking day? I'm not suddenly going to turn around and start writing about kittens. The single most compelling subject for me is that I have been drowning in melancholy, born out of a crisis of confidence that I have no idea how to resolve.
It's easy to say, just resign yourself to living the life you have. But it is somebody else's life. It's as though someone abducted me and forced me to live it.
I know who is responsible. I do not need to be told who the guilty party is. Believe you me, he is being punished for it.
***
Becoming sad, although it happened overnight, was the outcome of a longer process. I felt the joy leaching out of everything I was doing, as though someone was squeezing me until I couldn't enjoy anything. I started to feel I was walking up and down on the spot, always doing the same things, my life static and unrewarding.
I stopped enjoying trolling, because I could simply have written a bot to do it for me, and got the same results. I stopped having any thrill from writing, because I stopped hoping it would ever receive an audience. I stopped making music because it became clear to me that the outcome was embarrassing and awful. I have never enjoyed sex, but the realisation of how little I get from it grew to the point that I started thinking of it as something like eating -- which I do not enjoy at all, particularly given the paucity of things that are actually good to eat in this place. Even masturbation became boring, because I stopped being able to fantasise, and I had always enjoyed that. Now I cannot construct fantasies that I enjoy, only wan pictureshows that do not enliven, and seem unreal and unhappy.
I stopped enjoying walking in the woods. It didn't help that I hurt my Achilles tendon and had to avoid anything too strenuous for a while, but I was a lot less enthused than I had been about bushwalking. I just cannot be bothered. I should become fit, but what is the point? No women like to look at me whether I'm thin, fat or anything in between, and I do not care about extending my life: living to 100 seems a bad idea when you're fucked at 75. It seems easier to sit at home and play computer games. Which I also don't enjoy. Or play poker. Which has become a grim pursuit of a dream that won't come true; I spend most of the time I play angry at things that shouldn't make me angry (for instance, when the software "rewards" a bad call, or a useless player says something stupid in the chat).
Of course, it is distressing not to enjoy your life, but the answer is simple: find things you do enjoy. But there isn't anything. It all seems pointless, which is as it should be, because it is pointless. But life is about pretending that there is a point to it all. And failing to do that makes it a horrible thing to have to go through.
***
I think it has not helped that recent changes in my life have not been improvements. My work situation has changed. My major client first took me on as a full-time employee, effectively. It was just that I didn't work in their office. But the personnel changed, and I slipped to being just a freelance. But it's made my income less stable, which worries me, because it's not easy to get more work here. Another client simply stopped giving me work. We had a problem but it wasn't major. I wrote to them recently, and they promised me a project, but it fell through. Another client changed its way of working, so that no sooner had I acquired them as a client than they binned me. If you haven't been there, you can't know how bad it feels to go from someone's saying they will give you x amount of work a week (so that you feel you can rely on it and schedule it in) to saying they won't give you anything a couple of weeks later. Of course, you question yourself. You ask whether it's what you've done. I know I'm not doing the best job I can for any of these people. But to be honest, they're not treating me well. I would love to be working for people who actually valued me. When you are not valued, you stop being able to give value.
I lost S as a friend, and that hurt. Faced with the choice of being a friend by my lights, or being a hanger-on, a sycophant, I chose the former and she binned me. I don't think she realises, or cares is probably the better word, that if you tell someone, be someone else or I'll fuck you off, they are inevitably going to be hurt. I don't think I often suggest to other people that they should be any different from what they are. Mitigate your flaws, yes; fake your relationship with me, no. I am over it, but I have a residual hurt that the effort I put into my relationship with her, the care I showed her when she needed it, the price I paid in my life for knowing her, all is for nothing. But worse than any of that was having to re-evaluate her: realising that she saw me as just another person to use, worse, that she did not value me above a fucking website! Man, did I get her wrong.
I get a lot of things wrong. It's easy to paint yourself as the hero when you're the one writing the story, easy to feel comfortable in your rightness and the world's wrongness when you are the one making the judgements. It's easy to feel that when you are being kicked, you are a victim, not someone who has brought the kicking on themselves.
It's easy to feel that when you are not being loved, it is others who are broken, and not you. And you become sad when you realise that it is you who is unlovable.
***
The last of the things I do not enjoy is writing this blog. I do not feel passionate about politics these days; mostly just bemused at how fucking horrible people are. I don't want to write about what I do or where I go. I don't enjoy reviews of stuff, because I feel so uninspired, and how many times can you write "I didn't enjoy that". I tried to enthuse myself with a new series of posts, but I just went meh.
And how much can you enjoy revelling in melancholy? I'm no Keats. I do not feel it is necessary for creativity; quite the opposite, I feel it is robbing me of it.
So I'm not going to. I intend to confine myself to small sparks of joy. It is bad enough living someone else's life without diarising it for him.
I can understand fighting for what is yours. If someone comes to take your land, your stuff, your wife, whatever, I can understand fighting, and even killing, them for it. Understanding is not approval, but it means that I don't find that entirely alien.
I can understand that defending what is yours gets tied up with your religion, and that of the person you are defending yourself against. The conflict in Iraq is largely driven by economic and political considerations, but the political factions in question are sectarian. Northern Ireland could be analysed in the same way: fundamentally, it was a struggle for control of resources, and it was resolved -- in so far as it has been resolved -- when the factions involved found a way to share the resources. The religious aspect of that dispute -- and I think of the dispute in Iraq -- was simply a way to create banners. I do not think that most people are fuelled by hatred of other people just because of what they believe (although they may use that as their excuse for fighting over resources or power).
But I cannot understand killing other men simply for their beliefs, where those beliefs do not affect you one iota. And to kill yourself in the process!
That's fucked. There's no other word for it, at least, none that I know of.
Where factions struggle over resources, negotiation is possible. The fighting is, generally, simply an extension of the political process. But where men decide other men and women must die simply because they do not share their beliefs, there is no negotiation. Indeed, this is true of any case in which men decide others must die simply for being different.
Of course, it's possible that these men have aims I haven't understood, and that they saw their actions as part of a larger political struggle. I am hoping so, because I cannot imagine a sadder story for a man's life than "he gave his life in the cause of wiping out Yezidis".
Yes, I know that they believe that this will please their god, and that that is worth more than the human record. But dude, if that pleases your god, your god is even more fucked than you are. And gods, of course, are outcomes of men, not the other way round.
The Chinese have answered those who think that it would be a good idea to place tariffs on Chinese goods if China refuses to revalue the yuan to favour the US. Ms Clinton is among those who have been posturing over the yuan.
A translation for noneconomists: Dear US, we have your balls in a vice. Don't make us start cranking.
So our children have headlice, and that's really annoying. And it's doubly annoying that no treatment known to man will shift them. And trebly annoying that people who find out are, frankly, rude about it, often without really meaning to be, but they can't help implying that there is something wrong with our children, or our care of them, when the truth is, they are not dirty, or uncared for, just victims of a parasite. (Parasites are featuring heavily in my life at the moment. I have a stomach problem that's lasted for way too long, and tests' having revealed nothing amiss, my doctor has prescribed tinidazole because his best guess is giardiasis. Tinidazole has some fairly unpleasant side effects -- of which I seem to have dizziness, stomach pain, blurred vision and a little bit of nausea -- the worst of which is that it interferes with the breakdown of alcohol in the liver, so drinking is out for the next few days. I have been putting off taking the tablets because the prospect of not drinking is so horrible.) It doesn't help that Zenella has long, thick hair, so clearing her of lice is close to impossible. Curiously, I have never contracted the lice, and that has a bearing on what is worst in this.
Which is that one of Zenella's friends will no longer play with her. Her dad has told her not to. He has not spoken to me about it: he wouldn't have the balls. He is not basing his orders to his child on anything rational or reasonable: you can't contract headlice by skipping with someone, which is how they mostly play. It has saddened Zenella, because now she has no one to play with at break time (she doesn't have a huge circle of friends because she is one of those girls who likes to have a best friend). And it has made me sad too. The guy has not moved out of the playground himself: he is like one of the children in the schoolyard who pointed at others and called them fleabag.
I hated those people then and I still do. I championed the underdog at school. If someone was being bullied, I did not join in; I took their side and stood up to the bullies alongside them.
But this is what people are like round here. Sometimes I go to pick Zenella up from school, and other parents are waiting for their kids. It's a mass of petty jealousies . Some days Parent X will blank me, others they'll talk to me, and I have no idea why they are doing either. Many of the parents are fundies (this is Brisbane's Bible Belt), who hate me because I took my kid out of the religious instruction case and was not afraid to express the opinion that it was disgusting that five-year-old kids are exposed to religious propaganda. (Sometimes, of course, you have to give in to it. Tonight, Zenella will go to the Guides for the first time. She's really looking forward to it. So am I; I was a Scout and it was great for a kid. But to be a Guide, you have to be willing to make the Guide Promise: which is to serve god, queen and country. So, look, on principle one ought to have Zenella refuse, but then she won't be permitted to be a Guide, and who will have been spited? Not their god, because he doesn't exist; not them, because they don't give a shit about others' beliefs.)
Ultimately, this is what I most dislike about the people here. They have no respect at all for other people, not for their beliefs if they differ, not for their choices if they differ, not for their feelings if they differ. Not for anything that isn't just the same. I've never been anywhere so conformist, where so many people hold the same narrow set of views. Not just in this suburb, I mean in Brisbane in general. For someone who enjoys discordant milieus, the creativity of chaos, the bubbling pot of a thriving society, it's like hell with palm trees.
So our children have headlice, and that's really annoying. And it's doubly annoying that no treatment known to man will shift them. And trebly annoying that people who find out are, frankly, rude about it, often without really meaning to be, but they can't help implying that there is something wrong with our children, or our care of them, when the truth is, they are not dirty, or uncared for, just victims of a parasite. (Parasites are featuring heavily in my life at the moment. I have a stomach problem that's lasted for way too long, and tests' having revealed nothing amiss, my doctor has prescribed tinidazole because his best guess is giardiasis. Tinidazole has some fairly unpleasant side effects -- of which I seem to have dizziness, stomach pain, blurred vision and a little bit of nausea -- the worst of which is that it interferes with the breakdown of alcohol in the liver, so drinking is out for the next few days. I have been putting off taking the tablets because the prospect of not drinking is so horrible.) It doesn't help that Zenella has long, thick hair, so clearing her of lice is close to impossible. Curiously, I have never contracted the lice, and that has a bearing on what is worst in this.
Which is that one of Zenella's friends will no longer play with her. Her dad has told her not to. He has not spoken to me about it: he wouldn't have the balls. He is not basing his orders to his child on anything rational or reasonable: you can't contract headlice by skipping with someone, which is how they mostly play. It has saddened Zenella, because now she has no one to play with at break time (she doesn't have a huge circle of friends because she is one of those girls who likes to have a best friend). And it has made me sad too. The guy has not moved out of the playground himself: he is like one of the children in the schoolyard who pointed at others and called them fleabag.
I hated those people then and I still do. I championed the underdog at school. If someone was being bullied, I did not join in; I took their side and stood up to the bullies alongside them.
But this is what people are like round here. Sometimes I go to pick Zenella up from school, and other parents are waiting for their kids. It's a mass of petty jealousies . Some days Parent X will blank me, others they'll talk to me, and I have no idea why they are doing either. Many of the parents are fundies (this is Brisbane's Bible Belt), who hate me because I took my kid out of the religious instruction case and was not afraid to express the opinion that it was disgusting that five-year-old kids are exposed to religious propaganda. (Sometimes, of course, you have to give in to it. Tonight, Zenella will go to the Guides for the first time. She's really looking forward to it. So am I; I was a Scout and it was great for a kid. But to be a Guide, you have to be willing to make the Guide Promise: which is to serve god, queen and country. So, look, on principle one ought to have Zenella refuse, but then she won't be permitted to be a Guide, and who will have been spited? Not their god, because he doesn't exist; not them, because they don't give a shit about others' beliefs.)
Ultimately, this is what I most dislike about the people here. They have no respect at all for other people, not for their beliefs if they differ, not for their choices if they differ, not for their feelings if they differ. Not for anything that isn't just the same. I've never been anywhere so conformist, where so many people hold the same narrow set of views. Not just in this suburb, I mean in Brisbane in general. For someone who enjoys discordant milieus, the creativity of chaos, the bubbling pot of a thriving society, it's like hell with palm trees.
The abyss bleats back; with update, now more for your money!
Now updated with extra anger and vengeance!
Regular readers may remember that I had a lot of fun back in the day trolling a board that had been set up by a neonazi, which had attracted other Holocaust deniers. That board fell apart, and was superseded by a new version, which mostly contents itself with whining about Wikipedia, with posters complaining about how they got banned (because many of its posters are banned, and rightly so, from Wikipedia, which is fairly tolerant of fucktards all in all) or playing the shell game with Wikipedia's admins. Much of the board's effort from day one has gone into stalking a Wikinerd called SlimVirgin, who I'm acquainted with. At first, the neonazi attacked her because she is Jewish, and had clashed with him on a favourite page; over time, the point of the attack has mutated because there is less concern that she is Jewish and more that she does things that the fucktards don't like.
From day one, some of these people have claimed that they stalk her because they want her to be "accountable". I've always said they do it because they want to bully her, frighten her and upset her, as people who play the shell game this hard always do.
A glance at this thread will show what these people's motivation really is:
This serial troll and defamer needs outing, because they've basically now done criminal actions against members of this board.
says one.
Hmmmm. I don't need to be made "accountable" (for Grace Note, she is me, you doubtless recall), but I need to be "punished". Ho hum. (And my view has long been that the motivation for attacking SlimVirgin is that she is an uppity woman, and the limpdicks who are after her just cannot stand that.)
Well, I am a serial troll, no doubt about it. I just can't resist a fucktard. But a defamer? Luckily, you can judge for yourself. Here's the post in which blissyu2 denies the Holocaust. Note this in particular:
"And do we say that holocaust denial is racism? No. I mean, in the end, we don't know 100% all of what happened. Sure, we've pieced together most of the details, but there is some scope of believability. Perhaps the boundary is that yes, we know that Jews were sent to concentration camps. We also know that people died. But we don't know for 100% sure that it was Jews that died, or that they died purely for being Jews. It is hypothetically possible that they just happened to dissent. Maybe they talked back or something? Maybe they were just people that died in the war generally that were just buried there?"
Maybe they were just people who died in the war generally and were just buried there?!? What teh fuck?
So the fucktards are having a picnic, and of course I'm loving it, because I occasionally read the board (because from time to time someone would note something that needed fixing on Wikipedia, and I knew fixing it would wind up some of the lobtards there, so I could have the best of both worlds: do good and seriously annoy a lobtard).
Apparently, I'm Jewish:
I think Grace Note was Jewish and hated Igor Alexander or whatever the name was.
Nah. I hated him for being a neonazi. You don't need to be Jewish to do that.
Or I attacked him because I didn't want to be banned from WP... LOL. I've never been in any danger of being banned from WP, of course. It's just impossible for these idiots to believe that people do things because they think they're right and not because they are involved in some huge, nefarious conspiracy.
They have recently found themselves noted on Slashdot, because they enjoy speculating about SlimVirgin. They have traced her to an IP in Canada, and found a name they think she used to use. Someone they think was a boss of hers sacked a person, claiming they were a spy, so the fucktards think she's a spy. They ignore that the guy in question became famous in his later years for a particular form of dementia that he suffered, which led him to believe in conspiracies.
The truth is much more mundane. Rather than being employed to spread an evil web throughout Wikipedia, poor SlimVirgin is just another wikinerd. She does some rank things, and gets away with them because she is popular with the right people. Yeah, she could probably do with not doing the shitty things, spend less time pissing people off, and generally all round be a nicer person, but which one of us can't that be said about?
Hilariously, these fucktards are not even any good at the shell game. I comment on their blog linking to this page (all traffic is good, after all). It's quite clear to anyone who reads this blog that I live in Australia. But they've decided I'm some other poster, and that poster's IP resolves to Quebec, so I must live in Quebec.
Doubtless one will follow the link here (hello fucktard!) and will "reveal" that I live in Brisbane, Australia. Unlike SlimVirgin, I'm not afraid of being "outed" (she is afraid because Wikipedia attracts, among other lobtards, some seriously scary nutters, who have stalked people IRL, and because she is a journalist, who may have cause to go to places where the mere suggestion that you are a spy can put you in peril). I am, sadly, not a sekrit agent, much as I'd like to be, but if by any chance, any sekrit services want someone to spread an evil web in Wikipedia, I'm willing to for a small fee.
Update: It's curious to me that people who claim to be reasonable critics of Wikipedia, which is somewhat in need of criticising are, well, so unreasonable. They much prefer their own explanations of what is going on than those of people who actually know what is going on (so, as I noted, SlimVirgin is a spy rather than just a researcher whom a guy famous for his delusions claimed worked for MI5 -- the wrong agency for the work in question even if she was one!, and she is now a sekrit agent rather than a sad nerd with too much time on her hands who has gone a bit crazy with the banhammer and enjoys a ton of interwebnet conflict -- and who doesn't? The only real gripe you can have is that, unlike arenas such as the Uselessnet, Wikipedia allows asymmetric warfare, which is a bit unfair). It's also curious that they savage your poor friend, Dr Zen, who is only having a bit of fun at their expense, but defend and shelter Holocaust deniers and others whose aim is to hurt others.
So Fred Bauder writes an article and I go and stop Adrian Meredith from rubbing it out. That means I must have written it, right? And passed it to Fred? LOL. I don't know Fred Bauder, and my only interactions with him will have been negative, because he's a horrible prick and I have an aversion to horrible pricks.
I'm angry and vengeful? Not hardly. Trolls do not get angry. And Wikipedia Review has done nothing that much bothers me, except to hound and hurt people I know. And that doesn't really make me vengeful, so much as sadden me.
Sometimes I supported everyking and sometimes I didn't on the same issues. Nah. Sometimes I supported him because I agreed with him, and sometimes I didn't because the cabal told me not to... okay, no, because I didn't agree on that particular thing. People who enjoy forming up in camps find it hard to understand a person who doesn't take sides but calls it as he sees it.
People who know me are pretty clear on a couple of things: I don't need to lie about people like Adrian and I don't have any tolerance for Holocaust denial. It's simply true that Wikipedia Review was set up by people who mostly wanted to attack the Jewish editors on Wikipedia, and hangers-on who, in the name of free speech, facilitated their antisemitism (of the people Adrian lists, it is not true that I accused Selina or Somey of Holocaust denial, and Selina cut most of the bad posters loose after I urged her to consider how it reflected on her to permit that shit). I had a lot of fun proving to them that they actually had no commitment to free speech at all. Curiously, I am still banned from their site, and my freedom to speak is severely curtailed, which, given that they are joyously slagging me off, is reflective of what their principles really are. Naturally, I am happy to allow any of them, even Adrian, to comment on my blog as they choose. The only comments I remove -- and then I think I've done it only once or twice -- are ugly flames of other commenters (not of me; my aim is not to dissuade flaming of me but to dissuade long flamefests in the comments) and, if I can be arsed, spam.
But these people don't do reason, do they?
They say things like this:
I note that, while on Wikipedia itself he goes along with the clique that claims there's no reason anybody should ever link to Wikipedia Review, on his own blog he in fact links to it in the course of criticizing it.
Wikipedia Review hurts people who write Wikipedia. It has the intention of embarrassing and "outing" them. I don't see any good reason that a site would link to sites that exist mainly to hurt contributors in good faith. But my blog is not Wikipedia, and I link to who the fuck I like for whatever reason I like. I don't mind people trying to hurt me or out me, so I don't mind linking to them. And if I didn't link to the fuckt^H^H^Hnice boys and girls at Wikipedia Review (that better, Sal?), my readers could not enjoy laughing at them. That's kind of the difference. Wikipedians don't find their bullshit so funny, because it's aimed at them; but people who know me will.
And this:
Now of course he doesn't know what to do. He hates SV and all the bad guys on Wikipedia, AND he hates the people that oppose them.
Of course, it's perfectly possible to yell "a pox on both your houses" and hate both sides in a war. People who believe the world is all "with me or against me" don't really grasp that, but it's often true in a world that has conflicts over some truly stupid things.
But, truth is, I don't hate anybody involved. I am laughing at them, because both sides are so utterly ridiculous, entirely unable to act like decent human beings. I certainly don't hate SlimVirgin, with whom I've had cordial relations for a long time, and who is a much nicer person than she is painted by the fuckt^H^H^HWikipediareviewers.
Hilariously, the guy who denied the Holocaust thinks he can sue me for saying that he did it. Unfortunately for him, even with Australia's restrictive libel laws, that what I said was true is sufficient defence. He's keen on the legal threats (I believe that making them is the reason he was banned from Wikipedia, although it would only have been one of several valid reasons for it) but of course these people bluster and pose, but never deliver. Their moral calculus is interesting though: harassing and stalking a person, "outing" them, and lying about them in a way that is liable to endanger them personally as vengeance for perceived wrongs is fine; noting that you denied the Holocaust is a horrible smear, even though, actually, yes, you did do it, and there is no consequence to you bar becoming even more of a laughing stock than you already are.
When you find yourself agreeing with Fred Hiatt, you know something is amiss.
Until Congress passed the new FISA act, if an American emailed me, the government would have to break the law to read it. Okay, that probably wouldn't stop them if they had convinced themselves that I was a person of interest, but at least the veneer of the rule of law was in place.
Not any more.
You know, Hitler passed laws to make what he did legal. His enemies couldn't stop him because they were afraid of taking unpopular stands. Of course, they didn't have polling data, as today's cowards do, so they weren't aware, as today's cowards are, that the stands that their advisors are telling them to take are not popular.
I have been drowning in melancholy. It's the most important thing about me right now. I was struck about a month ago by a feeling of hopeless tristesse, after a particularly vivid version of a recurring dream that I have, and I have not been able to shake it.
I do not mean I am depressed. I do not feel that I am. I mean that I have become convinced of the hopelessness of my existence, and it has made me sad. At least I think that is what it is. I am used to being able to analyse things, situations, and find what is going on, but I have to confess to being stumped. I do not know why at this point I am suffering so badly from melancholy. I can only guess.
It is not news to me that my existence is hopeless. I am a devotee of Camus, a convinced materialist, a realist to the bone. I know that I have a small, unimportant existence in a corner of an enormous, uncaring universe. I've known that since I was old enough to understand the concepts involved. Probably even before then, because I've always wanted to be special, to stand out, to make my life, myself, bigger.
I thought I would be writing a big post about this, but I can't. I don't have anything to say about it. I am cutting the ridiculous figure of a grown man who just wants to cry like a baby, and wants so much for someone to take him in their arms and say there, there.
But no one does.
Sometimes I want to shed my life like bad clothes. They looked good in the shop but now I have to wear them every day, I find them ill-fitting and ugly. But I know that I can't; I must find a way to be comfortable with the trousers that cut into my crotch, pretend the shirt that is too loose in the neck and tight in the chest is a good fit. Bearing it is what you have to do in this life. Bear it or kill yourself if you can't. It's stark but it's really what it is.
***
Well, fuck that.
Let me tell you about Zenella. I had a dream, about six months before she was born, in which she was a child of five, six, with long blonde, straight hair. Which was weird, because Mrs Z is curly, and so am I if I let my hair grow longer. (I usually have it cut very short, because it suits me better, although it only really suits me better if I keep the weight off my face.)
Now Zenella is six, and she is just the way I dreamed her. It's uncanny. She looks a lot like D, a friend of my sister J's. She is a beautiful child, and although of course she has the pluses and minuses of any six-year-old, she is a good kid.
She is exactly how I would define "daughter". She is not perfect: beautiful but not perfectly so; smart but not top of her class; well behaved but sometimes naughty. She is rounded though. Real. A wonderful, wonderful person in the making. It is a constant joy to me to see her grow, to watch her learn about the world (and about planets -- her focus at school this term -- they have a new one each term -- has been on the solar system, and she shares what she knows, eager to spread knowledge, like her dad).
She does not like the things I would have her like if I chose for her. She does not do what she would do if I was pulling her strings. But fatherhood has taught me a curious thing: if you do not realise your child is a person, just as you are, and fight it, you will have as much joy as someone would have fighting you over who you are, what you like, what you do.
She is the child I dreamed of, and more. She is the child I would have dreamed of if I was capable of dreaming more, if I had had the imagination to imagine a real person.
And you know, maybe this will mean something to you, maybe not. But having her in my life is slowly teaching me not to undervalue you. I can't explain what I mean by that. Take it or leave it. It's an expression of love for my golden child, and an expression of love for you, because her existing has taught me that you deserve it, because our lives are hopeless, really, they are hopeless, and we all are going to need someone to hold us and say there, there, without judgement, with love, if we are going to survive.
I know why I have been sad. I know it if I will let myself realise the truth. I have stopped believing I am capable of loving and being loved. I have stopped believing that I can be whole. I know I am broken, but I have always believed I was whole inside, that all I needed was the space and time to pull the pieces together and I would be worthwhile. And that is why I will not undervalue you. Because I believe that no matter how broken, how fractured your life, your person is, you are still a golden child. And I won't drown in it until the day I give up that belief.
I know this hasn't made sense. I don't care. It makes sense to me. It's my road home. Why would I care if you can't see the map?
I do not think I can fix my marriage. I'm willing to try, but it remains a problem that Mrs Zen is not. She thinks only I need to fix anything.
We have plenty of problems and issues, but we cannot move forward because we have a fundamental disagreement about what marriages are for. Mrs Zen believes they are primarily means of reserving sexual partners (whether or not you want to have sex with them: something that strikes me as particularly perverse about this point of view -- you insist that your partner should not have sex with anyone else, or even want to, but you feel no obligation to them so far as sex goes. Traditionally -- and this is still the case, for instance, in Islam, which very much sees marriage as a claim on a person's sexual life -- the partners were under an obligation to meet the other's sexual needs), whereas I see them as creating mutually supportive teams, traditionally for the purpose of raising children (a difficult, though not impossible, job for a single person) but of course extending through all of a person's affairs.
Consequently, Mrs Zen is unable to get past her view that I have ruined our marriage by contemplating infidelity (and pursuing it to some extent, although I haven't actually fucked anyone), while I feel that being hostile and aggressive towards your partner, not caring about their pursuits or needs, is not a good way forward.
In some ways, you could sum up our views simply. Hers is "you belong to me regardless" and mine is "we have mutual responsibilities". Marriage, to me, is about responsibility. You can argue that one of your responsibilities to your partner is to allow them sexual security and the reassurance that you are not fucking other people. I admit the argument, even if I have doubts about its strength. My doubts are based in an understanding that human sexuality is deep and complex, and expecting it to be satisfied within very narrow bounds simply sets yourself up for a fall. The negative outcomes of not getting what you want surely outweigh the positive outcomes that Mrs Zen believes her narrow view brings her. I'm convinced that her view, and those of people like her, can only be possible if they have not considered their sexuality sufficiently, and have allowed themselves to believe that not being fulfilled sexually is reasonable. You have to ask, if the whole aim of marriage is to reserve yourself a sexual partner, are you not being sold short if you are not fulfilled? Well, maybe she is. I have no idea about her sexual horizons because she is simply not interested in discussing them. Of course I've tried but I'm not pushy about it, and I'm considerably more squeamish in the flesh than I am online (an outcome of the phobia that I've mentioned here before; obviously, someone who finds it difficult to telephone friends to arrange a night out is going to find coercing an unwilling spouse into talking about sex a tough ask: and Mrs Zen is unwilling; she's pretty much unwilling to discuss anything except what a shithead I am).
I am not naturally responsible. I'm more of a "forget about it and it might go away" sort of person. But I take my responsibilities seriously, and try to live up to them. Mrs Zen does not. I don't think she was always this way. She used to be willing to engage herself, to be willing to care. But when she became pregnant with Zenella, she changed. Becoming pregnant, if you have someone to look after you who will shoulder some of the burdens that you have previously taken care of, involves shedding responsibility and centring your attention on yourself, as others' attention becomes focused on you. As bad as that was, it became much worse when she was pregnant with twins. And after they were born, her self-absorption became complete. I don't entirely blame her for it. It was astonishingly difficult for her to cope with them. The sleepless nights are doubly as bad, because twins are not synchronised; there are two children to get to sleep, two to feed (who do not necessarily want to eat the same things at the same time); two to care for. To hear her tell it though, you would think that she had singlehandedly managed the job, womanfully struggling against tremendous odds. The truth is, I took on most of her responsibilities as she collapsed under the burden of the twins. I kept house, made her life as easy as I could, and pretty much became Zenella's sole carer.
Of course, Mrs Zen has recovered some of her responsibilities, but she has cherrypicked them. She grew used to the role of mother as centre of family, preferring it to partner. Now she is not interested in our finances, only in whether she can have money to spend on herself, does not see why I should consider what I want important, often sees the children as impediments to doing what she wants, which of course they are (perversely, if I'm not interested in doing something with the kids, she goes ballistic, but we all have times when we wish they would just leave us alone), and will not take care of things unless I relentlessly bully her, which I am very uncomfortable doing. I find myself shoved into a role that I don't like: I am forced to be a paterfamilias, when I want to be a partner.
Mrs Zen has been seeing a counsellor. God knows what they talk about, because it doesn't seem to have done her a lot of good. She says she is working through issues she has with her family (which doesn't surprise me, because they were horrible to her as a child, and still are mostly detractors from her, and my, life: it's no secret that one of my biggest worries about splitting up is that they will become more influential in my children's lives) and whether she can continue being married. She wants us to have counselling but I refuse. I have two reasons. First, it's my view that her expressing her upset about me is not helpful, and that is what she wants to do; she wants a third party to witness her anger. Providing her with a formal venue for blaming everything wrong with her life on me is not positive in my view, mainly because it's not fixable. I'm not going to stop being me (nor will she stop being her), and fixing our marriage is a question of dealing with that, not endlessly upsetting herself over my not being the ideal chav (or whatever the fuck she wants me to turn into -- and as an aside, if you feel yourself succumbing to the urge to "change" your partner, can I let you know that if you are already a good person, willing to do a lot for the people round you, decent on the whole, it is fucking annoying to have someone constantly harp on your flaws and claim that they are in fact the totality of your being). If she had the least intention of being constructive, I'd be more willing to think about it, but I know her too well, not least because she is totally unwilling to be constructive outside counselling. Second, in my experience, and I do have only a little, so feel free to supply me with anecdotes about your own experience, which you are willing to extrapolate to mine, because of course I must just be mistaken about my own, counsellors take a gynocentric view as their first position. In other words, they assume the man is wrong and go from there. Now, I daresay men are more often in the wrong from the point of view of a counsellor, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that I do not privilege their point of view. Why should I? Most counsellors are barely trained, and apply a set of ideas to situations that do not fit them because they are not subtle enough or flexible enough in their thinking to be able to work in any other way. Which leads them to be prescriptive, when correctly describing and diagnosing the relationship problem would be more helpful.
Or I assume it would. Because I feel I see it quite clearly, and could fix it quite easily, so far as I'm concerned. But Mrs Zen's idea of a solution simply doesn't address the problem. It's all very well for her to suggest that I should promise to be faithful, promise not to email other women, promise to do this, that and the other, and other things that she wants, but that would only make me more unhappy, more isolated, less supported, less indulged (and a key element of a good partnership is that you have someone who does not mind indulging your whims). It's a solution for her, not for the problem.
Maybe my solution is too, a solution for me more than for the problem itself, but at least I offer her something. All she is suggesting is that I should get back into the cage that she believes marriage ought to be. But I will always be peering through the bars! A gorilla cannot become a mouse, even if he will squeak for you when you demand it. Of course, there are other things Mrs Zen thinks I should change, but her theme is the same: you must become a mouse, and you have sole responsibility for being a gorilla; nothing I do makes you feel like pounding your chest.
Of course, I paint a blacker picture here than it merits. Mostly this is because the underlying faults never seem far enough away to forget them, even if things are not relentlessly grim. But there are better and worse times. If there weren't, why would I even feel there was any point to trying to remedy it? But I do think that Mrs Zen's approach is to assume that you could just fix things without even looking at the underlying flaws, so that the good times are simply extended, while mine is to assume that if you never fix the underlying problems, they never will be.
This is the second in a series of posts taking as their theme Kauffman's rules.
Or "leave well enough alone".
I've never felt that the basis of conservatism was wrong, so long as it is understood as an elaboration of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The issue then is what is a disagreement over what is broken, which at least allows the possibility of proving to the conservative that no fixing is needed. But of course conservatives use a whole different set of measures to decide what is broken.
I think the way women are pushed down and abused by societies and cultures across the world is broken, and desperately needs fixing. I'm convinced it's part of the road to salvation for this world. Education and uplifting of women have brought enormous rewards everywhere they have happened, and the poorest, most benighted of places are those in which women are treated the worst.
But conservatives see only harridans who want to steal what is theirs. Well, we all know that the chief problem with conservatives is that what they most want to conserve is whatever they have and others don't. When conservatives are also men -- and I've never really understood why a woman would be one -- that means conserving a structure of power that benefits them at the expense of women.
But not everything is broken. Far from it. Some among us worship change, as if it were in itself the good thing, and not its outcomes. Anyone who has worked for a corporation for more than a short while will have suffered at the hands of idiots who feel that everything should be churned. They spend millions on it -- usually all wasted -- and generally return to doing their core business.
The desire for change for its own sake has a particularly bad outcome: people and companies that were steadily doing a good thing can spiral out of control, leaving jobs, families, societies all broken in their wake. They think that if they only changed this one thing, they would increase profits, break the competition, make their shareholders millions. But you can never just change one thing, unless you are fiddling at the margin. One change impels another, and another, and another, until your whole system collapses. Like pulling threads...
In our own lives, we fall prey to the same mistake. "If I could only..." and we truly believe that we only need to fix this one thing and everything will be okay. We believe that a change is a panacea. But changes bring the need for further changes, and if we didn't think clearly enough of the outcomes of the first change, these can be tougher and tougher, making our lives worse, when on its own, the change we so desired, we were sure, would make them better.
I have learned to be wary of change. It is seductive. It makes promises that sound so good that you cannot believe you will not make the change straight away to have them delivered. But you pull the thread, and another springs out, and you must pull that one too, and before you know it, good things have unravelled as well as the bad.
So in some ways, I think conservatism, or caution at least, can be superior to progression. Leaving well enough alone can mean leaving slightly bad alone, if we are not willing to figure out whether pulling the string will pull our whole cloth to pieces.
This is at the margin though, in places where a little something is rotten, but on the whole, things are well. Where they are rotten to the core, you have to grab the thread and yank for all you're worth.
Kauffman 1: Everything is connected to everything else
This is the first in a series of posts taking as their theme Kauffman's rules.
The first thing that strikes you when you read eastern philosophy is how much closer the easterners came to what science has revealed than western philosophers, and particularly western religion. (This is not an original thought, as anyone who has read their Fritjof Capra will recognise.) Where the Buddha correctly noted the impermanence of the self (two and a half millennia before Dennett), Christianity focuses on the self as the locus of a "personal relationship" with the creator. The Buddha was way ahead of his time, because his notion of the person as an aggregate of incoming sensations is a fine model of what we consist of, and his insistence that we did not have fixed selves accords well with a strictly naturalist description of what we are (which of course I subscribe to, being all godless and stuff).
Capra noted that the similarity of the notion of an underlying, connected reality expressed by Laozi and other Taoists with the idea of quantum reality as one interconnected entity. Many models of reality exist, of course, because quantum theory gives equations, not descriptions, and a theory, or description, of the world is a model that is laid over the world so that we can see what fits and what pokes out, but the idea that everything is connected with and influences everything else is powerful, and explains well the nonlinearity that is a feature of quantum theory.
Another powerful idea, from chaos theory, is that small actions can cause huge changes. Everyone has heard the thing about the butterfly beating its wings in Beijing and causing a hurricane in Mexico, or similar. If we visualise the world and everything in it as a tightly woven cloth, with each thing a strand, tiny and insignificant on its own, we can understand this process pretty well. We pull the strand out. Perhaps it is a short strand and thin, so the cloth looks much the same without it. The cloth shifts a little but nothing much changes. Another strand might look the same -- short and thin -- but when we start pulling, we find that it was longer than we had thought, and the cloth begins to warp where the thread is missing. We begin to regret pulling on the strand at the point we realise that the cloth is no longer sound.
Of course, some threads run further than others, and some things are more connected than others. Formulations such as "everything is connected with everything else" ignore this, but it's quite true. When you study networks, such as the interwebnets, you see that some nodes in the network are much more connected than others, and some are barely connected at all. And I'm drawn in this context to thinking about village life in feudal times. I don't think it's possible to argue that a villager in Cornwall was connected with one in Anhui. They simply were not, except in the most extremely tenuous way: their lord might have been connected with a merchant who was connected with a merchant who was connected with another lord connected with the Anhui villager. But what the Cornish villager did would not affect the Anhui villager. Kauffman was trying to express that you could not change one part of a system in isolation, but his rule might have been better stated as "you never know what is connected with what". Which strikes me as much more true. Because very little happens in isolation, you cannot be sure which action will have a greater effect than you had thought. The Cornish villager might not spot some blight on his wheat, which his lord ate, killing him, breaking his connection with the merchant, who without his custom stopped importing a particular good, supplied by another merchant, who acquired it from a concession owned by the Anhui lord and I think you're getting the point. A tiny wrong move, whose outcome you could not foresee, can have enormous consequences. Maybe the Anhui lord begins a war because his finances have been hit by losing customers for the resources his estate produces. Maybe he is angered by the merchant and harshly punishes the Anhui villager for a small misdemeanour, and the villager, angry, punches his wife, causing her to fall over, miscarrying the child who would have...
Who knows? In any case, this is mostly why I bother discussing politics and morality with people, and think it is worthwhile to try to change minds, even though some feel it is pointless because you are not doing anything. You do not know which thread you are pulling though, and when all that is open to you is to pull the one you have your fingers on, well, should you then be criticised for not setting fire to the whole cloth or should you, perhaps fruitlessly, tug on the thread and hope that at the other end is a change for the better?
Sometimes a blogger likes to let loose on a flight of whimsy, blogging TLDR posts that indulge their love of spinning words into piles of, well, manure mostly, but manure is an outcome of something enjoyable, is it not? It's good to have an aid to this process, a jumping-off point, an entree to the bullshit, and I stumbled on this post at Orcinus, and it seemed perfect. So over the next whenever, I'll be writing a series of posts that have as their theme Kauffman's rules. I won't be referring to Kauffman's commentary on his rules, nor to Sara Robinson's, so reading her posts will be no help. Each post will be titled with Kauffman's rule, so you don't need to try to remember them, and they'll be clearly marked, so if you read this blog and don't like to wade through tons of bullshit (although, frankly, if you don't like wading through bullshit, it's hard to imagine what you're doing reading this blog in the first place), you'll know what to avoid.
See, Bush had a program to spy on US citiz^H^H^Hturrists. But that program had different elements, only one of which Bush has admitted to. The element he admitted to was totally illegal, and he should be impeached on that basis alone, but there were other elements even more illegal. So illegal that half the DOJ threatened to quit if they didn't stop doing it.
But here's the thing. Attorney-General Gonzales denied that he went to Ashcroft's hospital bedside to badger him to approve Bush's program. And McConnell says technically the spying Bush admitted to was not called the "terror surveillance program" until after that visit, so when Gonzo says the two things are not connected, he is not lying.
Head hurting yet?
FBI director Mueller called bullshit on Gonzo, saying there's only one program. Yes, but Mueller just doesn't get that there are strands to the program, and they're like programs in themselves...
You're getting it, aren't you? Gonzo's not lying because when he says program, he doesn't mean the big program thingy that everybody else is talking about. No, he meant the strand in the program that wasn't the strand everyone is talking about. All a big mixup, Gonzo off the hook, everyone walks away happy.
You know, if you tried this with a friend, or with your mother, you'd get your arse kicked. They'd be, like, don't bullshit me. I asked you straight about this program and now you're trying to weasel out of it.
But Bush and friends think lying is okay so long as you're not caught. And even then, it's okay.
Information is power. More commonly, people say that knowledge is power, but information is more readily quanitifiable. Often, if I know how much information advantage I have over you, I know how much power I have over you. I think this is a key concept for a realist such as me. Another, related, concept is that no information is hidden. This is a different thing from saying no information is obscured or even no information is unknown. It says no information is privileged. Basically, information is in principle discoverable by anybody and is never esoteric. This doesn't mean you will be able to uncover all information, because you may not have the tools to understand or use it, but it means that you could in principle acquire it without having to know magic words, do rituals or sacrifice goats.
This is going to be a poker post, I warn those who hate posts about poker, but only because it serves as a means of talking about a concept. And there aren't too many discussions of ICM online, so maybe people will stumble on this and it will help. Maybe not.
Two things boots said in comments lead me to make this post:
I'm not sure what "ICM" is but I think it might be a mistake to equate any specific school of thought with capability.
and
It puzzles me how you can expect to grind out $50/hour playing poker when you seem to think it is a matter of maths and mindreading.
Knowing the answers to the two questions implicit in these comments is the key to winning SNGs, and I know both answers. If you bear with me, you will too.
I will begin with the second. In a hand of holdem, the players are given two cards that they can see and others cannot. The hands are dealt quasirandomly.
It's not important that random number generators are not truly random, so long as the distribution of outcomes from them resembles the distribution of random outcomes sufficiently closely. For the purposes of poker, it does. You might think that a computer could create more random outcomes than a human dealer, but you would be wrong. A well-shuffled deck (which is rather less shuffled than you might think) will give a truly random outcome.
Here is a key understanding that boots lacks. The distribution of outcomes in a poker game is normal and the outcomes will converge on expected values over enough trials. These are important things to know, because they underpin the mathematical understanding of poker. If you're not clear what I mean, I'll explain. Say you flip a coin with me. You probably know that your chances are 50/50. But you could flip a coin a hundred times and get 60 heads, 40 tails. This does not mean your coin is not fair. Chance converges on expected values over many trials. Flip the coin a million times and you'll be close to 50/50. I won't explain why (mostly because I have an intuitive grasp of why and can't explain the statistics adequately, but much of statistics depends on its being true).
Now it's true that in a normal distribution, not every outcome sits neatly around the mean. You do get outliers, and it's perfectly possible to see a long run of outlying values. So you can be "lucky" in this sense. But working on the assumption that values are close to their expected values will generally be correct. What does this mean? Two things. First, the distribution of cards dealt will tend to be "sane". You won't see many hands in which two guys have aces, and two guys have kings. You might see that hand. It's possible, and every possible deal has equal likelihood (an important thing to remember in considering random outcomes: in a lottery 1 2 3 4 5 6 truly is equally likely as 1 23 32 37 42 45; however, a mistake people make is to think that you are as likely to have the consecutive numbers as spread ones -- you aren't: there are far more outcomes with spread numbers, so they are much more likely). Second, outcomes on the flop, turn and river will tend to their expected values. Say you have four to the flush on the flop. Your chances of hitting by the river are a bit less than 2 to 1, on some (slightly dodgy but necessary) assumptions (we always assume that all unseen cards are equally likely, but of course ones held by your opponents are not). So you would expect to hit one in three times. But you can hit three, four, a dozen flushes in a row.
What can a player do about that? Try his luck and hope he gets the flush when he doesn't have the odds? No. He plays to maximise his value over the long run. What he tries to do is lay his distribution of actions over the distribution of outcomes, so that his profit over the long run, when outcomes converge on expected values, is at the maximum.
This is the correct way to play poker. Whatever you think, boots, however much you sneer at playing by maths, this is the best method to increase profit over a lifetime. Those three words are important. Remember, you can flip 60 heads from 100. Over 100 trials, you might or might not be maximising your profit by playing the odds. Over ten million, you can count on it.
I'll come back to the mindreading.
I'm not sure what "ICM" is but I think it might be a mistake to equate any specific school of thought with capability.
I'll explain ICM. It's a reasonably simple concept, but essential to SNGs, and yes, it does equate with capability.
Two concepts need to be understood. First, at each point in a tournament, all remaining players have a "share" in the pool of winnings. (Even if someone has been paid out, there is still a remaining pool that you share in.) This is called your equity. It's somewhat like equity in a company. It has a value that is not realisable on the spot but is quite real. If you have a stock, you have a share in a company that can go up and down. And your equity in a poker tourney goes up and down. Second, SNGs are not generally winner take all. In this discussion, they have a distribution of prizes of 50/30/20. In a $5 tourney, the winner takes $25, second place $15, third place $10.
When I begin an SNG, I have 1500 chips. So does everyone else. The prize pool is $50. My equity is $5. This is because I have 1500/15000 = 1/10 of the chips, so I have 1/10 of the prize pool. But this is because I have 1/10 of first ($2.50), 1/10 of second ($1.50) and 1/10 of third ($1).
Say I double up. I now have 3000 chips and one guy has gone. So I have $10 equity, right? Wrong. The guy has surrendered his entire chance at the prize pool, and you can only win half of it at most! You take most of his chances of winning but you cannot take all. Why? Because you cannot finish first, second and third. You can only fill one spot and it is not winner takes all. Everyone else has also improved their chance of a share in the prize pool. They retain the same chance of coming first (yours has doubled), but they improve their chance of coming second (because the extra time you win, you cannot also come second! Someone else must fill that spot, and now there are only nine players to share it, and each has an equal chance). There it is, the key to ICM. When we all had the same amount of chips, I had one chance of winning the tourney. When I double up, I have two chances. But I do not have two chances of coming second and third, because when I come first the extra time, I cannot also come second. My chances of coming second and third do improve dramatically, but they do not double, because of that one extra time I win.
Well, why does that matter? Remember what I said. A poker player tries to lay the distribution of his outcomes over the normal distribution of outcomes to make the most profit. We call this "expected value". Say I have four to the nut flush and I am facing an allin. The pot holds $300 and I must pay $100 to call. This is an easy call. Over a lifetime, I can expect to win the pot one in 2.86 times (I am 1.8 to 1). The pot pays three for my one. My expected value, or EV, is huge: 3/1.8. Whichever action has the highest EV is the one you should take. (If this isn't obvious, comment, and I will explain, but it should be.) This doesn't mean I will make money on this particular flush, or on any particular flush. It means that over my poker lifetime, given this spot, I will make that money. (This is a simplification, because of course my opponent can pair the board sometimes and beat me with his set, but let's say that our flush will always win to make it easy to understand.)
In a cash game, your equity in chips exactly equals your equity in dollars. In the example I give, $100 in chips is worth $100 in cash. So if I make the call, I make my EV in dollars.
In an SNG, my equity in chips corresponds to a dollar value, but not in the same way. At the start of the tourney, 1500=$5, but as my stack grows, the relationship between the two changes. As we discussed, if I improve my chances of winning, I cannot improve my chances of coming second by the same degree, because it is not winner takes all, and I cannot be second at the same time I am first. Every time you win, someone else comes second; every time you improve your chance of coming first, whether you double it, increased it by a third, or whatever proportion, you are not in the race for second that same proportion.
This is the ICM -- the independent chip model. It is the understanding that because if you have all the chips, you will win 60% of the prize, not all of it, there is a scale of value between 1500=$5 and 15000=$25. 10x the chips does not equal 10x the money! But we are playing to win money, not chips. I can't go to the bank with my virtual chips. My bank insists on hard cash.
So here's the thing. Let's say I'm playing a cash game and I have QQ. My opponent shows me that he has AK and goes all in. I am last to act and no one else has called. I should call. Not calling in this spot is horrible because you are 57/43 to win. You may not win this time (43% is quite high!) but over a lifetime you will win 57% of the time. You should also call this early in a tournament, when the value of chips and the value of money are closely correlated. This is often called a "coinflip" in poker, but it should be clear that this is not a coinflip at all. QQ is heavily favoured. The numbers look close but think about this. If I offer you a series of a million coinflips at $1 a pop, you will win 500,000 and lose 500,000 and net nothing. If I offered you 57/43 odds on heads, you can pick heads every time and win 570,000 and lose 430,000. $140,000 is a lot of money! Make the right choice on a "coinflip" in poker a million times and you will make a ton of money.
But let's say I'm playing in an SNG and we're at the bubble. The bubble is the point at which you get paid. So it's when four players remain. Whoever comes fourth gets nothing. So let's say the guy has you covered, shows you he has AJ and goes all in. You have 66. You are 55/45. So you call, right? Wrong. In a cash game, you call. In an SNG, you fold. Call the value of my hand $10. If I call and lose, the value of my hand becomes $0. You get nothing for coming fourth. If I call and win, I double up in chips, but my equity does not double, as we discussed. Nothing like it. How much it increases depends on how many chips everyone else has. But because one guy loses a ton of his equity (all of mine if I lose, most of his if he does), everyone else gains some (because their chances of coming first remain the same, but their chance of coming third has just shot through the roof! If I am knocked out, they are certain of at least third).
If I folded this hand, my equity will not change. I will have the same number of chips and the same chances of winning, placing second and placing third. If I win, my chances will improve to the value that double my chips has. But the risk I should be willing to take should not exceed new cash value of chips/old cash value of chips. In a cash game, it's simple: the cash value of my chips is their face value. But in an SNG, I need to know the ICM to know what the cash value of my chips is.
Knowing ICM is crucial to making money in SNGs. If I make calls that decrease my cash equity in the prize pool, I am losing money. It's on paper, if you like, because no one has been paid yet, but it's like having a share: 100 shares at $5 are worth $500, and if they fall to $3, you really have lost $200. Imagine that you held those shares but had to cash them out on 31 December. Whatever they're worth then, that's what you get. That fall of $200 is money that you've really lost. You are going to need to gain it back before the cashout, or your wallet takes a hit. An SNG's cashout date is the point at which you bust out! Whenever I gamble in an SNG, I'm gambling my equity. Sometimes, of course, I will bust out and my investment will be worth nothing. On a 55/45, that will happen 45% of the time. So I must ensure that the 55% of the times I get paid compensate for all those times I win nothing. In a cash game, they will (keep thinking of the coinflips if you struggle to understand why: this flip you lose your dollar, next you win: 45% of the time you lose the dollar, so out of a million, you lose 450,000 times and $450,000 dollars, but you win the dollar 550,000 times to make up for it). In an SNG, they won't.
Where does the mindreading come into it? Well, players do not show you their hands. It's tragic that they don't, but that's the cross you've got to bear. Remember what I said. Information is power. In poker, knowing what someone has is very powerful information.
Say I'm playing cash. I have 66. Some guy pushes all in. If I knew he had AJ, I have an easy call, as we've seen. But I can't know that. And as I also noted, information is not hidden. It's not unknowable that he has AJ. He knows! There's no secret to it either. If he turned his cards face up, they would be revealed as AJ. They don't magically become AJ in the act of being turned over. The information was always there. It was not created de novo.
But I do not know that the guy has AJ. What I know is that I've seen him play a few hands and he's pushed a few times. Because the cards are received at random, they have, over the long term, a predictable distribution. So you can assume that he has had that distribution. He may have had a heater, and have been dealt aces five or six times. But you cannot assume that your sample diverges from the true population of hands, even though it's perfectly possible that it does. (If they never did diverge, poker would be a lot easier!) You have to deal in models because the actual distribution of his hands is, and will remain, unknown to you. The model is an approximation and can be wrong, but it's your best guess.
So the guy has pushed a few times and you think he's doing it a bit light. He can't have been doing it that many times. So you give him a range. These are the cards you think he might have. It is not an exact science! You just do your best. The ranges you put people on get closer to what they actually have depending on how many hands they've shown down, how tricky you think they are and how much you think they balance their play (by mixing in hands that do not fit so obviously into their range -- a player might raise AA/KK/QQ UTG but also raise 76s so that he gains some value from your uncertainty over whether he does have the big pair).
You compare your 66's chances against that range. You do not know which hand he has, but you do know your chances against his range of possible hands, so far as you know them. You consider your equity vs the range your opponent has. This is how you calculate ICM. A guy pushes, you have to decide whether to call. You cannot know his cards, but you can have an idea what percentage of cards he will play here. So you calculate your chances against that percentage. He might be pushing the top end of it, and your chances are worse than you think. He might be pushing the bottom end, and they're better. But your aim, remember, is to lay all your outcomes over the distribution of outcomes, not just this one outcome. So you choose the correct action in the long run. You are not having just this one flip of the coin. There will be many many flips.
Experience helps you pick ranges that fit players. And knowledge of ICM helps you make the correct choices given those ranges. At first, you have to work it out (or use software that helps) but with training, you have a good feel for it (you might already have a good feel for it, and the training just hones your intuition).
Information is power is money in poker. If I have information about your hand (or the range of hands you might hold when you do an action), my actions will be better. I will be empowered to make the correct choices. And if I have learned ICM, I will make the choices that make me money, while you, lacking the information I have, will make the choices that lose you money. Yes, you will stumble on the right choice a lot of the time, but you will make the wrong ones sometimes, and each wrong choice will cost you just as not choosing to sell a share the day before it falls in value costs you.
