stuff

so anyway, i've been reading The shock doctrine by Naomi Klein and it makes you think, why bother? the forces arrayed against reason and decency are so powerful and rich, it barely seems worth thinking about, let alone fighting.

the problem is that we can do so well from being passive. if we just play the game, we will get the crumbs. you probably know me well enough to know that i'm hopeless at playing the game. i was very unhappy to learn that the company i did a lot of work for, good work mostly, has been advertising for editors. i have been asking for work for months, and they haven't even bothered answering my emails.

not even bothered answering. these people are able not to think of me as a human being with a family, but as a cypher, a nothing at the end of an email.

i gave them three years' service, and at least in theory they made more money from me than i did from them. but no one ever bothered writing to tell me what their problem was. they just gave me the silent treatment.

see, it makes you start thinking, how could i leave this life behind? but i don't think i could make mrs zen understand, even if she wasn't wanting a divorce. and i've never minded so much being a fairly passive consumer, because thinking about it makes everything so tough. most of what's available to us involves exploitation and harm in some way. avoiding all that means a much simpler life.

but i was thinking, when i keep hearing that piracy is killing music, what that means is that it's killing the music industry. and you know, i'm not sure that isn't actually a selling point. i should steal more if it means the end of EMI. other paradigms are possible, and would quite likely put more money in the pockets of more artists.

i mean, do i GAF if Bono goes without a few quid? look at it another way: ask me whether i think Bono should receive millions just for writing a few halfarsed lyrics, which i wouldn't even try to pass off as drunken ramblings, and whining them as though they weren't sub-juvenilia?

more and more it seems that this was a golden age. we came closer to equity than we have at any time since we first built cities. i'm not sure whether we won it by fighting or got it as the scraps from the privileged few's table. but i have had a life of some ease thanks to how our world is. that will all likely be gone in my children's lifetime. the rich have learned how to steal much, much more than their share (and i know that my easy life is an outcome of theft from others of their share; i'm not kidding myself that somehow i deserved to be wealthy while others starved), and their control of the levers of power has become close to absolute. can you imagine a politician getting elected these days who actually is for the people? not likely. and we are losing it by inches, so there is no prospect of a revolution: too many of us feel that we have too much to lose. but we will lose it. we just won't feel it until it's all gone.

***

so i haven't been feeling a hundred percent, but it's been nothing worse than a cold, but the other day i found a lump under my armpit. which was a bit weird, because the only time i've ever had a swollen gland was as a kid with the mumps. i don't think it was anything serious, because the swelling went down, and the pain has subsided (and it was never that bad). mrs zen says, go to the doctor. but i don't think it merits it. okay, part of me does, but that part also doesn't want to know.

i hate feeling like i'm going to die, and seeing the doctor would be an admission that it's possible. so fuck that. but still it's a bit sore. and the strange muscular pain in my chest... hmmm.

see, these things are nothing, but if you want to scare yourself, you can scare yourself. particularly as you age, and everything falls apart.

did i tell you i bought a pair of jeans? i haven't worn jeans for fifteen years, but i saw a pair for a tenner in Big W and thought it was time for a midlife crisis. i'll let you know when i buy the leather jacket and get a bimbo gf.

***

i am trying not to be so negative about everything. it's easy to let yourself spiral into negativity, and it makes you a magnet for bad things. i don't mean that in a mystical "feel the vibes" way. i mean that if your attitude is all wrong, you get things wrong. you can't climb a hill if you're telling yourself from the first step that you can't make it.

i played eight tables of $6.50 turbos at the same time yesterday. i found it surprisingly easy. i was a bit rushed towards the end, and would be slightly stressed if i had opened tables to replace the ones i busted out of, which i'll be doing when i'm more experienced. i probably had a bit more luck than par (you don't often read a poker player saying that) but i went really well: six cashes, three firsts, two seconds. i won't keep that up, obv., but i'm going to add tables until i can comfortably do 12 or even 16, then move up permanently to the 16s. i have to believe i can make it because i am feeling more and more that i get it.

the downside of my game is that i suffer from tilt. i get angry and it affects my game. i need to cope with that. maybe i should do the anger management course mrs zen thinks i need. maybe i should just stop being such a baby and get some perspective: i want my opponents to play badly and i understand that if they never got lucky they'd stop playing. poker players forget that luck is most of the game and a lot of the skill lies in making the most of your luck when you have it, and not getting too burned when you don't.

the very pleasing thing was that when i analysed the games in SNG Wiz, i didn't find tons of bad pushes or bad calls. far from it. the pushes i missed, i missed on purpose. at one table, some guy started whining about my pushing with the big stack, and saying "someone should call". i had stolen another guy's blind maybe six times, so i felt i should probably let him be for a couple of rounds. of course, in isolation, Wiz says to steal the blinds every time, but it doesn't know that there's some guy trying to sheriff you.

***

so isn't it just much better to be surrounded by people who care what you want and want to give it to you than it is to be surrounded by those who want you to care what they want? not that i want anything much, but top of my list is to not have to do what you want if i don't want to.

so much of our lives is all about doing what we don't want, and what isn't is partly taken up by things we don't really want but haven't figured it out yet. i mean, did you never find your attention drifting at a boring party in your twenties?

maybe i just don't inspire people to give me what i want, or maybe i appear to others as someone who can fulfil their needs. or both. still, that's better than what i have with mrs zen, where she doesn't want to give me what i want and she doesn't think i can fulfil her needs either. i probably can, but she doesn't see the linkage between getting what she wants and giving what i want.

few people do. i should take a more generous view of her, and a less generous view of others imo. but it would help if she was clearer on who i am and why i feel the way i do about things (rather than deciding i have autism and refusing to accept that i am mean to her because i just don't like the way she is, and the other issues she is isolating as "autistic" are just normal in frustrated *mumbles* year old men who have had enough of the bullshit).

i wrote before about how tiring it is to have people who "love" you feel that that entitles them to something. you don't choose it but you have to pay for it? why? of course i understand why people feel like that: they are not loving the person; they are loving an idealised version of the person, and feel frustrated that the beloved just won't be their dream. it would be nice, just once, for the dream and the reality to coincide. but maybe i'm no one's dream, hey?

i wonder whether relationships between people fail because we never do learn to love each other, only to love what we could be, should be, but never are. when i look at Naughtyman, i think about how my dad "loved" me: by hating everything i was and could be, pretty much. by wanting nothing for me as much as he wanted change. i would not be surprised to learn that this is the foundation of my bad self-image (although i'm not really interested in apportioning blame; people don't actively try to fuck you up). i will have to try hard not to do it to Naughtyman, but it's not easy to control the heart. the least i can do is not have anything i want from him. people are easy to love if you do not require anything from them, easiest of all if you can reduce them to ciphers. i guess that's what mrs zen has always wanted: to be reduced to "my wife" and not have me relate to how she is as a person at all.

***

but here's the thing. we can only really hate each other if we reduce each other to ciphers too. it's impossible to hurt one another really badly if we think the other is a human. if we do, we have to allow ourselves to have complex emotions about people, complicated ideas of who they are. it's easy for me to hate the chavs in Brisbane, but much harder to hate T's mum, who is definitely a chav but because i know her, i have insight into why she is bad in the ways she is bad. and don't all of them? yes, they do. it doesn't take much to be unable to hate, and to have to empathise, this side of sociopathy.

this, i think, is why i have always liked Rawls' veil of ignorance. because you have to imagine it's you. it forces you to empathise. if "someone must suffer" to bring wealth in an economy, you should think "if it was me, would i agree that someone must suffer?"

but they don't. we don't. we prefer sociopathy to society. we had a shot at the latter, but the sociopaths are never going to share. they hate us too much and we will never be real enough to them that they'll stop.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:02 pm