10.24.22

 I meditated today for the first time in too long. It was like cleaning out some disgusting thing in your bathroom that was neglected too long. I had an image actually of a liquid that had pooled, it was green and poisonous and I was in it. I had an awareness that it was some kind of acid that would normally burn a person's skin off but I had grown so used to it that I could submerge my hand in it and while the pain was excruciating there was no noticeable change in appearance. A voice said "you aren't supposed to be able to stay in that" in this kind of horrified and shocked tone. 

The other night I was having a dream and just as I was waking up a voice showed up and sort of commanded the attention of everyone in the room (my head being the room I guess) and just said "are you ready to get rid of all this shit she gave you". I was in that weird middle space between the dream world and the awake world. I was aware enough of what was going on to think and remember but I did not try to disturb my unconscious. That is happening more lately. The conscious and unconscious parts of my mind (I think that's what they are anyway) are coexisting more and the result is I can remember these vivid images and dreams from deep in my psyche. I have this vision I could see flickering today like an old film strip that was damaged or something. It is this kind of globe with a belt like semi-circular pattern going around the middle of it. The colors change and there is motion and I can sense it has some deeper importance for me but I lack the ability to describe it well. I need to visit it in my meditations I suppose to see what I can find out about it. 

David used to talk about this deep fear, terror he would feel when he started a new piece. He said Allison would have to talk him down from quitting and nurse him back to sanity. I am of course but an instantly dead spark of magnesium from a fire starter to David's forrest fire but I have found myself with a similar feeling just before starting big projects lately. Today before I went to teach I was feeling so low, just a massive flow of flight response. So uneasy and awful. Meditation helped and then after I finished teaching I felt a great calm. 

Now I am tired and oddly calm. Not a full calm but a calm that is really just the residue anxiety leaves behind when your body is too exhausted to sustain any more today. 

1,117 Days

The mornings are a time of hope. For a few moments the insulation holds and I am allowed to roam undisturbed in my own mind. The outer world is not yet able to impose itself and so questions of what is possible and practical can not take hold. It is a happy time for me. For those few moments I have the space to love purely and safely. 

Then the thaw starts. It's like once I notice it (and by "it" I mean the world outside my mind) the sun shoots up like I'm watching a time lapse recording of a sunrise and the ice thaws that protects me from them. I feel more and more unlike them. I feel less and less confident in my ability to get through.  David's words have been playing in my head from his program notes to Testament: 

When I consider the darkness that we carry,
the pain we inflict – on those close to us, and on those we don’t even know,
the death we bring through rage, ignorance and indifference,
I say “Please God, help us to melt the rage into love,
And love into understanding and acceptance.

I feel so sad today. I think there is something fundamentally different about me that they can't understand. I seek to make them laugh and help them find a way through their pain and so often they see only some low resolution approximation of the most superficial layer of that. I keep seeing in my head the image of Lenny from Of Mice and Men after George tries talking with him. I am this big stupid ogre of a man trying to love people who I seem only able to hurt. 

I miss her every day. Every day some part of me that I don't show or talk about bleeds and screams in pain. I am grateful that the pain is less today but it certainly isn't anywhere near gone and it remains substantial and defiant, like her. It has been one thousand one hundred and seventeen days since she left. My best guess is we had somewhere around 6,000 days together before that day. I estimate about 5,500 of those days she didn't hate me. She didn't describe me as a predator or a rapist or abusive or having taken advantage of her. In her mind I was not yet an oppressor or a symbol of all that men have done to subjugate women the past millennia. I was her person. I was who she called when she didn't know how to go on and couldn't find words to say it. I would sit there with her hour after hour and just be with her. Never knowing how but entirely unable to do anything but try. I thought after 15 years of doing that she had come to know who I was. I even dared (stupidly) to begin to believe she did not see me as that ogre accidentally squeezing the life out of people I loved but that there was something worth living inside of me. Even at the height of this hubris I never imagined anything grand. I just began to slowly soak in the idea that there was a little sliver of something inside me she found beautiful. And I loved her so much I could not have cared if any one else ever saw it. The only thing that mattered was what she saw in me through her eyes. 

It felt so good to feel that for a short while. I suppose it must have been 900 days or so I got to feel that. For 900 days I got to try on the feeling of worthiness. It felt so good. I still close my eyes and breath it in sometimes. I can feel it on my skin like a favorite sweater until the outer world imposes itself again and that disappears. 

I was just telling someone yesterday that after she left and took all that with her, I was left with a choice. I choose (most days at least) to keep on loving her and to wrap my arms around those precious days in my mind. I don't know why my life has unfolded in a way that has been so persistently filled with suffering, nonetheless I choose to keep the good memories compartmentalized from the bad. I want to be able to look through the photo albums of beautiful memories in my mind and enjoy them, even knowing what came after. And moreover I want to be brave enough to choose to love that way again. 

The only thing I want out of whatever days remain for me is to taste again what it feels like to be loved down through to the bones. I'm not optimistic it will happen but I promise to cherish it if it does. I can sometimes imagine a life with someone and my god I would cherish it. I just don't think anyone can see that shred of me worth loving. It seems more and more likely it was never there. I want to believe that her insanity stopped her from being able to see the part of me worth loving anymore but the logician in me is making the compelling case that her insanity is what made her think she saw it in the first place. 

Teach us how to forgive; teach us how to be forgiven,
because it is not a simple business… 

Is it too much even to dream for a George to make the pain stop? Someone who at least cries while it happens.  

This IS different.

We are at a turning point in the history not juts of our country but our species. Democracy is the most recent iteration of the innate hopefulness of human beings. It is about believing we are capable of goodness and reason. It is about believing we can find ways to find common ground even when our disagreements are seemingly insurmountable. Liberals are often quick to point out the great stains on our history but America is an exceptional country because we have been living proof that it is possible to create a stable and thriving civilization built on the rule of law and unleash the power of the human spirit through political liberty.

Perhaps because our nation acquired great power of the past century we have come to take that miracle for granted. Democracy is fragile because it requires each new generation to sustain and nourish it or like a flame without fuel it simply flickers into darkness. This IS different not because of any policy or proposal but because the current President is challenging, corroding and disrespecting the foundations of democracy itself. If you find yourself already jumping to disagree or agree with that statement you must know you are part of the problem. The level of political ignorance in this country has become truly toxic for democracy and you have jumped to whatever opinion you have jumped to out of a competitive, nearly tribal allegiance. It is not about being right or the struggle towards being right anymore, too many people just plainly don't know what they're talking about. it's about winning. It's about beating the other side and then holding their face down in the mud when they're down. The problem is the challenges we are facing in this particular moment in time are genuinely existential. The continued existence of the human race has not been in greater peril since perhaps the Toba Volcanic Eruption 75,000 years ago. That is not hyperbole. We may very well make the planet uninhabitable through climate change or we may just yet see the specter of nuclear holocaust revive itself.

The problem as I see it is not so much that the problems are impossible to solve (although the longer we wait the more likely that becomes) but rather that our mechanism for solving them is broken and at the risk of sounding hypocritical here having just laid the blame on competitive/tribal/my-team-beat-your-team kind of rhetoric, I don't see any other way to say it other than to say the leaders of conservatism and the Republican party have failed the country. Now again I'm sure that provokes an immediate redline emotional reaction one way or another as you read that but let me try to make a point here. The democratic party is by no means infallible. There is plenty of sloppy thinking and wrong headed policy going on there as well. The reason why I am singling out republicans is they have abdicated their responsibility to work with and argue with the other side. Debate improves ideas. This is one of the fundamental ideas our whole political system was designed around. The republican leaders in this country have refused to work with democrats and challenge their ideas with the goal of making them better. Instead they have chosen to win at all costs to the point where they have now rallied around a man who's ideas are not in any way reconcilable with conservatism (to the extent that anything he has said can be examined as an idea).

There is a great tradition of conservative thought in this country. There is a great argument to be made but there is no one I know of on the right side of the aisle making it. The result is the left has no intellectual opposition and by that I mean liberals are arguing ideas while Trump and his party engage in nonsensical populist rhetoric while simultaneously lining up a cabinet of billionaires with no understanding of the agencies they have been tasked with running. .

The Great Recession of 2008

Derivatives, Freddie Mac, Toxic Mortgages...

Terms you've heard bantered about I'm sure. Yet no one I've heard has ever explained in clear language what happened. I mean apart from political ad hominem attacks. Here's the short version...

1. Banks made home loans to people they knew could not pay them back.
2. The banks that made these loans knew they had to get rid of them or they would lose money when they defaulted.
3. The banks bundled these bad loans together with other loans to conceal the bad loans when they tried to sell them.
4. After selling the loans, the banks then essentially placed bets that these loans would default.
5. The loans defaulted sparking a chain reaction that resulted in near destruction of the financial system, a prolonged recession that c and making a small amount of people a tremendous amount of money.

Driven by competition and low interest rates banks began making home loans to people they knew probably couldn't pay the loans back. In a well functioning financial system this would just mean that the banks that make these kinds of loans would go out of business once the loans default. However due to the complexities of our financial system that did not happen. In fact many of the banks that made these bad loans ended up profiting from them. Here's how:

The banks knew if they held onto these loans eventually they would default and they would lose money, so they had to sell the loans. There are two large government backed companies called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that buy these kinds of loans but the banks knew that Fannie and Freddie would not want to buy them if they knew they were  filled with these bad loans, a.k.a. "toxic mortgages". In order to be able to sell these loans they sold them in bulk by combining them with lots of other loans that were generally safe (think of a rubber band manufacturer mixing in broken rubber bands into bags filled with thousands of rubber bands, you'd never notice the broken ones).

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (along with every other financial agency) relies on ratings to determine it's financial value. "Rating Agencies" like Moody's or S&P are companies that give a rating to mortgages (among other things) and they continuously gave these toxic mortgagees the highest possible rating of AAA. They did this partially because the bundled mortgages were simply too big to fully understand, partly because they assumed the well established banks that were selling them would not sell bad mortgages and partly because they benefited directly from rating them highly. The rating agencies are financed by these very banks they rate and so it was in their interest to rate them highly.

If this had been all that happened it would have been outrageous and criminal. However it did not stop here. The banks that gave these toxic mortages and then sold them to Fannie and Freddie then proceeded to go a step further and bet that they would default. In the same way that you can buy car insurance in case something bad happens to your car these people bought a form of insurance in case something bad happened to these mortgages. The difference of course is they knowingly built the car with broken parts and sold it to someone knowing it would break down. In 2008 the cars began to break down. To make matters worse most of the banks all bought their insurance policies or "derivatives" from the same company, AIG.

Once it became clear these mortages were toxic it started a chain reaction. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were hemmoraging money, AIG owed hundreds of billions in "derivatives", banks could no longer sell their mortages or get insurance making them unwilling to lend money. This in turn threatened to completely shut down the banking system. Several large banks collapsed as a result and the remaining banks bought them making themselves even larger.

Time and Place

It’s a sunny afternoon in a busy outdoor plaza. Young professionals buzz around on their smart phones cramming every second of productivity possible into the formerly independent acts of commuting, eating and anything else possible. Standing off to the side leaning against a building is a teenaged boy scanning the crowd as if he is looking for someone. He is out of place by manner of appearance and focus. He spot who he is looking for…

Teenaged Boy:“Wait! Stop!”

Man:(under his breath) “Shit. This asshole again…(out loud) yea listen I’m really late and I’d love to talk to you but I gotta run”

TB:“fuck that you’ve been dodging me for weeks. I’ll follow your ass if I have to”

M: “I know, I’m sorry but I have to go. Let’s get together early next week. I promise I’ll make some time for you.”

TB: “Listen mother fucker. You’ve said that for a month now and I’m not buying your shit. This is how it’s gonna happen right now. Either you’re gonna talk to me or I’m gonna follow your sorry ass wherever you’re going and embarrass the shit out of you.”

The  man was defeated. He knew what a stubborn and relentless adversary his younger friend could be and in this case it was clear he had made up his mind.

M: “alright. I really am going to be late though so I have to go soon.”

TB: “What the fuck happened to you man? You used to think of things on such universal global terms. You couldn’t conceive of a life in which you had so dramatically scaled back your expectations. I don’t mean to be a dick but you are an unequivocal failure. You have not accomplished a fraction of anything worthy and you’re not on track to do so. Quite the contrary actually as it appears you are moving the wrong direction. It’s hard to even look at you. I can’t reconcile the pathetic blob of flesh in front of me with that powerful determined young man you once were. While I’m generally agreeable to Locke’s view of identity in this case I am sympathetic to Hume because there doesn’t seem to be anything the same about the person in front of me and the person I once knew.”

M: “Well listen I appreciate the pep talk. Let’s get together next week man and I’ll let you berate me all that you want. I’m late”

TB: “FUUUCK THAT!! Dude I’m not letting ou blow me off. Answer me god damnit. Whatthe fuck happened to you? Why are you such a massive failure? Or have you receded so far from what you once were that you’re no longer even able to articulate your thoughts, mediocore and uninspired such as they are? I suppose there’s some of that mixed in with some arrogance. You know something I don’t. You’vel ived longer, experienced more, survived, learned to pick your battles, all that shit you used to hate hearing from your elders. You used to say all of that was different names for the same thing: fear. So now I borrow your own diagnosis and tell you that you are just a pathetic, afraid, beaten down, useless bastard. If you’re decided on continuing on this way you might as well off yourself right now I mean seriously we could use the reduced carbon footprint. I don’t know what the fuck happ…”

M: “OK shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up. Yea there’s fear. I concede that. And I am ashamed of that. I do miss the person you speak of who was so fearless and determined. I miss him desparately. This vessel of life though, it is leaky old wooden boat. We wish it to be made of impenetrable steel but life beats down on you like a storm on a boat deep at sea. The storm of my early adulthood smashed the ship. I was left clinging on to this scrap of wood waiting for the storm to pass. You have to understand how hard it is to rebuild from that. It is true that from the wreckage you are liberated from all the nagging problems of the old vessel but now you have to rebuild a new one. And unlike most people I know I didn’t have the privilege of a dry dock. I’ve had to rebuild at sea on the fly with only my hands and whatever floating debris I can find. Then these assholes show up with their speedboats to race and even when I beat them 8 out of 10 times they can…”

TB: “woah there captain enough with the shitty boat metaphor. I get it. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to that and it’s not that you didn’t use to be either it’s just that you understood the cause and effect nature of the mind. Sure terrible things happen. We endure suffering that is horrific and unimaginable. That is what we are cursed with in this wretched human condition of ours. The question is what the hell do we do about it? Do we shy away from fighting like a beaten dog? Do we surrender our hopes and dreams to the tyrant of human experience or do we defiantly resist to the bitter fucking end? I see these assholes running around with the dreadlocks in the drum circles mooching off productive society while preaching peace and love. Then I see the so-called champions of our society, the successful businessmen, politicians, sports stars whatever and they largely are mental slaves who will spend their whole lives moving 100miles an hour not knowing where the fuck they’re going. Then there are the huddled masses simply soliciting the fear of the day, stumbling about their lives trying to make the least waves.”

M: “Listen I hear you. I actually hear you and I appreciate being reminded of what you’re talking about. I wish I was further along. I promise you I do. Every night I lay down my head and I feel the failure through to the bone. I hate myself. I can’t control myself. I can’t focus myself. I can’t accomplish even a fraction of what I once dreamed of. In all of these matters you are right. I don’t know exactly how I got here. All I know is that a powerful idea has entered into my awareness that I believe is a potential way forward. In fact it is awareness itself. I can spend the rest of my life admonishing myself for past failures or indulging in the anxious projection of possible negative futures and in both cases I will find an infinite amount of material to draw from. Everything you said is true and more. However when I do so I fail to recognize the infinite power and importance of right now, this very moment. I’ve learned also that to the extent I am able to be present in the here and now the pain, the fear, the anxiety, the self-hatred it all melts away and not ignorantly or selfishly so. The phenomenon of human suffering will not go away and for me I know it will never stop pulling on me like gravity. What living in the moment offers though is a new force to push against it. I was watching a large ship leave the harbor today and as it began moving it caused huge waves that violently rocked many smaller boats. I’m not sure which boat I am but if it’s possible to be the big boat that thrashes around human suffering a bit than I would consider my life well lived. And if I’m the small boat then I just have to stay afloat I suppose.”

TB: “Well I know you’re late. I guess I was a little rude. You know I don’t meant anything, I’m just worried about the future of you. I don’t want you to look back on your life with regret and I’m worried that’s what you’re headed towards.”

M: “I know you didn’t mean anything by it and I know where you’re coming from. Honestly I’m glad you forced me to talk, I needed to hear what you had to say. I guess all I can tell you is that when you are worried about the future or when you are looking back at the past you are not in the present. I think you can be a good influence on me and help guide me if you start living in the present right now.

Speaking of right now I’m an hour late. I have to go. Talk to you later.”

TB: “Bye”

So She says

I think a lot about the things she might say. That is to say what she ought to say if she wasn't who she was, which is an impressive degree of selfish. The woman is literally unable to see past herself, or at least she was when I so needed her not to be. "Come here" I imagine her saying, "tell me what's wrong". She would sit next to me on my bed, towering above me looking downward with a facial expression that was part playful and part inviting and radiated warmth. If I close my eyes I think I can feel the warmth coat me like liquid chocolate. I imagine it feels warm to know you are loved.

In the absence of such relief though what is left is an arctic chill which over time freezes your own warmth shut. The absence of that love is not the real damage, the real damage is found in that you never learned how to value yourself. You never learn how to look inward and like what you see. Dr. Freud tells me that that which is external becomes internalized when you are young. That your parents voice becomes your own inside your head. I wish I heard so many different things in my head than the relentless beating of the drum of self hatred.

"Son, pain is a part of life. If I could stop you from feeling any pain I swear to you I would but the truth is I can't and I guess maybe it's better that I can't. What's important for you to undersstand is that no matter how badly something feels or how much it hurts the nature of pain is that it is temporary. It will pass and you will survive. You are so smart and so strong and life may try to knock you down but it won't ever win because you are a survivor. It is who we are son. We get bruised and beat down and sweaty and wounded and tired and sometimes when things get their worst we even feel like giving up but you know what baby? We never do. We keep fighting, we keep trying, we keep on keeping on. We never lose sight of who we are even when it might be easy to do so. We treat people with kindness even when they make us mad or treat us badly. And what gives us strength to all of these things is love. Love is what keeps us going and I want you to know right now and forever that no matter what happens to you, no matter what mistakes you might make or pain you may endure, no matter what other people think of you or say about you, no matter if things are good or bad or somewhere in between, I will always be your mother, you will always be my son and I will always love you with all of my heart. Even if you tried to change that you couldn't. So take your time, be mad at me, talk to me or don't talk to me, it's up to you. When you are ready I will be here for you, I will always be here for you. I love you."

I think then I might be able to sleep.

Good Times

What do you do when you find yourself more and more becoming ordinary? As each day pushes me further and further from youth I find myself a vessel for cliche emotional cargo. The change is not really welcomed but yet I'm strangely rather tolerant of the whole thing. Strange because I've so often prided myself on being odd. I despise predictability. I guess fundamentally the idea that our behavior is so cause/effect seems to equate to meaninglessness. I can't construct that link right now but it exists on an emotional level for me. 

What is scary about moving further and further away from youth is the ever increasing limitations of realism. That by growing older you become more and more cognizant of the possible and the "real" and less and less focused on that which should be, that which you desperately want to be and that which you know down in the most vulnerable part of your soul must be. Whereas a child thinks in dreams and potential, the adult sees only the difficulties and struggle in the way of progress. I feel fundamentally like a failure. I have accomplished almost nothing worth accomplishing. This fills me with disgust and leaves me unable to even contemplate the worth of my own existence. This is tempered only by the inextinguishable impulse to search for answers to the question "why" which in this case tells me a psychological pattern is at work. Namely that my mother made her love so conditional as to condition me to believe the only way to be worthy of love was to accomplish amazing things. I think the child in me sees a need to hold myself to this insane standard of accomplishment in the hopes that...

The feeling has gotten worse. It's grown steadily since last week. I'm exhausted. I don't have energy for anything. I want only to sleep all day.