if perfect is the enemy of the good then that means someone with the last name perfectstein would be my sworn enemy.
but no one has that name in the world so that means I have no enemies.
And maybe you're thinking 'oh what about the name Badstein or something?'
Well it turns out that actually is a name that people have.
Dang, I want to meet a Badstein now. That would be awesome.
If you ever meet someone with the last name Badstein tell them that I exist.
no more of this waving. they are the stewards of the future and must be treated with respect
A thing I've noticed is that a lot of people try to make comparisons to explain the phenomenon that is the human brain.
The brain is like a muscle.
The brain is like a computer.
The brain is like a little person piloting your mech body.
The brain is like a soggy computer.
The brain is connected to the stomach and really your stomach is your brain and your brain is your stomach where the food gets dissolved but the food is ideas and the stomach acid is cerebral fluid.
People will say stuff like that all the time. People like it for some reason when you call things different things than what they are. Which doesn't make any sense to me.
True wisdom is true wisdom! Or rather, true wisdom is calling things what they are. Or rather, calling things what they are is calling things what they are.
In language this is known as a 'tautology'. Saying the same thing twice. Like saying, your brain is your brain. A lot of people find this kind of speech annoying.
They probably think it's annoying because it 'doesn't provide any new information.' Well do they ever consider why the need new information when all of the relevant information has already been given to them?
If I tell you 'an egg is an egg' and you tell me to say more, do you want me to tell you an egg isn't an egg? Do you want to be lied to?
This is the start of my tautology era. My tautology era has started. Days are days. Nights are nights. Sleep is sleeping. Bugs is bugs.
I hear your shouts. I understand what the people of today are fascinated by. They yearn for bygone concepts like 'courtesy' and 'etiquette' and GALLANTRY!
Well I'll tell you dear reader where the word courtesy comes from. If you've got two dry brain cells to rub together you probably spied the word 'court' hidden in plain sight. And you'd be right to assume that courtesy is rooted in the word court.
Specifically, 'courtesy' comes to us by way of the word 'courteous' which means, 'having manners fit for a royal court.'
We must reclaim the COURT. Wherever you frequent you must think of it as your royal court! Which isn't to say that you treat everyone like their dirt and you're the best. Quite the opposite! You treat everything with great importance and care! This is the seat of power! Whatever goes on here will reverberate throughout the kingdom. Lives are at stake!
The word 'court' comes from the Latin word 'cohors/cohort' which has a DUAL meaning of 'yard' but also 'group' or 'company'. And so a court is not only a place of great importance it also contains within it a group or crew or squad of great importance! The people make the place!
And so to be courteous or show courtesy is not about following some old fashioned rules or being some uptight wet blanket it's about valuing the places and people that shape your life. We desperately need to bring back courts and all the classic court roles.
-king and queen aka sovereigns
-champions
-fools
-jesters
-viziers
-um, courtier! one who attends court!
It's just fun. One of the most fun things to do is to treat silly things with great seriousness.
I'm 33 and a half years old!
If high school me knew how chill 33 and a half year old me was living he'd probably be a lot less anxious and worried about school.
But then the question becomes, if that was true, would I end up as the same person?
I think if caterpillars knew they were going to become butterflies, they wouldn't act like that. If caterpillars knew they were going to become butterflies they'd probably hate themselves.
They'd be like, "what do you mean I'm supposed to be a beautiful color fairy creature that floats on the breeze and drinks flower juice??" They couldn't stand the fact that they're a big ol' worm that munches on leaves all day.
But they don't know! They just know what they are and what they do in that moment and then they wrap themselves up and turn into soup.
Caterpillar just wants to be the best caterpillar it can be.
it did a lot of GHOST MATH
“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
-Michel Foucault
"Chillin' out with the crew in the school yard,
Findin' trouble, never lookin' too hard.
Well back at class, they never taught us this,
Some things you gotta learn, hit or miss.
Tough times, hard climbs,
We'll take 'em on together.
Right now, let's go!
Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Generation NeXt!"
You can't be everything to all people. But you can do just enough at the right times to suggest, or create the illusion that you are everything to some people. And this is what Machiavelli's The Prince was all about. We live in a world of images and for the most part appearances are more important and realer than real! What Baudrillard called hyperreality. And so if you want to live in society and play the social game then the self is a curator of images and appearances. This is what any application is asking you to do. And then the next thing I want to say is 'don't worry about any of that' or 'do what makes YOU happy' and 'don't lose sight of what feels genuine and true to you' which is all true but also why not curate kindness and joy? Why not provide guidance and support and junk?
I had this old roommate who used to spend his days calling customer service numbers and making up arguments to have. Every day I'd hear him downstairs in the living room making a fuss about tuition payments or a refund or some policy and you could tell that he just liked doing it. He was also really anxious about money and who was making money and how much money they were making. And he stole my food multiple times.
Anyway that was 4 years ago and I'll still see him around town. This is bad to say but he doesn't feel human to me. He's like this android--going about his unknowable function. The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago when he appeared at the self-checkout directly across from me and I put my head down and acted like I didn't know him. He was on the phone with someone talking very loudly and from the twenty seconds that I was within earshot I could tell he was demanding to know how much money someone had or how much money they were making. This was at like 8:30 PM on a Sunday.
And then so the story stars this guy but he's in a kind of post-apocalyptic future where it's wrapped back around to a very primitive society and for generations everyone had the brain implants and stopped speaking and we achieved the Human Instrumentality Project.
No--wait, what happens is that total consciousness singularity is possible but it gets hidden behind a paywall so through the neural implant you can experience total light and acceptance and love but you only after you pay the subscription fee which you earn by throwing rusty metal drums of toxic waste into the Eternal River. You have to throw the sludge into the Eternal River to get a glimpse of the Totality. So no one interacts with anyone anymore--you just do your little goblin task with the other goblins to earn enough grub coins to go back into the god womb.
Anyway so that goes south at some point and everything gets blown up and we get nuclear winter and people are just holed up in little pockets of barren tundra for like a thousand years and we're back to grunts and following packs of big animals around. But like in the background for flavor there's the wreckage of skyscrapers and garbage and stuff.
So the episodes are all about the spiritual ancestor of my old roommate who wanders around hording and collecting cogs and sprockets and old mechanical junk and his neuroticism is just so potent that's it's lasted through these untold generations of progress and collapse and nothing and void and he's always getting upset over the perceived wealth of all the other human folk who are really just trying to survive and work together. And he's always "stealing" pieces of scrap from other people but really they're just piles of junk that people happen to be sitting next to and he's the only one who cares about any of it. And he's trying to charm them and put on a face to learn more about them and try to figure out how they're doing but like--that's trying to scuba dive in puddle deep water.
I've got 5 minutes to write the plot of a great novel.
We're gonna go with the working title of Book Guy for now.
Story about a guy. He has a near death experience involving a cliff and the personal assistant of some very important person who he met while traveling in foreign lands. He survives the near-death experience but the assistant perishes BUT not before telling him some deep dark secret about the previously aforementioned very important person. Our main guy is troubled by this and to resolve this conflict he writes a short story about the juicy deets and publishes it anonymously to the internet or something. Story blows up and attracts a lot of attention but then the guy gets paranoid because he suspects that the very important person is trying to take him out because he's gotten too close to the truth.
I've got one minute left.
The second half of the story is him wrestling with the question of whether or not he's been followed and he can't disambiguate plausible accidents between assassination attempts--
ran out of time--
He becomes a shut-in and a recluse and meditates on how knowledge is a kind of violence--capital K knowledge is the language of institutions which exist to concentrate and legitimize power and then---and then
and then there's also this thread that's been woven in throughout about classical faeries and the fae who represent the power of the unknown and the mysterious and ineffable and in the end the guy is rotting in the woods and it's unclear if he retreated to the wilderness and died from exposure or if he was killed but in any case he's being devoured slowly by mushrooms and this...
newest boulder in charlottesville
start jug almost immediately broke off/is loose
I kind of got the second ascent
-I started rollerskating again and I don't know exactly why but it made my squats feel dramatically better. It must just really get the hamstrings and glutes fired up. That was a really exciting discovery. My squats had been improving but even when though the numbers were going up, lighter weights than my one rep max still felt really heavy and slow. Today was the first day I felt really strong at lighter weights and that gave my confidence to go for some PR's which was great.
-I've already said this before but I love the climbing gym because it combines my two favorite things: making progress at something I enjoy and want to improve in AND going to a place where I know I'll see people I like being around without having to plan it. That's it. That's the top two. It's perfect.
-I learned the notes to Sweet Jane and What Was I Made For and melodica on this weekend. So far I can badly play
-the flute part to Mask Off
-part of the Rakehorn Pipe
-Tequila
-the Charge! song from sports arenas
-the opening part of Redbone
-4 chords of Creep
-Green Greens
-Hidden in the Sand (kinda)
-the chords of Just a Friend (kinda)
-The Saints
-the opening of Hips Don't Lie
-the opening of Runaway
-Woo-Hoo (kinda) by the 5.6.7.8's
-I ordered CorrectToes today so that was fun
-I'm getting my car inspected on Tuesday at the garage across the street so I won't have to bum a ride off someone
-I need to go get groceries and I think I'll eat an entire frozen pizza tonight
-I listened to this podcast today with this woman Catherine Liu and she was talking about politics and history and the attitudes of people in the 'elite class' or the 'professional management class' and talking about class consciousness and about how as a professor she felt like her job was to supplicate before the super wealthy/donor class while standing on the heads of the working class.
-If I had to come up with an idea for a show it would be a mini-series called Rock Swap and this girl would have a rock in her pocket and the show would start with her knowing at that at some point she is supposed to meet someone who will swap rocks with her in a Rock Swap but she doesn't know who that person is and she can't just ask anyone she meets because she thinks there's a huge stigma around being a Rock Swapper. She lives in a future where that's just not done. And there's a guy who is training for a mission to go to a mysterious second moon that suddenly appeared in the sky one day and for most of the show you think he's going to be the rock swap guy but actually he goes to the second moon and discovers it's just a big rock like the original moon and everyone is like 'ugh so boring' so he goes back home and is forgotten about because it's not like he's Neil Armstrong or whatever like there's just a second moon now who cares and he ends up marrying the rock swap girl but she never tells him about the rock swap and they have a kid and the kid when she's like 7 or whatever finds the rock and gives it to her friend who falls into an alligator enclosure and she's fine the alligators don't react and she gets rescued by whoever BUT the alligator eats the rock and then in the credits we see the alligator burrowing down into the center of the earth which is full of alligators and there's a door in the center of the earth that leads to the second moon and that's where they have their lasagna parties.
-the foggy froggy bog
-the desolation emporium
-the bone trench
-lone pine mountain
- [redacted]
-big ol' hole
-field of hyperbole
-castle moribund
-Bertrand's shack
-enchanted everything everywhere
-cube space
-plains of incompetence
- spiders orleans
- absentia isle
- that one spot where all the trees have mouths for some reason and if one of their shadows touches you you'll get cold and never fully warm up ever again
might turn this into a future camp activity
towards which path will your fate be wrenched??
-mud baker
-ratsmith
-tunnel scoundrel
-disease sommelier
-night oaf
-insufferable fool
-ardent rule-follower
-emotional wreck
-critter booper
-sludge monk
-peddler of lies and falsehoods
-hapless knave
-crumb bum
-stick monger
-shameless poltroon
-wizened codger
-ribald pelagic stakhanovite
I haven't seen any of the Hobbit/LotR movies or read any of the books. Just the Silmarillion.
shoutout Melkor.
gotta go on a little sick walk. it's been really mild so far but last night I felt pretty crummy. I think I'm through the worst of it now.
THEN 10/13 MUST BE WEENOHALL!
HAPPY WEENOHALL EVERYONE!
stay inside in regular clothes and give vegetables to...throw vegetables out the window to no one.
no
go outside in regular clothes and throw raw vegetables into your own house.
weenohall
I have a little bit of a cold. So I'm just resting today. I was going to go out and do things but instead I'm just resting today. I made a bunch of lentils and then ate them. It was a rest day. Yeah.
humans have about 6 billion pairs
why's this weird fish got more instructions on how to make itself than we do?
they can also grow to be 6 foot 5.
I'll never be 6' 5"
they also are most closely related to whatever first crawled out of the water and started being on land
they just believe in themselves so much, ya know. What's hiding in that genome? Dreams. Yearning. Striving. Like that code is ready for every scenario.
"What if me, the lungfish, is in Game 7 of the NBA finals with 2 seconds left and 45 year old Lebron James dishes the ball out to me to make the game winning three with my spaghetti like appendages?!"
The lungfish has genes for that. At the ready. It's 6' 5" and can live anywhere. Why not? Why not dare to dream?
the marbled lungfish
In the song Barnacle Goose, the Born Ruffians sing
The songs of the birds
Don't bring me calmness no more
Oh no, no they don't sing
And none of the girls seem to think you're cool
It's probably because you smell bad
A skin disease won't get you
Nowhere these days
It's true, it's sad but true
What is he talking about? I'll tell you what he might be talking about. He might be talking about "pitted keratolysis" which is when bacteria get in your feet and cause little pits and make them smell bad BUT you can treat it by rubbing acne medication (benzoyl peroxide) on your foot every night.
And it is sad and true that that won't get you nowhere these days. No but I really think he's talking about good ol teenage angst and the culmination of thoughts and worries and anxieties and troubles that is just so PEAK at that stage in your life.
And all of that is your ego right? Like it's fully coming online and you're navigating your ego and everyone else's egos and I think the constant challenge is finding little ways to get outside that whenever you can. Like doing things that give you joy for the sake of doing them. Like moving your body.
I'm not opposed to doing things for your mental health I just think it's not as inspiring as a goal as having a TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE! Like laying on a big big big big rock and watching the green green green leaves sway in the breeze breeze breeze.
Like like like what if your consciousness was an astronaut and you're sending it on a rocket to find out what it's like on Be Kind to Everyone Planet.
I'm not saying you have to live on Be Kind to Everyone Planet but have you explored your own inner gregarious nature? Have you explored your sinister nature? There's whole worlds inside you, big dawg.
And I think what's most healthy is developing that awareness of all the you's you are and could be.
What I'm saying is this: in the start of Barnacle Goose by Born Ruffians he says (the singer's name his Luke Laonde I think which is an A+ name)
Luke Lalonde sings:
And I'm frustrated with myself
but I can't change
Don't want to be me anymore
Lukey Bookey! The 'you' was never a static 'you' to begin with! The only constant is change! The ride never stops and it's always been happening. Will you always get the outcomes you want? No. But you can always change. That's the whole game.
My mind would have a lot of trees in it. Like the border would all be trees. There would be a lot of cedars and tulip poplars and locust trees. The grass would be long.
Here's a thing I've noticed about myself lately. I'll start expressing an idea and then I'll get part way into saying it and realize it's not the way I want to say it and then I'll start all over and say it completely differently.
Sometimes I can speak in a clear decisive way and then some things could be said in a lot of different ways or approached from a lot of different angles and it's hard to pick one.
But I would rather speak in a clear and simple way.
Cookies are good. Water is runny. Germs are mostly okay. Don't be afraid of germs. But also cover your mouth and turn your head when you sneeze. You can't just be blowing that out in the public air. You have to create your own private air pocket to ruin and then absorb that into your elbow crease.
I respect reptiles but I don't trust them. I don't think they want my trust. I think they chose a path that doesn't worry about trust and I'm not going to try to force that on them.
Did you know the word scurry comes from the shortening of hurry scurry which is a reduplication of hurry? Reduplications are words like super duper, chilly willy, easy peasy, nitty gritty, dilly dally, zig zag, lovey dovey etc...
But scurry was so cool that it broke off and formed its own band and lived its own life. That's great. No wonder that lizards scurry. They both side, 'here I go again on my own. going down the only road I've ever known. Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.
JACK WHITE IS 6'2"???? I thought he was 5'5". This changes everything
Surprise trip that I found out about a day before I went but it was so great!
Second time leading outdoors and put up a 5.10A that I onsighted! Dying for a Living. It was awesome.
Worked on a short 5.10C called Essence that was super fun but I was crazy pumped for the short roof section at the end. Would love to come back again and give it a proper try with some specific training. Very fun.
I love thinking about the New River Gorge. Just an endless amount of climbs. It feels like you could move there and climb every day and never run out of things to do. Really glad my sister has such great friends and invited me!
There's this guy I watch on YouTube name Greg Guevara and he's like a performance artist who goes really deeply into the ideas behind internet culture and the kinds of personalities that develop from being chronically online. And so for a long time he was kind of out there as this guy who was like really really down deep into the muck of the internet but could still speak about it in a semi-coherent way. Lately though he's made this switch to being someone who has come out the other end of everything and now he talks a lot about how much he values community and genuine social interaction and healthy friendships and he made this video about 'irony poisoning' and there's this section in it that I really like and think about whenever I make a social mistake or do something awkward:
"and I have felt and will feel absolutely all the problems that community comes with like broken trust and heartbreak. I will feel betrayal. I'm sure I will inflict plenty of pain upon of plenty of people just as they inflict pain upon me. That's how human interactions work. When did we forget that that was a part of it? Finding community will not solve your problems it'll just make your problems more bearable and it will also give you better problems. I want you to have those problems. Those are good problems. I don't feel purposeless and nihilistic and confused and to the extent that I do still feel all of those things--they're way more of just like passing thoughts and emotions rather than my actual baseline egoistic state."
Back in March I started focusing on ways I could become more athletic and faster and that very quickly led me to this guy Tony Holler and the Feed the Cats program. Pretty much the only thing Feed the Cats does besides sprinting is something called 'x-factor' which is a whole smorgasbord of high intensity athletic movements. Jumping, bounding, lateral movements, etc. The basic idea is to do things that fast people do well and that slow people do poorly and try to get better at them. Immediately I saw a connection to climbing because climbing is almost nothing but an endless variety of novel high intensity movements.
So I've been incorporating this movement practice which got me thinking about the ways that athletes inhibit their movement. The psychological definition of an inhibition is a voluntary or involuntary restraint on the direct expression of an instinct." And I think it's a much better word than saying someone is too scared or too lazy or too incompetent. It acknowledges that we all have these internal speed limits and warning signs and through conscious practice we can get closer to our full potential.
It's common in climbing to encounter moves where you're flinging yourself through the air towards a wall and you have to generate enough momentum to get your body to the wall to be able to grab onto a hold. 99% of people will stop their momentum or intentionally undershoot for a hold to try to keep themselves safe. Often they'll reach for the target hold but leave the rest of their body as far away from the wall as possible. You can see that braking system kick in so clearly when you watch people try to jump to something. And then most people will gradually kind of feel it out and build confidence by inching closer and closer with each attempt so they override that safety system. Anyway one of the first things I did to try to work on movement and inhibition was set up a gym mat on pads and say 'I want you to tackle this mat as hard as possible.' I wanted them to get more comfortable with moving their body very fast through space towards something.
Growing up I can remember thinking to myself in high school that I was a really inhibited person. I didn't use that word but I very vividly remember making a connection between being slow and the fact that I was uncomfortable with things like taking my shirt off at practice and getting on roller-coasters and generally shy. The really fast guys on the team carried themselves in a way and did things that showed they had a much broader comfort zone. I'm not saying there is a 1:1 correlation between social anxiety and performance but I do think it makes sense to think that if you have a pretty inhibited personality that you're going to struggle to push yourself really hard. A quality of high level athletic performance is that it looks unrestrained.
One issue we're running into now as we try to improve general athleticism off the climbing wall is that the kids are slow to trust training that doesn't look like climbing. So they'll say, "that's dumb. I'm not doing that." or they feel embarrassed or they go through the motions of the exercise but they're just kind of checking the box (I was very much this person as an athlete. I'll do what I'm told to do but in the back of my mind I was like 'can't we just go run?' The one thing I did basically outright refuse was the weight room because I was very self-conscious in there)
I can understand why if you're someone who really loves climbing and wants to get better at it that you would be skeptical of crawling around on mats and turning your body in all sorts of weird ways. I get that the connection between rotating your body on the ground and movement on the wall isn't immediately apparent. It's going to take time and convincing and ultimately it's going to take successful examples to really get buy-in. My big goal this year is to find ways to connect the two and make that more salient.
The last thing I'll say is that at the younger level and those who are newer climbing: they love doing off the wall movement practice. I think some of them would be happy to do an entire practice of rolling and crawling and jumping on the mats. My guess is that a lot of them are at a developmental stage where that movement practice is really relevant and they're less invested in climbing and they don't have the grip strength and their hands start to hurt about 30 minutes into practice so getting to move around without holding onto something is a welcomed break.
Inhibitions. Interesting stuff.
ants: I've had a long-held belief that ants are masters of teamwork. You ever watch a group of ants pick up something and carry it together? The sheer cohesiveness! I wish I could sip on an ounce of what ants got going on. For the queen. For the colony.
ducks: On a rainy day, it's a good day to be a duck. On a dry day, it's still a good day to be a duck. Ducks are the masters of multiple elements. Air. Water. Earth. And the wield all this power without falling into the temptation of becoming awful snake-headed beasts like the ignominious goose. This speaks to their character and love of good.
squirrels: turtles and snails get a lot of credit for having their homes on their backs but the squirrel tail is like carrying a sleeping bag that also gives you insane agility. I just think squirrels are neat little guys.
moths: I like that moths are like butterflies except they decide to worship the moon, be fluffy and feathery, and eat people's wool jackets to survive. Those are some bold artistic choices. Ooooh I'm a butterfly I like being colorful and drinking from beautiful flowers. Nah, be villainous and weird.
So my values based on these choices are teamwork, be good at everything you do but don't let it corrupt you, stay cozy but also nimble, and make iconic choices.
There are worse things to live by.
