The strongest passion in humans is not hunger, sex or power, although these are quite strong; the very strongest passion is laziness. The longer I study human beings, including myself, the more I am inclined to agree. Laziness is the strongest passion.” —-Carl Jung
The interesting thing in this article is that we aren’t only one person – we are a series of different personalities – changing over time.
The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.”
That’s really interesting… even apart from procrastination (ie, why do something when you can delegate it to your future self – who is sort of a different person, even a stranger). I have to think about the implications of considering my future self as a stranger. To extend the thought, do we think about our past selves as strangers? Should we?
Another thought?
Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.
Yes, I am a worrier. I worry too much about things I can’t stop – though I usually worry because I know there are things I can do to prepare and/or protect but I can’t really figure out what those thing are or what they should be. As I get old my worrying is getting a lot better though not for good reasons. I worry less because I don’t give a shit anymore.
One thing I have always worried about is the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Over the years I have looked at potential ash depths to see how much would make it to the Dallas area. Not smart – not healthy.
So, according to the linked article, nothing will happen in the next year at least.
Strike up a conversation every day Ask Interesting Questions Follow Your Curiosity Take Yourself on Dates Listen to Good Podcasts Open Yourself Up to Other Perspectives Tap Into Your Unique Passions
“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer
You can find beauty in the most mundane things, if you look closely enough. —-Paolo Sorrentino
The other day I watched “The Great Beauty” on the Criterion Channel and really enjoyed it.
So today, desperate for some entertainment I decided to return to the Criterion Channel and watch another of director Paolo Sorrentino’s creations, this time his first movie, “One Man Up“.
It’s the story of the rise and fall (mostly fall) of two men with the same name, Antonio Pisapia. One is a popular singer and the other an up and coming football (soccer) player. They live separate, yet nearby, lives and their stories overlap and echo each other in strange and interesting ways.
Their downfall is caused by the usual sins, sex, drugs and stubbornness. You can’t really say they don’t deserve what happens to them, but you are rooting for… at least their redemption if not their return to their early success (which doesn’t seem possible).
One does, in the end, find some sort of peace with himself while the other one… doesn’t.
I won’t tell you which is which.
The movie is gorgeous, sexy, and has some wonderful seafood. It’s Italian, in other words.
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis
It was very cold this morning, but the sun was making it through the clouds a tiny bit, so I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t dress too warmly as I wanted to feel the cold in addition to seeing the sun.
I decided to walk to Starbucks. I haven’t been to Starbucks in a long time – since I upped my coffee game their coffee simply isn’t that good. Especially since I don’t drink fancy sugary milky concoctions – I only order a cup of black brewed coffee (I like coffee, why put other shit in it?). With fresh beans, my grinder, and my Aeropress I can make far, far, better coffee at home for much, much less cost.
However, I have never considered Starbucks to be a place to buy coffee. It’s an office rental place – you simply pay by buying overpriced drink items. I never understand people that drive through Starbucks, or pick up an order… make it yourself!
Viewed as an office or meeting place I realize I have a lot of really fond memories of various Starbucks. There was the one in Mesquite where I would stretch out a coffee for two hours listening to the various Saturday Morning Confessions while I would write and wait for my son Lee’s double art lessons. Some significant and meaningful aspects of my life were born in that Starbucks a long, long time ago. I wrote something about it during the previous century – I’ll have to look through my stuff, find where I put it.
Then there is the Plano Starbucks that I met with my writing group, every Wednesday for over a decade. I could calculate how much coffee I drank there, in hundreds of gallons, but I won’t.
So today, nothing dramatic. I walked there with my library book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Murakami. It’s a popular book so I won’t be able to renew it – that means I only have three weeks to get through its prodigious pages, but thirty pages a day will be more than fast enough. I’m loving the book, so this won’t be hard.
After one large brew and thirty four pages I decided to hike home. Crossing Beltline I went by Gong Cha, one of the many Asian Boba Tea spots in my ‘hood – and considered if this might be another possible future destination. Unfortunately, most of their offerings have way, way too much sugar in them for my health… so I need to stick to American style black coffee.
In an empty parking spot was an abandoned mostly-drank Boba Tea. Its festive bright pink lid and specked black tapioca balls peeking through the clouds of milk tea looked festive on the cold morning, so I snapped a picture of it.
Oh, I found what I wrote… I think it was the first time I had ever been to Starbucks – I actually bought an iced tea with a gift certificate that Candy gave me. I bought the tea because I was intimidated with the coffee menu (this was a long, long time ago).
Here’s what I wrote – it’s silly- but it brings back good memories.
Saturday, August 29, 1998
Coffee foams
….. Coffee foams comes in a foam cup seashells hidden in the foam, spirals like an ear like time time flies Tea cold, iced, cubed the tea of the day is reddish, fruity cold and refreshing. Fresh tea is hot from the pot and steams hissing onto the cubes. The tea is iced, but the day is not the day is hot and sweaty
Round Green Tables
time flies blue eyes “I seldom talk to anyone anymore other than children and rednecks”
South American Beans Roasted, toasted, ground and boiled and percolate the suspension of disbelief
Once, I quit drinking coffee It made my stomach hurt
I feel something, sometimes as a burning worm in my stomach, my gut a monster of strain
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.” ― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Birth II, by Arthur Williams, Dallas, Texas
The library sent me an email, a book I had reserved was in. It was a new(ish) novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami. Over the decades I have read a good bit of Murakami and written a bit also. It’s a massive tome (and popular, so I won’t be able to renew it) but I’m going to read the thing, nevertheless. I’m happy because I had been scrambling for my next fiction book to read.
In honor of my new reading task, here’s a Murakami short story to read – it’s crackerjack (it seems familiar, I may have read it before, but I don’t think I’ve linked to it).
“You’re a classic case of Horney’s: the man who comforts himself not with what he achieves, but with what he dreams of achieving.” ― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
Decatur, Texas
A Dice Morning
“Alexa, please turn off the alarm.”
The harsh electric squealing fell to sudden silence.
“Thank you Alexa.”
Frank always thanked his electronic assistant while knowing full well how ridiculous it was. Frank lay as still as possible, relishing an unexpected almost comfortable position. His long night of tossing and turning, feeling hurt in his various spots of arthritis, inflamed shoulder, twisted ankle, and the other bits of injury left from decades of slow decomposition. This resulted, finally, in a position where the relative lack of pain washed over him like a warm flood of soft water.
After a few minutes Frank looked to his side. On a small nightstand was a pad of paper, a pair of white dice, and a shallow ceramic plate. He was in the habit, every evening, to make a numbered list, from two to twelve, of eleven things he might want to do the next day. In the center of the list, say, five, six, seven, eight… the most common rolled numbers, he would list ordinary tasks or amusements- a trip to the library or grocery store, for example. But at the ends he would put more more adventuresome and difficult items, and by the number two and the number twelve (the least likely numbers) he would always list things that shook him to his core.
Today’s list:
2 write and send email, quitting my job (which I hate anyway) 3 post a nasty, threatening, anonymous comment on work electronic bulletin board 4 go out and buy new television at Wal-Mart (they are on sale) 5 go for a long walk 6 vacuum living room 7 make coffee and breakfast 8 buy 25 bucks worth of tools at Harbor Freight (get free gift) 9 Start watching Netflix series about the Parkway Serial Killer 10 Pick one Item off my Amazon Wish List and buy it 11 Buy everything on my Amazon Wish List 12 drive to Springfield and murder my boss
With a grimace and a light quick groan, Frank moved out of his painless cold lethargy, forced his legs over the edge and winced his feet onto the cold floor, feeling the thick dry calluses on his soles against the tile. He reached out, cupped the dice, shook them in his closed fist, and rolled them into the plate.
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. —-Mark Twain
During the pandemic I was on a zoom call with my “Difficult Book Reading Club” (I was never able to work from home, my home Zoom calls were all personal) discussing… The Brothers Karamazov I think, when one of the participants, looking out through my camera said, “Bill, what the Hell is that thing on the wall behind you.” I had to think for a bit, and then realized it was my ink shelf.
I have been a fountain pen enthusiast for a long time. I have a modest collection of user-grade pens… I may write about some of them (you are forewarned). But pens are only one-third of the equation. Equally important is the paper – even something as famed as a Moleskine notebook is actually bad for fountain pen writing. Bleed-through to the opposite page and feathering are the two biggest faults.
The third part is, of course, the ink. It’s fascinating how some pens work better with some inks and the combinations may require a certain paper for optimal scribbling.
Over the last few years I have been accumulating ink with even more fervor than I have been acquiring writing instruments. Trying to think of a way to store and display my favorite go-to inks I came up with a shelf near my writing desk. The ink looked surprisingly bland there on the simple wooden shelf, so I drilled two holes in the wall, ran a USB cable behind the drywall to a power brick and stuck up an LED string behind the bottles of ink.
It came with a remote – but I have it on a permanent RGB color cycling pattern. It serves as a great nightlight too. It’s been there so long, I don’t even notice it until my pen runs dry – but I guess the constant pulsing and color-changing looks odd in the background of a Zoom call.
“An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me…” ― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
One Toke Over the Line
I don’t know what we were talking about but an odd thing came up in conversation (maybe online, maybe IRL) – that the song “One Toke Over the Line” was once performed on the Lawrence Welk show. I did some research to make sure that this was true and not some modern deepfake (It would be hilarious if it was) – but nope, it really did happen. Lawrence Welk himself described the song as a “modern spiritual.” Yeah… I guess it was. Wikipedia says Welk later claimed that ABC had forced him to play the misplaced song, as its executives had been pressuring Welk into including more contemporary material that Welk did not want on his show.
But even somebody as old-school as Lawrence Welk… what the hell did he think “toke” meant?
In reading about it, one take I found hilarious is pointing out that a lot of the musicians working on the Welk show were big-time session players and they all definitely knew what the song was about – they would have been laughing their asses off.
I know that some (most) of y’all are way too young to know about Lawrence Welk. I am old enough that I clearly remember the show airing – my grandparents generation loved, LOVED that show. It was so old-fashioned, so straight-laced… yet it had some odd underlying sexual tension… or at least I thought it did.
At any rate it was not the show to feature drug songs. And, of course, in this day and age, YouTube comes to the rescue. Here is the song, a little blurry, but still wonderful, wonderful.
“If life is an illusion it’s a pretty painful one.” ― Michel Houellebecq
Writing in my Moleskine Journal outside the Mojo Lounge, Decatur Street, French Quarter, New Orleans
Why writing by hand is better for remembering things
Of course I (and you) already knew this – but it’s good to be reminded. I remember in college in a moment of desperation I decided to cheat on an exam. I wrote out notes on tiny scraps of paper – struggling to make minute scribbles that I could still read – minuscule enough to conceal from the test-givers. Yeah, I know that’s cheating, and immoral… but it was a moment of hopeless weakness.
But once I completed the task I realized I didn’t need the notes anymore. It was so much work to copy then in their Lilliputian form, I had to concentrate so intently (my handwriting is terrible, btw) that the information was burned into my memory (at least for a day or so).
In the years to come that became another study technique for me. I would accumulate the most important information and recopy it – but as small and legible as I could – slowly, and with great effort. Then I throw the notes away.
It really worked.
“It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.” ― Michel Houellebecq, Platform
The most important thing I discovered a few days after turning 65 is that I can’t waste any more time doing things I don’t want to do. —-Jep Gambardella, The Great Beauty
The Great Beauty
I went to sleep intending to get up at the crack of dawn and go somewhere on my bike – but it was 34 degrees in Fahrenheit, which in Centigrade is just too damn cold for me. So I checked what was on the Criterion Channel’s 24/7 feed and was presented with a scene of a wild, colorful, lusty party, obviously Italian. I checked and it was a movie called The Great Beauty, directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
So I watched the whole thing. And really enjoyed it. Under a very thin veneer of carefree hedonism, decadence, and debauchery is a world of empty people, desperate to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
But, oh, such fine debauchery, such exquisite decadence, such amazingly carefree hedonism. I don’t get to go to parties like this, I don’t get invited to parties like this, I don’t even know how to find parties like this… not to mention I can’t afford to go to parties like this (the tailored suits alone would bankrupt me).
“You know how I always dread the whole year? Well, this time I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” —Charlie Brown
For New Year here in Dallas they put fireworks on the Reunion Tower downtown – which I’ve seen before and is pretty cool. Unfortunately, they had to cancel the drone show (I’ve never seen one – want to) because of the awful accident a few weeks ago.
Still, I had wanted to ride my bike down into the Trinity River Bottoms, find a spot on a levee, set up a tripod and my camera. Unfortunately RWD (real world disasters) intervened and I had to stay home, watch TV, and listen to distant booms at midnight.
More than a decade ago, (not on New Years Eve, I don’t remember why they had the fireworks display) I did ride my bike down to an abandoned parking structure (sprinkled with homeless shit) – which turned out to be an excellent vantage point. I took some pictures with varying exposure times (from a tripod of course – carrying one on a bike is something I’m still working on). Here’s what I came up with:
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
I remember the first time I saw the Reunion Tower. It would have been a year after I graduated from college, 1979. The thing was pretty much brand new then and we drove past it on the way from Hutchinson, Kansas (where I lived, working in a Salt Mine) to the beach at South Padre Island. I was gobsmacked – the thing was so modern and odd and unexpected.
Then I saw it in the PBS movie The Lathe of Heaven (I saw it on the only time it aired in 1979 – it had a long, odd history, disappeared for two decades, but you can see it now – here’s the part with the Reunion Tower) which was filmed in Dallas, and the tower was a stand-in for the evil scientist’s ultimate reality-bending dream machine. Dallas was considered very futuristic at the time and other spots (City Hall, the Water Gardens, DFW airport’s people movers) were also used in the movie.
Then, when I moved here, for years the revolving bar at the top was a go-to spot to take visitors or to celebrate special events. I haven’t been in decades… maybe it’s time for a re-visit.
Bill Chance 