Tag: Non-fiction

Most ideas are bad ideas

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Don’t jump at once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Time-constrained doesn’t mean high-quality. Top-of-mind doesn’t mean you should say it. Most ideas are bad ideas, even scarce, enticing ones.

Prioritization and patience are a pair of twins: prioritization is the concept, patience the implementation. Priorities are a rank-order of your values consistent across situations. Patience allows you to align your behavior with those values whenever a new idea arises or an opportunity presents itself.

When someone makes me angry, I often implicitly prioritize that anger, but I don’t have to. Some people channel their anger into achieving their goals instead of letting the anger steer them. The same can be true for other emotions.

An effective marriage between priorities and patience is part of why people with singular focuses are more likely to succeed. If your whole life serves the purpose of creating great literature, each thought, moment, and event slots somewhere under that heading. Every moment could be a story; every word becomes fascinating. If your life serves a purpose, each perception does, too.

Reading isn’t doing. It’s barely even reading. 

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The wiry man I thought was homeless

Too quickly suggests he can help sell my book,

With phrases like “sales funnel” and “affiliate links”

And name-drops of famous cult leaders.

 

His face shape and speech pattern

Conjure images of the family friend

Whose emotional problems

Prompted expulsion from school for threatening another student.

 

I emailed this man, thinking, “Eh, what’s the harm?”

He hasn’t set off alarm bells—

Only over-bold signs of earnest devotion,

And who am I to punish him for that?

Self-Portrait of the Author as a Hungry Man

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At sixteen, Julian could eat a whole pizza in one sitting. He’d be stuffed before downing those last few slices but finish anyway, because he hungered for achievement long after satisfying his hunger for pizza.

Yesterday, twenty-five-year-old Julian stayed awake for twenty-six hours. As he puts it, “one should spend times of plenty preparing for times of famine.” He calls it a “sleep fast” and planned to reach a whole day-and-a-half, but ended it early when he realized sleep fasts should be undertaken on days that don’t require driving.

Julian is most familiar with this style of self-disciplined self-deprivation from his multi-day foodless fasts, the longest totaling one hundred thirty-six hours (five-and-a-half days). He has completed a total of fifteen foodless fasts (each a minimum of three days long). There are known health benefits of foodless fasting. There are no known health benefits of sleep fasting, but he feels a calm sense of power for the following few days.

To cap off his sleep fast, Julian devoured a large $10 Costco pepperoni pizza. While you technically don’t have to be a member to eat at the food court, you certainly don’t have to be a member if you walk past the ID checkers when they’re not looking. If you employ this method, you also get to feel smug. There are no known health benefits of eating a whole large $10 Costco pepperoni pizza, but he did anyway. What a rebel.

An Uninformed Yalie’s Notes on Suicide 

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“It’s not about death as a good choice, per se: more a rejection of all that exists and a disbelief in underlying capital-V Value that prompts a strong and visceral disgust of all that I find. And, so, without any importance to be found, the act—suicide—becomes as equally rational as it was previously irrational: trading the next terrestrial 60 years for that same time spent in that void I’ll reach eventually is just as fine as not. No value is no value is no value, and what’s 60 years to a rock.”

Yes, I wrote those notes (lightly edited for clarity) as an undergrad dabbling in nihilism. And know what? They’re bad—morally bad. That line of thinking breeds Columbines and Unabombers. They’re also wrong. Meaning is made. Even if Value is a construct, that means it’s constructed. That means you can make it! And just because you make it doesn’t mean it’s not real.

But golly, could I write. And for a nihilist, I sure had passion.

I had a feeling I could be someone.

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You’ll only feel me by listening

to the same song,

fifty versions,

but none better than the downtown boy

with hair like Dylan

accepted to Yale when I was

but dropped out

and now plays to a Farmers’ market audience–

an empty picnic blanket and me.

 

At 24 years old,

he looks more like twelve

and sings folk like a wizened bluesman.

Will he go anywhere

or stay in Fairfax forever,

wearing the same uncool shoes

as the classmate I bullied in 4th grade.

 

If America’s misfits come to San Francisco

and SF’s go to Oakland,

where go Oakland’s?

We’re only fifteen miles north of The City,

but you can believe astrology

and we’ll still believe in you.

 

If you move too quick,

you hit the speed of loneliness

like a too-fast car,

breaking the sound barrier,

collapsing personality,

emptying you out.

Time moves consistently, but mine doesn’t.

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Time moves consistently, but mine doesn’t.

Subjective perception of time is altered by all sorts of stimuli. After a drink, it swims faster, blurrier. Right before lunch, it slows as I savor it more. “Time” is an objective measure about the world—a construct based on collective human experience. Each person’s time, however, is subjective. Experientially, there is such thing as a fast second or a long day.

At twelve years old, late at night in the hold of a sailboat, I wept at the realization that time only moves in one direction. Correct, precocious pre-pubescent philosopher young-Julian: correct, but incomplete.

I also recall, earlier, as a tyke of about seven, telling a friend, “we should have fun for the next hour so it passes faster.”

While I couldn’t yet articulate the difference between subjective and objective time, I already understood its implications: Subjective time is inconsistent. You can manipulate it, and thereby manipulate your experience.

So what?

So play with it. That’s as much as I’ve got. I’ve discovered a powerful tool and have little idea what to do with it, so let’s experiment and see what works. Try slowing subjective time by sensing the subsections of each second. Speed it up by losing yourself in thought. Objective time moves at a consistent rate in one direction. That’s our creative constraint. What we do within its bounds is up to us. If you discover something, tell me. 

Traveling around the U.S., with no nine-to-five, I revert to a pre-1800s sense of time, which I find brings greater focus and emotional depth.

How long have I been writing this? Wrong question.

Is it valuable? Better question.

Is it what I should be doing? Right question.

I don’t deserve your sympathy.

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When I sleep poorly, I harm myself,

not with pills or knives

but doughy pizza and poker.

 

These might sound small—verily they are,

but I’ve avoided loving any people who die

and only been once dumped,

on my quest for #2.

 

Still a kid, a spoiled millennial,

these problems equate to self-inflicted boredom.

The world will crush me. It crushes us all.

Build your ark. Recession’s a-comin’.

 

Even Meth Heads call their Mom…

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… if only to ask for money.

“Can I borrow your phone? I need to call my mom. I’ll give you a dollar; don’t even need to touch it. “ This comes from Chris, the Chicago Bulls hat with misshapen teeth and meth sores.

I dial the number for him, put the phone on speaker. “It’s 3am in Ohio,” Chris’ mom tells him.

“I’m sorry,” Chris says. “I didn’t realize.”

“Did you get the hundred-dollar MoneyGram I sent you? Can you come home? I’m worried about you. Have you talked to your dad? Did he send you any money?”

“Not in a while.”

“Okay, here’s the code:”

Chris’ Mom gives Chris the number for the MoneyGram. Chris writes it on his palm using the pen I lent him.

“Thanks, Mom. I gotta work in the morning, but I’ll call you at lunch.”

Chris played online poker until the US government shut it down seven years ago. Now, he teaches tennis and plays poker in Vegas, but one-tabling live is not the same context or variance as twelve-tabling on the web.

I suggested he go international—like to Cali Colombia, where he can play online again and live like a king for $1k a month. As a bonus, I told him about two ¿cartel members? who lose $1k per day in the only non-profit casino I’ve ever heard of. (A money-laundering front for the cartel? Probably.)

Chris calls his friend Red. Red’s got something for Chris. Chris writes an address on his palm next to the MoneyGram code and the “HoHoHo” he doodled while chatting with his Mom. I don’t know what Chris is going to pick up, but my money’s on meth. When he asks me for $3, I don’t know why I give it to him. Maybe it’s pity. Maybe it’s hope.

I wish he would go to Cali. The cocaine cartel in one of the most dangerous cities in the world would probably be safer company.

How to celebrate in a predatory place

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(On New Year’s Eve in a Las Vegas Casino)

How does one celebrate in a predatory place? I evidently celebrate by feeling sad. The band didn’t play Auld Lang Syne as their first song of the New Year. Unacceptable, but not why I feel sad. I feel sad because I spotted a little girl. She’s celebrating New Year’s in a casino, which feels icky to me, bordering on harmful. My being here doesn’t feel icky, however. Is there a difference?

Maybe. Perhaps it’s bad to teach a child to associate predation with celebration, while I’m old enough to make my own decisions. I chose to be here. That’s one difference. It’s not particularly strong—it doesn’t justify the existence of casinos in general, but it explains a bit of the ethical difference in my gut.

The girl and her family stepped away. A mother and her two young children arrived. One, a baby boy in a stroller surrounded by stale cigarette smoke—you should have seen his thousand-yard stare.