monkey banana

Drug the boy not

2012-01-30T13:14:00.002+10:00

Interesting
article in the NY Times about the ADD drugs that it has become
fashionable to poison our kids' heads with. Mrs Zen wants Naughtyman
to be drugged. I am totally and implacably opposed to it. I will never
allow it no matter how much the school lies about how it will help
him.

Of course when tested in the lab, drugs such as Ritalin have been
shown to improve concentration. We all know that stimulants can help
you focus. As a oneoff. (Who didn't scoff Pro Plus when cramming?) But
what has been less studied (why would a pharma company even care about
it?) is the long-term damage done to a child's neurons by being
constantly stimulated.

One of the key quotes in the article for me was this:

"One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in
recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is
shaped by experience."

One of the areas in which I and Mrs Zen differed to the point of
screaming matches was her parenting of Naughtyman. I believed she
damaged him by not treating him like a "normal" little boy. Not that
she didn't also do good (he has real issues that have been helped by
some of the help she has acquired for him), but she often acted as
though she had a mild version of Munchausens by proxy. She decided
when he ws first born that Naughtyman was fragile, and then proceeded
to make him fragile. Then she diagnosis shopped so that she could
match what she felt about Naughtyman with whatever she found on the
web. (She did the same with me: apparently I have Asperger syndrome,
which would be news to anyone who knows me. In case you are not au
fait with Asperger's, think Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory and you'll
get the picture.)

In some ways he is fragile. Most kids are. They are sensitive and need
a lot of love and care. But he is also clever, cunning even,
manipulative. He pursues what he wants by any means he has available.

A big area of concern is food. He won't eat what the other kids eat.
It remains my view that the biggest error in parenting Mrs Zen made
was to give Naughtyman separate meals from the girls. We all have to
eat things we don't like much when we are kids. We all have to try new
things. Except Naughtyman does not. He is able to refuse because he
knows she will cave and give him what he wants.

Last night, I gave him mash. He used to eat mash but now he cries if
he's given it. Mrs Zen says he will eat "orange" mash made from
potato, sweet potato and whatever else, so long as it's just right. If
it isn't, he will refuse to eat it.

I make him eat it. It's a war because he is used to getting his own way.

So he starts gagging. Naughtyman, I say, that won't work with me. I
know you're faking.

He stops. I say to B, he does this gagging thing to the point of
spewing so that he doesn't have to eat things. B is sceptical. The
girls confirm that they know he's faking. They say he goes to the
toilet and spits his food out, pretending to be sick.

But his psychologist said he's ultra sensitive, and some foods may
give him a bad mouthfeel. I laugh, because it doesn't seem like
there's a biscuit, chocolate, cake or lolly made that he doesn't like
the feel of in his mouth.

I am not sure how to resolve Naughtyman's issues, although I'm sure
many, even if not all, are resolvable. I feel like anything I do is
bound to be undone week to week. If I try to make him try new foods,
she will undermine me by letting him eat baked bean sandwiches for a
week; if I try to get him to stay in his own bedroom, she will undo
the good by letting him sleep with her, as I'm told he does every
night.

I am concerned that she will have him prescribed ADD drugs behind my
back, because she "knows best". She does not. Although I do not think
for a moment she has anything but the best intentions toward any of
our children, I do think she hurt Naughtyman, and the girls, by
treating him as though he was disabled from the moment he was born.
(And it has hurt the girls. They hate that he's treated as though he's
more special than them. Now it's hard to feed Zenella too because she
has started to not like things she once ate. It's clear that she is
hoping to get the special treatment that Naughtyman has always had by
acting like him: she often complains that "Naughtyman is allowed to do
it but I'm not". Luckily, Zenita has reacted in the opposite way: she
becomes ever more obliging in the same hope. All they have ever needed
though was to be treated evenhandedly.)

My view remains too that Naughtyman should be shown how to get what he
wants in ways that aren't so dysfunctional. He should be shown strong
boundaries. Kids don't start thinking you don't love them if you're
firm with them: generally, they respond well, because you are, after
all, showing you care. Naughtyman possibly would respond to slightly
tougher love. But I often feel, what's the use? Any good I do will be
undone the next week. In this way I've become complicit in his
misparenting, but I don't really know how to fix it. Mrs Zen refused
to talk about the children in a serious way when we were together and
she still refuses to. Naturally, I understand that when you feel
bitter about someone, it's easy for conversations to degrade into "you
did, I did, you didn't, I didn't". But that doesn't necessarily mean
you shouldn't try.

Repost: Canaries

2012-01-08T08:48:00.001+10:00

The bang and the clatter. The rattle and the wheeze.
Bang, clatter. Rattle, wheeze.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
He is a man. He is a man who is smacking that cheap, plastic keyboard.
He is a man of thirty-seven, thirty-eight years – I’ve never asked, never cared to ask – who shows the keyboard who is boss.
Fuck it. Fucker. Fuck it. Fucker. The bang and the clatter. He stops. Sucks his teeth. The rattle and the wheeze. Fuck it. Fucker.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
He is getting the minutes in there by some sort of two-fingered Morse code, I swear. He is a man among men. You'd think he could have learned to touch type. Bang. Bang. He is fierce.

I am fierce. I stalk the corridors a mighty warrior. I hunt the prey. I jerk my hips like a savage when I get the picture of the pool secretary. Then I remember the cameras and stop it. Stop it, stop it. Is she begging or teasing? Wanting it really. I catch sight of myself in the glass panels.

No natural light touches me nine to one, two to five. I breathe the breathings of those who have breathed before me, and when I am done with it, the system takes my air for them to breathe once more. The building hums gently. The air tastes strange. Everyone but me has bad breath.

Fuck it. Fucker. Fuck it. Fuck it. Everyone is breathing the air I have breathed and their breath is worse every day. They are talking under their breath and under that oppressive weight what they say never rises above a mutter. A murmur. Fucker. Bang. Fucker. Bang. Fucker. Bang.

*

This is how we compete. Someone is talking about targets. I am looking at a spot on the table. If I look harder, ever harder, the voice becomes a drone, the drone a hum, the hum indistinguishable from the aircon, the aircon a whisper of nothingness. I am glaring at the spot on the table. Glaring.
Someone asks me something. I haven't a clue. Yes, I say. I nod. Yes, and a nod. Nod, nod.
The drone begins again. They’ll send the minutes. He’ll send the minutes. Action. I find out what I agreed to when I see the minutes. I don't care. This is how we compete. Say yes, nod, move on. I can vanish into the spot on the table. I can vanish and they won't know I've gone. They will keep on putting the money into my account at the end of every month and they will not know I've vanished. Bang. Clatter. This is what you agreed. I don't know. I just nod, yes, nod, and read the minutes.

Someone is talking about targets and I am wondering if time began or whether the world has always been. But I'm thinking, in here time begins at nine. There is the world out there, beyond these four walls, and the world in here. The same rules do not apply. We are sealed off from the rest of it. We are breathing the air we’ve breathed.

Someone is talking about targets and I am watching the pulse in his neck. I wonder whether anyone could stop me if I dived across the desk and bit through his neck.

I need sharper teeth.

*

I am looking at my teeth in the mirror. My shirt feels uncomfortable. I pull it, I tug it, I move it around, but it bunches. I have to pull it out from my trousers. I glance up. I wonder whether they have cameras in here. You’d think it would be wrong. Wrong. But what is wrong? They have cameras in every corridor. If they want to watch you shit, they can.

The door opens. A guy walks in. He knows me. I know him. We are nodding. Nod, yes, nod. Hey. Hey hey.

He doesn't ask why I have my shirt pulled out. He doesn't even look curious. I tuck it back in. I look at his prick as I walk out the door. Not a long look, just a sneaky peek. It is small and the foreskin hangs over the glans.

If there is a camera in the washroom, they've seen my looking at another man's cock. I don't know what they will make of that. I don't know what the rule is for that.

*

Bang. Bang. Bang. BANG.

The end of his typing hangs in the air. He is breathing heavily. He has chased it down, hunted it, killed it, skinned it and fucking roasted it. The minutes. They are done.

If I could see through the walls of this room – do you still call it a room when it is so big? – I would not see the forest, I would not see the hills. But if I could stand up, on the roof, I could see far enough, far enough to see beyond the grey, to another, whole world. I could breathe.

What the fuck am I thinking about? He passes me a copy of the minutes. He has been talking to me. I have been nodding. Yes, I say. It's amazing how often yes is the right thing to say.

If I could only climb up the sheer face of the glass outside, reach the roof and breathe. If I could get high enough, just for a moment, I could see the forest, I could see the hills. They must be there. Even if in here there is no forest, out there…

Yes, I’m saying. Yes, yes. I nod. But what the fuck am I thinking about?

*

I am thinking it over. The figures are not right. Someone has changed the figures. I am thinking over the figures. Who would I tell? If I wanted to tell, who would I tell about the figures? I am trying to think who would care.

Someone has stolen a large amount of money, I’m almost sure. I am trying to think who would care. The same amount of money passes into my account at the end of every month. I'm trying to think who would care that someone has changed the figures.

I can see my reflection in the monitor. I am looking at my teeth. They are flat and blunt, not the teeth of something that lives in the jungle. I need sharper teeth before I start to care.

These figures don't look right, I say. But I am not sure anyone has heard me. I am not sure I said it aloud at all.

*

When we are born, we are the whole world and everything in it. Then our lives, one long process of finding out that others have made the world, and the space they have left for us in it grows smaller, ever smaller, until it is a speck of nothing, blowing in the wind.

I am looking at my teeth, reflected in my monitor. It is close to five o'clock. I should file my teeth like a savage. It is five o'clock. I should leave.

Repost: Fu Manchu and the Golden Phoenix

2012-01-08T08:46:00.002+10:00

Some years ago, long before he became Fu Manchu, Fu learned the secret of extending life.

He stole it – although he claimed it was fair exchange – from a sect of monks whose commune he swept and cleaned for seven years. The monks, peculiarly for their sort, did not sweep and clean their own quarters. They had lost the discipline. Their order had once had a strong discipline, a rigid and some would say harsh regimen: gruel, manual labour and an obedience that would have appealed to the very soul of old Kong. But in those times of easy living, the scions of gentlemanly families, who as you would expect made up the most part of the monastery’s complement, would have no truck with anything that might dirty their hands – preferring to pass their days in meditating and playing cards – and it became necessary to hire a boy for the job. Fu was that boy.

He wanted to tell Harry Landers, as he fastened the handcuffs on to the steel bar above his head, that he only stole the secret because the monks, degenerates all, had replaced him with a woman, their order having fallen so far from its ideals as to permit the defilement of the monastery with a female. But he doubted not only that Landers could grasp the intricacies of Chinese society of that time, although Landers did claim to be Oxford’s foremost Sinologist (which Fu did not credit, Landers’ putonghua having shown itself more than once to be lacking, unless the importance of China as an area of study had very much declined since he had last visited), but also that Landers would welcome the distraction from the serious business of figuring out how to escape from the fiendish end Fu had prepared for him.

Sometimes, in a darker hour, Fu felt he might just as well shoot them, these blowhards who came to foil his cunning plots for world domination, but it was one of the few pleasures his dwindling years afforded him to spend long hours in imagining the most fiendish of end.

He left Landers strung up by the wrists, and walked out on to the verandah of the mountain hideaway. He had built it himself, twenty years before. He enjoyed the physical work of cutting the wood, shaping it. It kept him supple and focused the mind. He had learned the art of carpentry and joining from a man in Shanghai who had built houses for merchants who had made money in opium. The carpenter had struggled with his conscience. He knew the money he was paid was dirty, that it derived from others’ misery. He knew that the merchants sometimes had one another beaten, assassinated even. He knew they were not good men. He found it hard to bear.
Fu Manchu reflected that a man can always choose. The opium does not choose the smoker. Fu knew that well. For many years he had been a dope fiend, hanging around the slums of one of the numberless cities of the south, hoping to destroy himself, to eradicate himself in opiate oblivion. It didn’t work. Fu had a core, an inner light, which no matter how he tried he could not extinguish. He blamed his youth in the monastery.

On a dark night – unseasonally dark, you might say, for July in Shanghai, but the clouds covered the moon and made it a night for evildoing – Fu Manchu drowned the carpenter in a bucket. The carpenter had been washing his face. Fu knew a fork in life’s road when he saw one, and pushed down the carpenter’s head. With all his strength he pushed the carpenter down. When he was dead, he threw his body into the harbour from a shaded boardwalk. The carpenter barely made a splash.

Fu took the carpenter’s business and expanded it quickly and ruthlessly. His strategy was simple. Some of his competitors he killed. In those times a man could disappear and hardly be missed, if you had the will to make him gone and a dark night for the deed. Fu had the will and as the year drew on, the nights became dark enough for any desperate thing a man felt he had to do. Other competitors he frightened with sorcery, which is to say by using thinly veiled threats cloaked in the melange of smoke, mirrors, blood and thunder that impresses the less educated, or did back then, before schooling became more available to the lower classes. By the close of the year, Fu had a monopoly on traditional housebuilding on the waterfront. But clouds were gathering. Soon the Europeans – who had been only an occasional, pitiable presence, mostly in the form of crazed priests, whose own version of sorcery, with its own thinly veiled threats (which Fu somewhat admired for their ferocity but scorned for their lack of personality) gripped the peasant mind of many of Fu’s workers, to his great delight, because they ceased to agitate for better conditions, having come to believe that their reward was assured in another life – began to encroach into all areas of trade. The worst of them was that they despised the wooden houses that the merchants had always loved. They held to a peculiar belief that the solidity of stone was the right medium to express wealth rather than the organic beauty of wood.

Fu knew he had two choices. Kill every European who came or change track in his business. Fu did the research. It seemed clear that Europeans were tenacious where they were not subtle. Still, he felt it would be somehow noble to kill them on principle. The meddling fools seemed to believe they had a right to the wealth of the whole world, and would trample the locals underfoot, destroy their customs and traditions, to get their grasping hands on it. There were many unemployed coolies on the waterfront whom it proved easy to inspire to a grudge against Westerners. Soon Fu had a small army of thugs, who would assassinate the European businessmen who were becoming so prominent in Shanghai. The thugs grew ever more enthusiastic. They burned and looted godowns, churches and houses; they even swam through the choppy water of the harbour to climb like rats up the anchor chain of the Europeans’ boats, to rob them of the merchandise they brought as well as that they intended to take away. Chief among the imports was opium, and Fu quickly found he owned several hundred pounds of it. He did not wish to enter the drugs trade, having been ensnared by opium himself and recognising it for the evil it was, but neither did he wish to waste the goods that he had so the scruple proved surmountable.

Fu Manchu’s thugs were not often caught. When they were, they did not speak his name, because they feared him more than any torture the authorities offered them. Still his name came to be known, and the Europeans, who had been making great profits from the opium trade, began to think that he was the worst of things in their universe – bad for business.

So they began to send their agents, resourceful although not particularly intelligent men, to find and if possible eliminate Fu Manchu. Over many years they came and he amused himself with the game of setting them ingenious puzzles, watching them blunder through Shanghai and the surrounding countryside, bemused and lost children, his playthings. He had amassed a very large fortune and employed many thousands of men. It became obvious to him that he could, if he chose, become ruler of all China, which was becoming more and more complacent of its power and, in truth, was needing only the gentlest of pushes into instability. From there, how could he be stopped, were he to arm his nation with the latest weaponry, easily purchased from the Europeans, who would sell anything to anybody if the price was right, if he wished to conquer the entire world?

But something held Fu back. He began to doubt he could rule the world and remain the shadowy figure he liked to present. He did not seek the limelight. He had managed these many years not to be known, just to be a name – not even his real name. The people who could correctly identify him could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and each of them could be eliminated in an instant if he chose. Periodically he had them eliminated anyway, just to be sure. But if he had to inspire a nation of millions, he would need to be a figurehead. There would need to be rallies, conferences, meetings. Meetings! Fu did his business in smoky rooms, speaking from behind a curtain. He began to doubt you could conquer the world from a smoky room.

The view from the verandah was splendid. The low hills and wooded valleys around Fu’s hideout shone with late spring rain. The air, fresh, with hints of pine and jasmine, made a promise of new life that even Fu, bitter as he was, could not fail to respond to. He was glad that he had begun to make the puzzles that little easier, the traps slightly more escapable, so that the European agents would at least have a chance. Their ends could be, and often were, ghastly, usually involving sharp blades, for which Fu would confess a penchant. But they were not entirely doomed. Fu had come to feel he should share some of his own ability to escape fate, that they too should not necessarily have their lives curtailed. He did not know why. He had begun to have the idea that they were like children, and he was no more than their teacher, a guru of pain. Certainly they did not understand that wisdom must be earned, which explained why he found it so easy to entrap them in the first place – they never had the experience or plain dog sense to try to cover their tracks when they arrived in China. They blustered about Shanghai and Guangzhou, shouting the odds with the locals, many of whom owed something to Fu, and could repay their debt by sharing what they heard. The fools might just as well publish a circular, Fu thought, so brazen were they.

But it tired him. He bowed his head over the rail of the verandah. He could hear the cries of Landers, who had realised what was planned for him. Fu sighed. What use was life’s game of chess, if one’s opponents must each time be taught the rules, over and over? He walked down from the verandah, on to the path that led down from his hideaway, down through the forest, over the old bridge and into town. He would eat some rice and pass perhaps an hour in contemplation of the people passing by.

*

“The world shall hear from me again,” says Fu Manchu, wishing that this time he will not escape from the abyss and return to one of his hideaways to lick his wounds and once more work up a plan to make himself master of perhaps not the whole world but at least the corner of it he coveted. But he knows that Landers, who did not have the sense to look behind him when he entered a dark room, can inevitably only confront him by the cliffside.

Fu curses. He doesn’t even know whether he’s cursing himself, the Europeans or the world for existing for him to dream of owning. Or nothing at all.

He will turn end over end, his voice fading, until the watching agent can no longer hear it at all, and will not see, will not know that Fu Manchu has concealed a parachute, can fly, will live a thousand years and a thousand more, always striving, always thwarted, always alone.

DR 2004

The story of my dad

2012-01-04T22:31:00.000+10:00

What is he hiding? I have never known and of course I have wondered about it often because he is the man most like me. I know what I am hiding because I have gone and looked for it but it has never illuminated for me who he is.

I wonder whether it should be what is he hiding from that I should ask. I do not believe it is darkness though, and I know I hide from darkness. I think he is afraid of the light. I think that if he could, he would live in a burrow, where nothing could make him feel anything at all, where nothing real could disturb his imagination. He was never happier than hidden away in his room, defeating the computer at whatever game was his current passion, or deep in a book in front of the TV.

I found it interesting that he studied history but the history he was studying was mainly constructed from lies. He studied the Greeks, who lied, and not modern history (I mean that he was most interested by that, not that he has never read any modern history).

Am I wrong to believe that he is hiding from love?

When I was small, he loved me passionately, and I am afraid to think too much about it, because it recalls for me the passionate love I have for my own son. I fear its dissolution, that I will not love mine if he is something other than the boy I picture. I know that I find thwarted expectation unbearable. Does he too? Is that why he will not put skin in the game?

Some time ago, when I was more confident about who I am (I mean who I was then), I begged him to tell me more about himself, to confide in me about his own father, to make me more real by becoming more real himself. But he would not or could not, I don't know which. He said he had never known his father, which is true. He knew him as a small child and briefly when he met him when he was grown, when his father was as utterly a stranger to him as a man he had never met at all. I imagine he imagined I was seeking something special, something memorable, a fantasia of father and son that simply did not exist. I did not. I wanted to know the mundane details, the things that seemed meaningless to him. I wanted to know how he felt.

I feel as though he is a stranger to me. It disconnects me from myself, to be so rootless. Unmoored. I often think of myself as someone who has no tethering to the world, emotionally stateless. I sometimes believe I have no other real emotion than rage that I exist, that I am who I am. It is easy to tell people you do not love yourself but close to impossible to explain how that feels, what it means concretely. I am not able to describe abstractions because, I think, they involve faith, and I am entirely devoid of faith in anything. I roleplay faith; I play a game in which I have it, yet it is entirely hollow. If I had to inspect it, I would find nothing there.

Do I believe he is more complex than he is? I do not believe that. I think he is as complex or as simple as I am, and each is a true description, depending on what angle you view him from.

I am afraid that he will die without my ever knowing him. I want it to be enough that I have never questioned my love for him and never will. He earned it when I was that small child, although earning it makes it sound much more transactional than it was. There was a process that did not have structure, in which he became the person I loved more than any other in this world. I do not understand that process. It is of course no longer true. I know that he would not mind that it isn't. He would expect me to love my children more fiercely than I could ever love him. I know that because I know that he and I are more similar than we are different.

I have to write this because it is the only way I will ever know him. I know he will never have a way to be present for me, to become real; I sometimes feel sad because it is my belief that he was robbed of it.

I will never diminish my belief that he is a good man, even if I must redefine good so that it includes him. I will do that because my love for him has not perished and will never perish. I will cherish him until I am gone because something in me, I don't know what it is, holds firmly to honour, and that is how I honour him.

I feel sorry that I am not the son he believed in. If I could relive my life, I believe I would simply become that man because ultimately nothing else really matters. Only our love for each other. Only that, I cannot subscribe to any other religion. When I read about Chinese people and their notion of filial piety, I understand that they have merely formalised something I understand intuitively.

I like to tell the tale of how my dad taught me to chase women. As far as I know, he is as useless with women as I am. But his advice has, I hope, stood me in good stead, although I haven't always been able to follow it.

He was drunk, I seem to remember, which was quite rare for him. He likes a drink but I seem to recall that he is not good at it. I can well remember his coming home from a work do, where he had drunk heavily, on a moped. His story of how he had fallen off on a roundabout made me laugh my arse off. He said a car had stopped and the driver had got out to ask him how he was. Piss off, Jack, he had cried, remounted his steed and somehow made it home. You probably had to be there. My dad's "funny voice" is truly funny.

So he took me into his room. I was downcast because some young thing was breaking my heart. I did not have the balls to ask her out (often the case in my teens). My dad looked at me with the deepest pity. I'd say contempt, but to be honest, he only really has contempt for people who are full of shit. I've never known him express it for people who are honest but misguided.

When you're chasing women, he said, putting on his I am wise voice, there's only one thing to do.

I leaned forward. Finally, my dad was going to give me "the talk". I was to receive the family wisdom. I was beyond eager.

His eyes tried to focus but they were well beyond his control. He looked like he was on the verge of collapse. He nodded. This would not just be wisdom. It would be a deep secret of manhood. Only now, drunk, uninhibited, could he share it. It felt like I was experiencing a moment of the deepest bonding.

Talk to them and don't be a cunt, he said.

***

I'd like to dedicate this to Don. I think he too strives to be a good man, and striving is good enough for me. When he wrote about his dad, he reminded me that we are, above all and endlessly, sons, whatever else we are.

Make your own tree

2012-01-04T21:49:00.000+10:00

I was thinking about Naughtyman and how he was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. It was a bad diagnosis because he meets few of the criteria. Of course there's something up with him but it's precisely that he's Naughtyman, not that he's something simply categorised with a list of symptoms (B's dad, who is a psychologist, says that Naughtyman certainly does not have Asperger's because he is very social; although he has some anxiety around new people and situations, he doesn't avoid social contact--he will look you in the eye when you talk to him, and he's a loving and giving boy). He's like me in that. Mrs Zen used to google Asperger's because I was writing a character with it, and she thought I must have it because I lack empathy. But the truth is, I don't. I lack empathy. It's not a part of a broader picture. It's just something about me.

One criterion for Asperger's is an inability to understand figurative language. Of course I understand figurative language very well, but I don't like it. I don't enjoy simple metaphors in writing and what is more, I don't enjoy descriptive writing much either. I don't enjoy reading it and I don't indulge in it. I was talking to B and I said, Aspies don't understand things like "my heart was racing like a steam train" because hearts are nothing like steam trains. My objection is that I prefer to say "my heart beat fast" and you can decide what that's like. I like to write in extended metaphors, which are built from blocks of concrete language. I do not say "there were great oaks that spread their branches like a giant's clothed limbs, cloaked in the luxuriant russets of their autumn foliage". I say "there were trees". In my writing, you make your own tree.

Once I wrote a post in which I suggested that women think I should be a pond, in which they could see themselves reflected, but I am more like the sea, where all you can see is shards of reflection, which you must form for yourself into a picture that makes sense. And I think that captures well what is good about how I write: I do not describe the world you live in for you; I do not reflect it back to you; instead I give you pieces of understanding about it, which you must fashion into your own picture. I think it seems I am more generous, when really I am willing to give you much less than it seems. Literary types use artifice to make a world for you to enter, enslaving you to their vision. I offer you freedom, but if the metaphor I have built is clever enough, I enslave you in a more subtle way. You think the shards are reflections of a truth, and they are, but you are led to believe it is a truth we share, because you must construct it. Yet ultimately it is the truth as I see it. It doesn't always work, and failure is much more common than success if I'm honest, but there is no limitation on how many blog posts you can experiment in, and anyway, I am always and forever only talking to myself, seeing my own reflection. What else could I do, lacking any way to understand who you are?

You are politely requested to read this post thanks

2012-01-04T15:13:00.001+10:00

The sign in the toilet says "please use the button to flush thanks",
which seems rather passive-aggressive once you get past the natural
reading that you should somehow flush thanks when you receive them.

This is what you might call a polite order, although it is not
actually all that polite. Were you to write "Please use the button to
flush", this would simply be a politer version of "Use the button to
flush", which is simply an instruction for those who may not otherwise
be able to figure out either what the button is for or whether it's
for constant use or just for the cleaning staff or whatever.

I dislike passive-aggressive signs. "Thank you for not smoking" is
grossly offensive. The "thank you" is fake courteous, which is at the
other end of the courtesy scale to really being courteous. It means
"Don't smoke", not even "Please don't smoke", which would seem to
offer you the option.

I believe this kind of sign was invented to avoid the awkwardness of
the passive voice in signs like "Smoking is forbidden". Who forbids
it? is the question that springs to mind. One is led to believe that
God himself made it a commandment. Indeed, I believe the world would
be a slightly better place if it read "We forbid you from smoking" or,
should it be in a train station "Q Rail forbids you from smoking", or
"This hospital forbids you from smoking". Or just "No smoking" or
"Don't smoke here".

There's worse: the passive-aggressive command with passive voice.
"Patrons are reminded that the use of mobile phones during a
performance is forbidden." This is as bad as English gets while still
being recognisably English. If I knew you forbade using a mobile
phone, I won't have forgotten. If I didn't, you need to forbid me more
directly:

"Please don't use your mobile phone during the film."
"Hawthorne Cinema forbids you from using your mobile phone during the film."

Although the latter is on the face of it discourteous, I contend that
it is politer than the version the cinema prefers.

Note that in my version I have preferred using a verb or a verbal noun
over the construction "the x of". Do this where the terms are
equivalent. ("The end of Rome's hegemony..." and "Ending Rome's
hegemony..." are not equivalents. I will write a post explaining why
at some point.) It will improve your writing probably as much as any
other thing you can do.

On whether you should write whether

2011-12-21T10:25:00.001+10:00

One of my big nits as an editor is the slurring of fhe fields of meaning for words. So it irks me that "therefore" and "thus" are used interchangeably because they can convey different meanings, which makes them more useful tools. (The difference, tout court, is that "therefore" means "because of this" and "thus" means "in this way".) Don't get me started on "hence"!

Generally, I automatically "correct" these words to the usage I prefer as a small rebellion against killing their usefulness. I use the scare quotes because it's not wrong as such to write "I don't like him, thus I punched him" (but it's ugly!) but I greatly prefer "therefore" in that sentence.

Two words whose meaning has slurred together are "if" and "whether". This is particularly common in Australia, and I find myself "correcting" "if" to "whether" often, at least daily, sometimes several times in a day. Here, the justification is clearer than it is for "thus" to "therefore" because in formal writing, "if" is unacceptable where "whether" should be used. (The spoken language is somewhat different, and I use the idiom I grew up with, which favours "if".)

There are three cases for if/whether, simply stated:

A/ Sentences that need "if", where "whether" would simply be incorrect.

If I see him, I will tell him.

If the siren blows, you can leave work.

Here, "if" introduces a condition that does not imply a choice. Often it could be rendered "in the event that" (but please don't render it that way).

B/ Sentences that need "whether", where "if" would make the sentence ambiguous.

I don't know whether he's coming tomorrow or Wednesday.

means that he is coming on one of tomorrow or Wednesday but you don't know which.

Were you to write:

I don't know if he's coming tomorrow or Wednesday.

the sentence can then mean that he may be coming tomorrow or Wednesday or at some other time, and you don't know which.

"Whether" always implies at least two cases. It often introduces one case, and leaves the other implied.

I don't know whether he's coming (or is not coming).

Tell me whether you like my shoes (or you don't like my shoes).

This leaves us with a simple rule for deciding whether to use "whether". If you could append "or" plus the opposite of the case you are giving, use "whether".

It's then clear that case A sentences must use "if" because they only offer one condition, not two or more cases. See the difference between:

If the train comes, leave town.

Whether the train comes or not, leave town.

C/ Sentences in which 'whether" is more correct but people use "if".

I don't know whether he's coming on Friday.

I don't know if he's coming on Friday.

Check if you have any messages.

Check whether you have any messages.

We can tell we need "whether" in this last sentence because there is an implied clause "or you do not have messages".

Should you write "whether or not"? Generally, the rule of English applies that one should not use redundant words. In the same way that one writes "to" for "in order to" or "period" for "period of time", you ought not to use "whether or not" where "whether" alone would suffice.

One uses "whether or not" when we mean to say that both conditions under consideration apply. For instance, when M says he prefers blondes, I might say "I like women whether or not they are blonde", or you might ask whether I am keeping my child at home tomorrow if she is coughing, and I answer "I'm keeping her home as a precaution whether or not she's coughing". In this sense, it is clearly the same as "regardless whether".

Time Out

2011-12-13T15:19:00.000+10:00

There is a Time Out wrapper on the stair. Someone ripped and dropped it. 8.50 and I have the first symptom of rage.

Deep breath.

The raggedy man is ugly. There is a scar on his jowl. I can see it from where I sit, right now I can see it. It looks like someone sliced him one time. Miss Inoffensive is ugly. Her hair is fine. Can't you plump it up somehow? Can't you volumise it? Maybe she doesn't want to.

Maybe she doesn't want her hair to attract attention. She talks in a low whine. It says, I am not going to offend you. She was talking in the lunchroom about Aborigines but her comments had no substance. Something about a judge. Something about a case. You know she is sympathetic and can write in the substance for herself.

Is it a kind of ill-formed elitism to believe that you could write in the substance for just about everyone you meet? Were people really this unsurprising in the life I left behind?

My shirt smells strongly of the liquid B uses to "iron" clothes. It's entirely artificial. They did not think it worthwhile even to pretend to make it smell of flowers. It is odd that everything that has a floral scent smells like no flower you've ever come across. Because they could synthesise the flower smell, right? But it's just not worth bothering.

I feel caged. What else could I do? I think about that almost all the time but somehow it's as though there's a block someone has put in me, that the inability to figure out any way out of it is artificial.

I am thinking about a piece of art that I will paint. I have felt like I'm flourishing recently, albeit in a barely perceptible way. It's just that I feel like I'm going to die and that impels me. I am thinking about poker again: there are concepts at play. I know that if I nail them I will be made.

It worries me that I might not nail them before I die.

I do not have change for the machine. I was going to have a coke with lunch but I had no change. I realised I didn't care. I could just drink water. But I didn't. Just being able to was enough.

Do you have days in which you feel disconnected, and could you only get the dots joined you would truly see? No. I wonder sometimes whether I can feel any other emotion than vanity. And love for my childen. Which is the same thing, let's not kid ourselves.

I do not buy brand names. But I wanted a coke. I do not believe in God. But I want magic. I do not love myself. But I worship love.

I know. I could have picked the wrapper up. But I realise that only now: I was complicit because I wanted to despise another person. It is a long way to shore and I am treading water instead of swimming.

We are mice

2011-12-11T20:54:00.000+10:00

Men.

Proud warriors.

Rocks.

Strong, unyielding giants bestriding our Earth.

Apparently not.

Not here in Australia anyway. Here we are worms who need to apologise even for having the temerity to take a shit.

So we know that ads for household products are aimed squarely at women. And we know that Australian women hate men (with reason, I daresay). But we have to grovel?

Beg forgiveness for taking a shit?

Paul Hogan would spin in his fucking grave, I can tell you. Were he dead. Which he is not because apparently his missus has not given him permission to shuffle off this mortal coil.

About 3pm

2011-12-11T15:14:00.000+10:00

I had a curious dream last night. A friend who I had known when I lived in London 20 years ago was in town and we met up for drinks. We talked about her best friend, an old girlfriend of mine. She said the girlfriend still thought a lot about me and I said, we should meet up for old time's sake, or something like that.

But she was forbidding. She did not say it could never happen but she made out there were obstacles that would make it close to impossible. She did not say what they were, exactly, although I felt I knew, but became angry at the idea. Not angry, shouting; angry, dark, as though I was intruding on something by the very suggestion.

I don't try to make sense of my dreams. They aren't messages or anything. They are just the way your brain keeps itself alive at night as far as I know.

I used to have a recurring dream about that woman too. She would always be laughing, her long hair falling down over her face. I wish we had remained friends. I felt joy in her presence, and it's hard to find.

***

It has been bothering me that I have not felt well recently, on and off unwell for a while now. I feel like I am not in good shape. The whiplash from my rearender hasn't helped: I've had a lot of stiffness in my shoulder that has made me feel old. I'm usually extremely loose in the shoulders, which is odd in someone who spends so much time at a computer, and at odds with nearly everyone I know, who has rockhard shoulders.

But I feel like I will not live much longer and it bothers me that I have not had the joy in life I should have done.

I don't even know what "should" is supposed to mean in that sentence.

***

I have been filling up a piggy bank with the loose change I have around the house. It feels like my life dripping away, coin by coin, because, you see, these are all Australian coins. I feel like I am refusing to live here. I cannot go home and, as though to punish myself for being too cowardly to follow my heart, I refuse to live here too. I have not been alive for years and frankly that's squeezing me to pieces.

Recently, I stopped blaming everyone else for how bad I feel my life is and has been. It's me, but I consider it unfortunate that I have not been lucky enough to know people who want me to have a good life despite myself. I married a woman who did not care whether I was happy and I will probably do the same again.

I cannot be on my own. I cease to exist without someone loving me, nurturing me. I enter an existential panic that is inexplicable to anyone who does not feel it.

***

I don't really think it's all me. Are you fucking kidding? It's only all me in the sense that I blind myself to reality: I pretend that people understand give and take.

Or is that right? See, the problem I have is that I do believe that people must at heart understand give and take. So if they do not give what I feel they ought to, I have to conclude that I was wrong about what I deserved.

That's not good for your self-esteem.

But I don't have any way of generating self-esteem from within myself. People say, just love yourself, but how are you supposed to do that? I look inside myself and I see a whirlpool, a spinning vortex of bits and pieces of life that I've lived, as though a tornado were set loose in my soul and now I cannot build anything out of the scraps.

If a person thinks a lot about me, how can they not know that nothing hurts me more than to be nothing, that I have always been someone who needed others to write and say, I know you're there?

I remember when S wouldn't write to me for months. She said she was hurt (and I don't doubt she was, although whether it was justified is another question -- but I am not at all discounting that hurt is something you feel whether it's justified or not; I've just always believed that intentions count and have been willing to forgive a person for hurting me if they didn't intend to; after all, what I most despise in Mrs Zen was that she simply didn't care -- I think it is the worst you can do to a person, not to hate them but just not to think they're worth caring about one way or the other; and I do recognise that I feel that way about most people I know, but I have not claimed to be decent) but I think she knew that she was paying me out more harshly by doing that than she could in any other way. She knew that not letting me know I existed would be a knife twisting and burning in me that I could not ignore.

I may have that wrong. I'm not an expert on human beings, or at least, if I am, I wilfully ignore most of what I know because if I didn't I would have an excellent life and there's still a monkey in here whose main intention is to ensure that my hopes are destroyed and anything good in my life turns to shit.

I may have it wrong and she may be more like Bella. I assume Bella behaved the way she did to protect herself, because she couldn't resolve what her being desired and what her indoctrination told her it should desire.

They were both genuinely crazy. Probably they were attracted to me because they thought I had the key to unlock their craziness, and tired of me when they realised I do not.

Perversely, I probably do, but they did not know how to get me to use that key.

***

Sometimes I wake up in the night and think how much better it would be not to know myself at all, to be blissfully unaware. I ask myself sometimes how Mrs Zen can sleep at night, but then I realise that she has no desire or ability to know herself, and genuinely believes herself to be innocent.

She is not even lying to herself. People are like that here. They are raised with a sense of entitlement that is alien to the English psyche. It must make it difficult to understand where I am even coming from, and I know that it was a huge failing in me that I am capable of understanding that and dealing with it, yet I didn't bother. I think I have to accept that I didn't love her in the right way to achieve that, and that was a deep cruelty to her.

Still, often it takes two to create cruelty. It sounds a lot like victim blaming to say so, but victims are often to blame, because we are not on the whole victims but are just frail beings who don't understand each other very well.

***

It leaves me at a crossroads and I am determined that I will live with the belief that I really do not have much life left to me and must resolve it. The problem, as I see it, is that I did not move past 14, and I have been looking for others to help me, to become the mentors I did not have then, or to provide the love I needed like water, but I have to be capable of it. Somewhere within me, given my talents and ability, which I don't doubt truly do exist, must be the capability to grow and become a man. I know I was flourishing 12 years ago -- and now I have pissed away too much time mourning that and too little rediscovering the man I was becoming.

But to do it involves such a large change in my mindset that it leaves me doubtful. You know how sometimes you face a task that is so large you don't even know how to begin it? Yet you know that all it will take is to begin, no matter how small that beginning is?

I have been waiting for someone to tell me which is the first step I should take, but at the same time I do not have anyone in my life who is wise enough, or who cares enough about me, to point it out. It's a paradox that to be someone who anyone could care enough about would need me to have already walked some way along that path.

***

Faced with paradoxes like that in our lives, it's easy to become paralysed, to chooses inaction, to wallow in self-pity. Yet I'm contemptuous of others who do that, and of course when I think about myself I am quite clear that I am like those others. But doctoring yourself is not easy. You may clearly see the diagnosis and simply not know the cure.

Or know it but be unable to focus on it, which is, I think, worse.

Ragged

2011-11-29T18:52:00.000+10:00

The raggedy man must have ADD.

I think so. He is yawning. Is his life that tiring? He yawns loud and long.

I call him the raggedy man because he doesn't seem solid. He is never shaved, his hair is greasy and too long for the "style" he has it in, and his clothes are not coordinated. It's not that they are not good -- most people don't dress well, and I don't claim to myself -- it's that they are just wrong.

I suspect him of wearing polyester.

He is yawning loud and long, and it seems to me that it's a cry for attention. But everyone knows that if you ask a person like that why they're so tired, they will give you an angry look that you didn't really merit and your relationship will be soured.

This kind of prick thrives on sour relationships.

He has stopped yawning. Now he is drinking.

In case you weren't aware, I am English. Among the many things that means is that I was brought up with a particular set of table manners. I rarely talk with my mouth full, do not put my elbows on the table and hold my knife and fork correctly most of the time. I do not make a noise when I'm eating or drinking. How awful that would be!

This guy slurps. I cannot abide slurping. I am close to ready to break the conventions of the office and confront him.

But you can't do that.

Life is full of things you can't do. Mostly I don't mind it, because we're social animals and we need to get along.

But when he gets out his packet of crisps, I know I will want to murder him within minutes.

Chomp chomp, rattle pen on teeth, slurp water, sigh, yawn. All day long, I know he's there. I can't pretend he isn't unless I put on my iPod. But I have to resist that so that I don't feel coerced into behaviour I don't necessarily want to pursue. It's bad enough having to work.

***

I am the opposite of attention seeking. I prefer not to attract attention, unless it's from hot women. And not so hot ones, let's face it.

***

The height of this guy's bad behaviour is that he has had ten children.

I am mystified why. He doesn't seem to be religious, and usually you can tell when someone is. Why would you want to have that many children unless you wanted to be that guy?

And he is that guy.

***

So wtf. None of us is perfect, right? And who am I to judge? I realise that he probably doesn't even know that he's an annoying prick. I do know plenty of people who have no awareness that the issues in their lives derive from themselves, although I'm very aware that that's true of me.

The other day P, trying to piss me off rather than truthfully analyse me, suggested that women love me only until they get to know me. Which is not true at all. They generally love me until they find out I'm not what they imagined. Which is more a comment on their lack of imagination than on my lack of loveability, although I have no illusions about that. I got those kicked out of me a while ago. For nearly two years I've been aware constantly that I'm not worth knowing, let alone loving. I suppose I should be grateful that a few people remain who are willing, for reasons that aren't all that clear to me, to pretend that I am. I tend to feel they want something from me, and so long as I seem like I am going to provide it, I'm okay with them.

I did not want to become so cynical about people. I always believed in the good. Even when things were really bad with Mrs Zen, I kept thinking she would become human again one day, that she would wake up some morning and think, omg, I have done wrong and should put it right.

***

I miss my dreams of a walled garden so much. It is terrible to be so withered, so incomplete -- and beyond incomplete, to feel that you never can be completed. I miss hope.

I realise that when I judge the raggedy man, I am not judging the raggedy man. I am hoping that I am wrong that he is a mirror.

Quick note about law

2011-11-20T10:00:00.000+10:00

I was reading a post on RationalWiki about the Freeman on the land movement when I saw this:

Ultimately, the law derives its authority from the fact that the state has the means and the will to use force to impose it. You can argue that the authorities have no jurisdiction over you, and you can choose not to recognise their authority, but as long as the authorities have force to back up their rules they can enforce sanctions against you. Freemen would argue that this would be unlawful imprisonment - but at the end of the day you'd still be in jail.

and realised that it was true.

When I was watching the Tudors, it struck me that power was very personal and based on the ability to cause violence to quasi peers and direct inferiors using their peers if they do not do what you want. By quasi peers, I mean people who structurally are the same kind of person as you -- aristocrats in the case of the king -- but are not the same thing as you by convention. So the king is just a privileged lord, but is not just a lord, and a duke, say, is just a sort of baron, but is not a baron.

So the king would charge dukes to do this or that, and the dukes would charge their underlords, and the underlords would charge their men at arms and so on and so on, so that power percolated down through the levels, until what the king wanted ended in the serf having to provide service or whatever.

In this model, the government is clearly understood as by and for the king. It's tolerated by the elites because the king is a "convenor" of power and a distributor of largesse. His empowerment leads to the empowerment (and enrichment) of his quasi peers.

But power in the democracy is supposed to derive from the people. We are supposed to consent in being governed.

The rather snotty writer of RationalWiki doesn't seem to understand that he is not presenting a counterargument to the Freemen on the land. He is simply explaining why they cannot succeed. I think they mostly already know that. And we can certainly ask whether it's desirable that our laws should be based on the ability of the elites to use violence on us to force us to comply with what they want.

I think that some laws are essential for being able to live in cities. I don't believe any rational person could really dispute them because the downsides of allowing them to be optional are so clear. We are talking here about no parking statutes, for instance. If no parking is optional, some people will "free ride" and park. But those areas are no parking for a reason: usually to allow access. Denying the access the no parking allows may lead to congestion that will disbenefit many of us.

And of course, once some free ride, others will too, and a tragedy of the commons will ensue. Laws that prevent tragedies of the commons are clearly in all our interests, yet we need universal consent for them to work. So even if we allowed that we should consent to all laws that bind us, that would present a problem.

I'm not sure how one could formulate laws that we consent to. In principle, we have consented because we elect representatives who make the laws. But the representatives rarely have a mandate, and are clearly not people like us, and even less so, us. The influence of money and power leads them to make laws that we don't want (it's astonishing how often parliament passes laws that are grossly unpopular, and could never pass a plebiscite -- the "debate" that surrounds them doesn't extend much further than Parliament House, although there is "consultation").

And were we asked to consent to laws, there are surely too many for us to consider, and many are too technical? Well, the answer to the first is that we could surely live with a lot fewer laws, and the answer to the second is that perhaps we should have only those laws that can be described relatively simply, and we should consent to the "headline" gist of the law, while leaving the detail to those who care about it.

I agree not to kill anyone is easy enough. I agree to abide by contracts easy enough. The 100 pages about estoppel are mostly neither here nor there.

I think a good start would be to repeal laws that are impositions on the person, and could not ever be consented to by the person they are imposed on. There is no justification in a democracy for the illegalisation of drugs, for instance, or for seatbelt laws.

Note that I'm not suggesting that we have a referendum on which laws we should keep or rid ourselves of. I have a horror of the masses making law, because the masses are apt to be unjust.

Even

2011-11-14T23:58:00.000+10:00

Is it any point being sad about what is inevitable?

Is that the same question as asking, is it any point being sad about what is irrevocable?

So I look at my teeth but I'm led to think, yeah but you can get false teeth. And you can have a false life, just the same, but you ask yourself, when you have false teeth, don't you feel all the time, just a little bit, that those are not your teeth. What's more intimate than teeth?

And I look at my hair, and I'm led to think, yeah but when you dye it black it does not look like any colour hair could ever naturally be.

Is it any point being sad about living and dying?

***

If you accept that our universe is a 4D projection of a universe with many more dimensions, you might be tempted to ask what the "inside" universe really looks like.

But, maths aside, this is the only way it can look to us. I think so often of Wittgenstein's mesh: the picture we impose on the world to force it to make sense. Curious: we can write maths for six dimensions but we cannot visualise them.

But it nags at me that if you can represent those dimensions in maths, then you can "visualise" them, because what we are doing does not depend on which tool we use to do it with.

***

Are we doing the best we can? It doesn't seem like we can be, but if we are, we should be forgiven anything and everything.

I take it as axiomatic that you may not be hurt for your nature.

But I have been thinking a lot about how we forget that axioms are not based on principle, but are selected for diverse reasons, some of which we may not well understand.

Equity is axiomatic; and I choose it because it feels right to me that we should strive to be fair.

Love is axiomatic, I suppose. It is like worshipping a god to worship love. I suppose if I think about it, I can imagine that their god seems real to them in just the way love feels real to me.

I mean, you do understand that if you chose one axiom, you could as well choose another? I worry that I chose what would be comfortable, rather than choosing what was best.

Well, what does it matter? Whatever you choose, you are desined to die and be forgotten.

From 0 to the speed of light in a nanosecond

2011-10-10T18:20:00.000+10:00

So we learned recently that some neutrinos at CERN seem to have travelled faster than the speed of light and that's a bit alarming. We may have to rewrite Einstein's theories and so on.

Some things, in theory, can travel faster, but they cannot carry information, which the neutrinos in question certainly do.

A few explanations come readily to mind and the researchers who reported the results do favour one of them: that there is a systemic reason for the apparent speed of the particles. Note that it is not an explanation to say that they may be different particles, because that is equally impossible.

One problem in quantum physics that remains without a decent explanation is quantum entanglement. Basically, pairs of particles are "entangled" so that each has a quality that is a polar opposite to the other's. It's easiest to understand by saying that if one is spinning clockwise, the other must be spinning anticlockwise. (This is close enough to the truth for our purposes.) What you need to recognise here is that until measured, we cannot say which way each is spinning. It's possible to separate the particles and then measure the polarity of one. This immediately fixes the polarity of the other. It's as though one particle lets the other know what its state is.

My understanding is that string theory explains this by suggesting that the particles are connected in a way that is not apparent to us because there are many more physical dimensions than we can perceive. As far as I know, the belief is that there is a sense in which everything is in the same place at the same time.

Which is kind of cool.

Does it explain the neutrinos? Probably not. They probably just fucked up the measurements.

Could Einstein have been wrong? Well, on a macro scale, he's been shown to be right to a very precise degree. But at very small scales, it's proved to be very difficult to make quantum physics and relativity play nicely together. Scientists have worked for decades now on trying to unify the two theories. It's possible that one is "wrong". I say "wrong" because it may be that "incomplete" is the better word.

Personally, I doubt our current cosmology is even close to correct, and I have strong doubts that string theory really does describe reality. IDK enough maths to get to the truth of it, but as I've noted in previous posts, it must not be forgotten that mathematicians and physicists build models that they hope will coincide with reality, not descriptions of reality itself.

About Bayes

2011-09-29T12:32:00.000+10:00

A quick note for B on why Bayes' theorem is useful. Not going to talk about what the theorem actually is much or go deeply into the maths. Just a backgrounder so you get it.

Let's say there's a disease that 1% of the population has, and a test for that disease that is 90% accurate.

John is tested positive for the disease. Bad for John, right?

Well, think about this. Let's say we tested 10,000 people. We know that 100 of them have the disease and 9,900 do not.

The test will be positive for 90 of the people that have the disease and for 990 of those who do not. (If the test is 90% accurate, it will give a positive result for 9/10 of those who have the disease, but will also give a positive for 1/10 of those who don't.)

So of the positive results, 990/1,080 are false positives. That's 91%!

So John is only 9% likely to have the disease.

When I came to Australia, I had a test for HIV. Now let's say the figures are just as they are here: 1% infected, 90% accuracy in the test. Let's look at our 10,000 people again. Of the 100 that have the disease, 10 will return a false negative and of the 9,900 who do not, 8,910 will return a negative. So it's very likely I do not have HIV: 10/8920 = 1/10th of a percent.

Why do I think this applies to poker? Well, let's say that after ten hands, we have a guy who has raised three times. Let's simplify the world of poker to two types of players: tight and loose. The tight guys raise 10% of their hands and the loose guys raise 30% of their hands (the real poker world is not like this but we do have a priori knowledge of the types of players we are likely to encounter). It should be clear that the latter guys are 3x more likely to raise on any given hand. It's like this: if each player is dealt A7s, the first guy just folds, the second raises it (it's outside 10% but inside 30%). Each hand has an equal likelihood of being dealt.

I won't do the maths, but we can work out how likely it is that any given raise is from a loose player given our a priori knowledge of the game (if the players are split 50/50, it's 75% obviously), and we can work out how likely it is that over 10 hands the tight player will have picked up three hands from within the 10% (my learning of probability does not stretch to doing this but it's an easy bit of maths that I just didn't absorb). I actually posted this example previously but I can't remember what the post was. The outcome is that a player whose stats are 30/30 over 10 hands is much more likely to be a loose player than a tight player (in fact, very few players are as loose as 30/30 and the result is like the negative in the test, not the positive).

On gayness

2011-09-13T12:41:00.000+10:00

I don't have a great deal of time for evolutionary psychologists because although it's doubtless true that we became the way we are for certain reasons, EPers generally work from the reasons backwards. In other words, they pick something they want to be true about us and then figure out how its evolution helps us in our quest to reproduce.

I do not of course deny that our purpose, if we have one, is to reproduce. That's what we, and all living things, are all about. We live and die and attempt to pass our genes on. You really do have to look at human beings in that light because even if we want to believe we are "post-Darwinian", we are still animals and we are still in the business of passing on genes. Survival of the fittest does not mean that animals evolve to a peak of fitness in some absolute sense. It means that whoever best fits their environment at the time survives. Our environment can just as well contain people competing for power and resources, or whatever else we do, as a peacocks can contain peacocks competing to impress peahens with their tails.

Before I say any more, I want to make a couple of things clear. First, I do not believe biology is a measuring stick for judging people. If I were to conclude that we are "supposed" to compete for women so that we can have more children, that doesn't mean that I think more or less of those who are successful at it. That "supposed" is not a value judgement: it's simply a fact about biology. We do not have to bow the knee to all facts about biology! For instance, we may say that we have a tendency to aggression in one situation or another, which may have sound motivation in our genetic history, but that doesn't mean that nothing else plays a part in our reacting aggressively or not. Second, my position on homosexuality is pretty clear. I hold it because I have reasoned it to be correct, not I hope because of prejudice, and I would only change it if I were shown my reasoning was wrong, not because of an emotional appeal. It's as follows.

I personally do not feel there is anything wrong with being gay or lesbian. It doesn't bother me that people are. I don't feel like it is anything to me who someone fucks. I don't mind if gay men want to fuck me, any more than I care about anyone else wanting to who I am not interested in. Indeed, I'm just as flattered as I am when a woman wants to. Why wouldn't I be? However (you probably knew there was a however), I don't consider gay to be a separate cultural identity. I understand the desire to create ingroups and to have signs and signals of belonging, so I am not particularly critical of them, but I don't have to think it's particularly praiseworthy. I don't either believe gays are any more sensitive, artistic, good at talking to women etc etc than anyone else just because they're gay. It may be that they are more apt to become stronger in some of these areas because of different cultural pressures.

What I mean by that last thing is that it's very clear that in, say, English youth culture, boys are pushed into certain sorts of behaviour and understandings of the world. The pressure on us to be competitive, parochial, xenophobic (in terms of in- vs outgroup rather than a more narrower racism), conventional and misogynist are huge, and few, if any, of us ever escape being stuck with some of these things as part of our makeup. Gays are clearly outsiders, and have reasons to avoid some of these outcomes because they are aware that they are not like others. There's no particular reason this should be true: it's a cultural outcome and this is quite easily shown by looking at other cultures, for instance, that of the early Roman empire, where being gay did not necessarily entail taking on, or rejecting, a set of cultural baggage (in other words, men could be gay without feeling any need to "be gay").

It's also not really something to be "proud" of. Not being ashamed of something is not the same as having pride, and I've never really liked the whole "gay pride" idea, although of course I do support, very much so, the idea that gays should be visible and unashamed of their sexuality. It was somewhat patterned on black pride, but it's forgotten that black pride was a racist reaction to racism. Why say that? Well, black pride was all about saying "we're not inferior, look at all these ways we're superior to you". It helped, rather than hindered, the entrenchment of stereotypes and prejudice: that black and white are different and clear lines can be drawn between them. I find it hard to say how anyone can say that they are "proud" of something that is a genetic outcome. You think you were born gay, so what's to be proud of? It's like my being proud I have green eyes or that I'm tall. I suppose I strongly associate pride with merit and not with fortune.

However, homophobia needs to be understood in the same light as "being gay". Both are driven by the same desires: to find cohesion, to mark the ingroup. I think that when we are discussing equality we should remember that we are basing that discussion on principles that are not grounded in anything. It is axiomatic that we should have equity. We are willing to accept so much other unfairness that it's hard to argue that straights cannot, if they choose, discriminate against gays simply because they outnumber them. We may well feel it is unfair to punish someone for being born gay but is it any unfairer that we punish them for being born poor or in Afghanistan or unattractive? Our judgements of people are so often arbitrary that they resemble those of peacocks, and the outcomes of those judgements can be very inequitable. Ask yourself whether it's really fair that people are allowed such a very large chunk of our resources because they are cleverer than others, or even because they are given better environments in which to develop their cleverness. They are not all contributing more. My view is that people who work in sanitation are for more vital than lawyers and clearly if we were forced to choose to shoot all derivatives traders or all nurses, it wouldn't be a difficult decision.

From my point of view, the ideal would be that no one gave a shit about gayness: we would all just accept that we love whom we love, fuck whom we fuck. We'd all just hold hands and kumbaya: straights wouldn't feel gayness was a big deal and neither would gays.

So here's my thesis. What I think needs to be explained is this: why would human beings evolve a type of behaviour that on the face of it prevents the passing on of genes? This seems entirely counter to our "purpose". Being gay looks like an evolutionary dead end, which should have been evolved away, at first glance.

Well, we can ask ourselves whether there's a simple reason: we could look at bees, for instance. Some bees are not able to reproduce, but are supportive of other bees who share their genetic material, so that they are able to work to ensure the passage of their genes without passing them on themselves. You can even go as far as suggesting that even though they have separate bodies, bees are not separate organisms. One bee can be thought of as differing from another only as much as a liver cell differs from a heart cell. Just because one is bound into a larger framework and the other isn't is not a good reason for thinking they are qualitatively all that different.

But gays do not have this role in human society and I don't think you can make a good case that they ever have had. Gay men don't seem any more or less willing to support people who share their genes. While humans do show altruistic behaviour, I'm not aware that gays do more or less than straights do. And I'm sure that lesbian women are equally as caring and supportive as their straight counterparts, but I'm not aware that they are any more or less willing to support their genetic sisters than they are their nongenetic ones. I mean, the straight-out counter to this possibility is that we do not have large families.

Well, we do not now: we obviously had more children in the past. However, I do not know much about the evolution of human society but my understanding is that we likely evolved living in bands, in which children could be raised communally. So any tendency to altruism helps other people's genes as much as it does our own. Of course, those bands likely contained people we were somewhat related to, but it seems a stretch to suggest that that is the cause for gayness. Apart from anything else, there's no sign whatsoever that gayness and altruism are closely linked, or linked at all. Most of the characteristics of gayness that we can see are cultural: we cannot find a genetic basis for liking musical theatre. And humans in a band, even if that band contains kin, are not as closely related as bees in a hive.

Could we have evolved gayness as a way to keep the numbers down? I mean, you have to ask it but the answer seems to be obviously not. Humans' numbers were limited by environmental factors before they developed agriculture. Our circumstances, and hazard, prevented our numbers from rising too rapidly and we had plenty of world to expand into. I just can't see it, to be honest.

I think it's easier to understand gayness if you simply abandon one of the axioms of the modern liberal orthodoxy. That axiom is: some people are just born gay. Replace it with this one: men are born with a largely undifferentiated sexuality that becomes more specific because of environmental and cultural factors.

OMG, I must be a homophobe, right? I did just say you're not born that way.

How can what I said be true? Well, I think that evolution does not dictate that men should be selective. As in other animals, it's the females who choose. Peacocks will bang any willing female; peahens are looking for fit males. Selection is stereotyped in peacocks in a way that makes it very clear who does it and who doesn't. It's less clear in human beings because we conventionally assume that we choose each other, but there are plenty of other indicators. For instance, men can abscond and women find it harder. Women bear the children, after all. If I make you pregnant, I can disappear without ever seeing the kid's face, yet I still pass on my genes. You can't.

Most importantly, what harm does it do my reproductive chances if I fuck men? None, so long as I also fuck women. I make plenty of sperm. When within my best reproductive years, I could make enough sperm to impregnate a woman several times a day. I could have fucked people to the point of physical exhaustion without running out of sperm. Of course, I should typically be fucking women because, dur, they bear the kids, but here's the thing: evolving specificity is harder than simply evolving an undifferentiated sex drive. So long as I'm horny enough, it will work.

Did I just say men are like dogs? Yes, I did. I think a lot of our confusion about ourselves derives from not understanding that we are born with relatively undifferentiated sexuality (I'm not sure whether it's entirely undifferentiated or lies along a spectrum) and much of our cultural bias against homosexuality derives from our fear of our own sexuality.

So how do some men become gay? Well, Freud wasn't wrong about everything. Let's say small children are beings in the process of being socialised and in the process of figuring out how they interact with their environment. Part of what they learn is that certain drives within themselves can be satisfied by certain things in the outside world. It can be as simple as some things becoming hardwired in the juvenile brain. So if your mum satisfies your sexual drives when you are a toddler, you are predisposed to become straight. The massive cultural pressure to develop that way doesn't hurt.

Am I saying that straight men are mummy's boys who learned to love the feel of their head against soft tits and gay men hate their mums? Well, the first bit yes, the second bit not so much. I'm not a developmental psychologist so I don't know how it could work exactly. It's just a thesis.

Okay, but that leaves lesbians as a real puzzle. Women are selective. In the same way that a peahen is compelled to select its sexual partners, so are women. You generally choose who fathers your kids. We rarely produce kids by rape, and I doubt we ever did in our evolutionary history. This would be a seriously poor way for evolution to work, given that successfully rearing kids is not simply a matter of getting chicks knocked up. Men are not solitary, womanhunting rapists for good reasons. I won't rehearse them here because I think that the benefits of living together in something approaching harmony are quite clear. Apart from any other reason, women are not compelled to bear the products of rape, and even if men had been evolved to try to force random women to have children by raping them, we'd soon realise that it was a poor strategy when we realised that they could terminate pregnancies in some, if not all, cases. Not that rape isn't about sex. I have never bought into the pablum that rape is solely about power. Men are much easier to understand and conceptualise if you accept that they really do want sex a lot.

So why, if we are saying that we are products of evolution, would we have evolved lesbians? This is the most controversial part of my thesis. I think that it's fairly easy to accept that no one is born gay and we only say that to make fundamentalist Christians shut the fuck up about something's being a choice when it really isn't (even in my conception that I outline here, it's nothing you can choose to do or not do: the process is not within our control and it's not easily or perhaps even possibly reversible because the word "hardwired" is fairly important--you don't imagine you could reverse your ability to speak English! It would be possible, and people do in fact forget their native language when they spend a lot of time speaking another, but it's not something you can do by talking to a preacher). But it's another thing to say that no one is born lesbian and it is purely an environmental outcome. But I think it probably is. It's just so hard to see any good reason to evolve lesbianism. How can it possibly help a being produce offspring if it is biologically incapable of finding the other half of the genetic puzzle suitable as a partner?

I think it's fairly conclusive that while we can find plenty of animals who exhibit gay behaviour, we find very few that are lesbian.

Why would a woman become a lesbian? Ah, the cry of teen boys throughout history, I think! But seriously, one could imagine they do so because they are turned off men in one way or another, or in some cases because they want the cultural outcomes of male roles.

Did I just say that women are "turned lesbian" or they're just butch? No. I am saying I find it hard to think of any good reason for them to have evolved to be lesbians and would look for the reasons in their environment and culture, and those are two possibilities among many others.

What I doubt is that you will ever find a "gay gene" or even that gays and lesbians share patterns of genes that indicate gayness. I don't just doubt it; I'll flat out say that you never will. I think that all men are born gay and no women are, and our environments shift us one way or the other; possibly, that process is sufficiently complex and individualised that we will never understand it. There are outside reasons to believe it: sexual tastes vary, and they vary in ways that you can readily ascribe to environmental causes. You get turned on by being suffocated? Were you suffocated as a child, perhaps? You like your balls to be tickled? Perhaps the nappy's tickle as it went on turned you on?

Well, take it or leave it. I'm not married to it. Feel free to prove me wrong. But you can't because it's true: all men are born gay and no women are.

Remembrance

2011-09-13T08:55:00.000+10:00

In our family, everyone knows that we had a great-granddad who was killed in the Great War. He was a pacifist, a conscientious objector, who refused to fight, and was given the role of holding the horses (which I presume means he was in the artillery).

I do not know his name, but something of him resides in me.

Every year, Australians march up and down, expressing their national pride at their soldiers. They are particularly proud at how they died in their masses at Gallipoli.

Gallipoli, in case you are unaware, was a senseless manoeuvre in a pointless grinding slaughter occasioned by imperial powers who could not, would not find a way to coexist. The Great War is comparable in many ways to the Civil War that ended the Roman republic, except that the footsoldiers in that war stood to be rewarded with money and land. My great-granddad got nothing but the King's shilling.

I do not care at all for national remembrances. They are generally more about feeling good about ourselves and what we're doing today. People tell you, we must never forget, and then you ask them, well name five people who were involved. And they've forgotten.

People should matter more. We are not nations. We are sons, fathers, daughters, mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, webs of relationships that make a world that is fundamentally, always and forever, together. Love is the binding for those webs. F the haters. We don't need to ceremonialise the pain they cause. Remember to love each other, that's enough.

Approaching whatever

2011-09-12T20:14:00.000+10:00

So the other day I am in the pharmacy and the chick says, when you are over 45 you need to get an endoscopy if you have heartburn twice or more a week and I'm like, you cheeky cunt, but I guess I have started to look worn down.

When you are approaching 45, all you really want is to do your life over, because now you know. It would have been cool if at 15, 16 there had been someone in my life who knew but there wasn't so that's that. And I am hoping that when you are going down the other side of the hill, you realise that you can just live the life you have and it's okay. Really, all I need is paid work and I think I will do that okay. Of course I still wish and hope that ex-Mrs Zen will wake up one morning and think, oh fuck I really didn't do the right thing by him, but if she hasn't figured that out by now, well I guess she isn't going to, right?

I have an interview with Centrelink tomorrow and you'd think the whole thing was easy. You just apply for five nonsense jobs and there you go. But the problem is, it's wrong to do cheat like that and I find doing the wrong thing awesomely hard. I can lie if I can convince myself it's the right thing to do but I can't make myself do wrong.

Don't ask me whether that's a virtue or a vice.

The thing is, I ran out of work in sort of a hurry and I didn't have any advance notice because the people I work for simply didn't care at all about me and tbh would never even have told me it was over if they could have got away with it. The woman I mostly worked for has actually ignored all my emails. Don't ask me what goes on in the head of someone like that because I don't know. It seems entirely dishonourable, but she's Chinese so maybe she sees it differently.

Anyway, it knocked me for six. It just didn't seem fair that I should be so fucked. I know I'm smart and capable and it seems to me that it should all have worked out for me. I did the right thing. I came here for the sake of my family and I made sacrifices that went completely unheralded. I have been useless for three or four months because I am just shellshocked. I need to snap out of that but I think it's going to take a job to help me out of the crater.

I was telling B today that what I had wanted when I was younger was to work in a bookshop. I would have been really good at it. I'm the sort of person who if you told me you liked a certain sort of book, I'd find that book.

But the world doesn't have any use for that, or it seems for anything I'm capable of doing.

Except that B has a use for me. She wants me to love her. She doesn't want me to transform into a being I can't ever be. She wants something at least close to who I am. I say close, I mean on the same continent. But that's better than wanting someone from a whole other planet, like ex-Mrs Zen did.

***

So today someone rearended me. I wouldn't have had anything to say about it if it hadn't been a bit weird. I am on Mt Gravatt-Capalaba Road, driving towards Garden City, and there are roadworks. So I've slowed to 40 and the car in front is a ways in front. The traffic is spaced out because it's just after rush hour. I see that car in front has braked so I brake. I'm at about 20 with my foot off the brake when I realise the guy in front has actually slowed to a stop.

WTF.

He is letting someone in. It doesn't really make any sense to do it because the traffic is not heavy but whatever. I slow to a stop too, not too abruptly, and bang, a ute has run into the back of me.

So the guy is saying, you guys must have braked suddenly and I'm thinking, but I don't say, no not really. Later it occurs to me what has happened and how unlucky the guy has been.

So I think he has been talking to his missus. They've just returned from holiday so they're relaxed and easy. He turns to talk to her, something I never do because I have focus issues and force myself to concentrate with loud music and willpower. So he looks at me, I'm going 40; turns to look at her, turns back, has missed my first spell of braking and thinks I'm still doing 40; turns to her and turns back, bang. I am not where he imagined I would be on the road. I mean, who the fuck stops to let someone out in light traffic? He could never have expected that. I know I didn't. But I watch the road, the car in front, all the time, so I knew what the idiot was doing.

So there it is, another car wrecked. I hope it can get fixed. This guy's insurance company does not take care of it. They want quotes and pictures. No assessor. I just tell them it will cost X and they look at the pictures and go hmmm, maybe. At least the car was driveableish so I could get it home without a tow.

Is it a metaphor for life? I did nothing wrong. I was by the book and beyond: taking care and concentrating. He wasn't but it costs him nothing. It's a company car, his dad owns the company, it won't cost him a cent and his car wasn't damaged much. I ended up dazed, nauseous and dizzy and my beloved car may or may not be a writeoff (I'm hoping not obv.).

Yep. Sounds familiar. Sigh.

Our love stories

2011-08-25T19:44:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I feel like saying to the people in my life, you were supposed to love me. And then I remember that that's what they thought they were doing. But can you feel that if someone is adamant you didn't?

Sometimes Naughtyman comes up and wordlessly hugs my arm. He didn't do that a year ago. I've shown him love and now he wants to show me love. I don't even know what changed or how I changed it. That's what I know about love.

And of course you don't want it to be true because it makes you feel so much less valuable but loving someone is all about yourself, not about them. How many times have I written that and I still hold out hope that it's not true? How many times have I reflected on how much harder it is to be the beloved than the lover? Love is easy. Being worthy of it is not.

Well, what would any of you know about worth? You all believe you're worthwhile and don't have a monkey in your head constantly informing you that you're not.

No, I don't either. I fixed that. Now I know it's really me who thinks I'm shit. And spare me your nod of agreement or shake of the head. Like I GAF what you think anyway. I've always trusted myself more than I trust anyone else, and given how deeply untrustworthy I am, that's not a compliment.

What's the point of crying over it anyway? Most people deal with it by just lying to themselves. Fuck my soul that I should be condemned to be an artist and always have to face the truth because God knows I could do with some convenient lies just now. And not even a good one. Fuck that. I remain heartsick that I couldn't have even one thing I'm actually good at except failing.

How we may misunderstand everything

2011-08-18T12:04:00.000+10:00

One of the themes of science of the past few centuries has been the gradual diminishment of man. It's one of the products of reason, simply because the overstatement of man's position in the universe was an outcome of not understanding the world, and filling in the gaps with magic.

In many ways, that diminishment has been a story of making a world we felt was real more abstract. When the sun was something a god drove across the sky, it seemed close enough to touch, definitely something that was familiar and comfortable. Because the universe was smaller, our deeds also seemed bigger. It was credible that our gods should care about us: we were just as much the centre of their world as they were of ours.

But it's hard to believe you're special when you are just another ape on just another planet circling just another small star in just another small galaxy, just like the billions of others like it.

***

In my post on consciousness, I discussed a couple of ideas that I am going to expand on here. The first is that what we take to be thinking is just the chatter of our brains' activity. The second is that how we look at things can mislead us about what we're looking at and, importantly, what information the things we look at contain.

It's interesting how often humans think they have a hard question because they simply ask the wrong question. Look at the "debt crisis" in the States. It looks like a hard question: how should taxation and spending be balanced? But it's the wrong question. The question is, why is everyone pretending that money has value? It does not (it's easy to prove so take my word for it): it's a placeholder for value.

Anyway, when we think about human consciousness, we ask ourselves, why are we self-aware and dogs aren't? We assume that they aren't because they can't communicate self-awareness to us (and do not seem to be self-aware when faced with the kind of test that would show we are). But here's the thing. What if the question is not how are we different from dogs but in what ways are we the same? We know we evolved from a common ancestor, and generally we ask ourselves at what point we evolved into something different. We even have a word for it: sentient.

But it seems to me we do not have different brains from dogs in kind, merely in degree. Dogs' brains have electrical activity, and one must assume the corresponding chatter. I'm not saying that would be like human thought but I am saying it would be similar enough that we can say dogs "think".

Is it that they "think" appropriately and we somehow need more intelligence and awareness than they do? I really don't think so. I believe our "intelligence" to be entirely incidental, and I believe it does nothing. I believe your body, including your brain, does what it does, and you just think you're doing something with it. Dogs are spared that illusion, possibly, because their chatter is less complex. (This is not the same thing as saying they are as intelligent as we are: they are clearly not, given that "intelligence" is defined in terms of our abilities, rather than in terms of anything more objective. It's rather saying that our brains are more powerful, which makes what seems like greater intelligence emerge.)

Aside: when I ask people why humans domesticated dogs, they'll say, because they are affectionate and good companions. But of course that is not why we domesticated them, even if it's why we now keep them. Our ancestors lived in marginal environments. They could not carry pets. (It seems a very human answer to me though. We choose the concept that makes our taking on pets quite noble: we domesticated dogs because they made an emotional appeal to us.)

We domesticated dogs for their sense of smell. They can find prey that is very distant. We must have noticed dogs hunting, and realised how effective they are. Who knows though? It may be that we should say that dogs domesticated us. Dogs are smart, so who's to say they did not realise that living with us, eating our food every day, would be far superior to having to run after prey all day and only eating every once in a while?

Regardless, I don't think there's any reason to believe that dogs do not have an appearance to themselves of being real, even though it must be different from ours. We know their cognitive activity is not on the same level as ours (and consequently their culture and politics seem simplistic to us -- arguably, almost certainly I think, they are just as complex as they need to be: evolution is a chisel not a sledgehammer).

Of course, it's not a comfort to us to think our way into being barely more "special" than dogs. I remember that it would upset Bella a lot when I would say that we were a type of ape, no more, no less. That it's true didn't enter into it for her. Like most religious types, she admitted different types of truth and focused on just not thinking about it a lot. Personally, I find it hard to want to be ignorant of anything but of course I recognise that the compulsion to educate myself is no more valid or decent in me than the desire to find spiritual comfort in a bleak world is in her. We were just constituted a bit differently, and I didn't despise her for it.

Still, I do think I can offer comfort, because while you do not exist, God (or a god, if you like) might. I know, small comfort indeed should there be a creator but no soul for him to have created, but you have to take what you can get.

***

The key element in my concept of consciousness is that we misinterpret something that is real. Our brains chatter and crosstalk all the time, and that chatter clearly contains information about what our brains are doing. If this neuron and this fire, it means something. Our science is not sufficiently sophisticated for us to be able to discern what the information is precisely (although of course we have some idea because we know which areas of the brain control which activities, although some things remain very uncertain to the point that we cannot be sure they actually do occur in the brain at all). This is quite beside the point though, because what we are saying is that we misinterpret brain noise as thinking because of how our brain represents it to itself. (Indeed, a perceptive reader will know that I cheated a little bit, because waves do of course sound different in different settings, and you could tell quite a lot from them were you skilled at it. Furthermore, you could certainly write software that could extract some information about the wave from its noise. My contention remains though that you could not extract all information from it because much would have been swamped. A good but not exact analogy would be a large choir. It would be very hard, were you to analyse a large choir's singing, to analyse each person's contribution. Is Jim a smidgen flat? Well, we can find output at frequencies that are a bit off, but we don't know that it's Jim because he is not distinctive enough. In a quartet, you surely could pick out Jim though, so it is likely going to be possible to retrieve information from the brains of, say, ants, which exhibit less chatter.)

The universe is or seems to be real. I think that a rationalist has to accept its reality as axiomatic. It's not impossible that the world is a purely mental construct, or that we are all just subroutines in a big piece of code, but we cannot readily ascertain that. It is certainly an axiom of physics that the world is real.

When we were less advanced, our primary tool for observing our world was our vision. We looked at the world and reported to ourselves what we saw. We were mostly wrong because our vision is not on the whole well adapted to interpreting the macro world, but is fit for the purpose it primarily has: it helps us in the two major tasks that face all animals--getting food and getting laid.

We did not in fact use our minds, as you might think. Metaphysics is not on the whole a means of interpreting the apparent information in the world. Here's what I mean. Say you have a creek in your yard. You might wonder where it flows from. Now, if you take some of its water, examine its mineral content and look at the microorganisms it contains, you might be able to draw conclusions. That would be scientific; importantly, the answer you received would in a real sense be more correct than other possible answers, even if you could not fairly judge its correctness (in other words, you could not know that you had the right source but you could know you had the right type of source). But if you simply speculated on where it came from, even if you used some concepts that were themselves based in knowledge provided by science (such as that it must have come from ground higher than your yard), you would not be using the available information, and the answer you arrived at would in a real sense be equally as correct (or wrong) as any other plausible answer.

So metaphysics is a lot of fun, but it's not at all connected with the real world, because nothing that does not interact with the information that the world exhibits can be.

As our understanding shifted though, we became unable to discern facts about the universe with vision, even if we augmented the vision. First, we needed tools to help us understand what we were seeing. Second, we investigated things that were more abstract, so were beyond perception to a large extent.

Our chief tool is mathematics. Much of our theory of how the world is is formulated entirely in mathematics. We describe things that not only have we not seen but that we could never see (even allowing for sufficient magnification).

But maths is not real and much of our "physics" is no more than metaphysics. Of course, scientists will argue that their mathematical constructs are shown to be real when experiments concur with their observations but I'm going to explain briefly why you can consider this untrue.

We're familiar with the concept of garbage in, garbage out in computing. Computers can't make good output out of bad input, regardless how well programmed they are. Well, our experiments are maths in, maths out. We ask them questions in maths, and the answer comes back as maths. If it concurs with our theory's prediction, we say the theory is confirmed.

But I want you to consider this notion: say you went fishing with a net that had holes an inch across. When you return to shore, you hand your catch to a scientist. If he didn't keep in mind that other nets were possible, and convinced himself that only this way of finding and categorising fish existed, he would have to conclude that the world does not contain fish smaller than an inch across.

The reasons I have concluded that maths is not real are simple (maybe silly, I don't know) but they are products of deduction. Here is one. Pi is a very precise number. It's not built from other numbers, but exists on its own. You cannot, as far as I know, deduce it from other numbers. But there are, as we're so often told, no perfect circles in nature. So if pi is a relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle, we can readily see that it does not exist in nature. But pi is not only that relationship, right? Right. But in other places that we use pi, we define outcomes in terms of it, so that they are equally as idealised as circles.

Another reason is to be found in Goedel's theorem. I'm going to state my view briefly and if you want to know what Goedel actually said, you'll have to find further information. In effect, the universe is complete. It contains everything and nothing is missing. Yet our understanding is that mathematics cannot be complete. It cannot describe everything correctly (Goedel says that there must be truths that it cannot express, in fact).

I deduce from these ideas (the route is tortuous and you can be thankful I am not going to ramble along it) that mathematics is constructed by humans, rather than discovered by them. Not everyone agrees. There are theories that the universe is mathematical, so we simply uncover what is there. However, I take Einstein's view:

as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality

which I think is common. We were taught in our very first lesson in physics that physics creates a model that approximates to reality, rather than describes reality, and it seems to me that physics is the child of mathematics. Maths is a system that follows from axioms, but those axioms are chosen by humans. They are not arbitrary (for instance, five is the number of five things -- the things are real and there really are five of them) but they are products of human ingenuity, rather than things that have an exterior existence. When our maths works, the outcomes look like the way the world is.

But although we do forget this, that "looks like" means "looks that way to us". In precisely the same way that the chatter of our brains looks to us like thought, the workings of the universe look to us like something that can be manipulated in mathematics.

So the question asks itself: if what we perceive is just the "chatter" of a universe, which we misrepresent to ourselves with mathematics so that, just as in the noise of the wave that we previously discussed, we see information that is an artefact of our looking, rather than something that is part of the thing we're looking at, what information might the universe really contain?

I do not know. I do know though that this conception of the universe permits us to believe that science cannot be used to disprove God. It seems clear to me that God could be manifesting himself in the universe but the "noise" has swamped that manifestation, and our means of looking are so ill fitted to the task that we cannot see it for what it is.

I do not of course believe that. Just because we may be wrong about what we are looking at does not mean we are looking at a particular thing. But I do feel that it's wrong to be dogmatic simply because our techniques work well, particularly because humans are so often wrong, and sometimes wrongest when they think they're rightest.

Taxing ideas

2011-08-17T15:23:00.000+10:00

Before I prove that God can exist, a quick word on tax havens.

We all know they're a bad thing. They allow corporations and the rich to avoid paying their share and have no real beneficial purpose. But you can't help other people's tax laws, right?

Wrong. The solution to tax havens is very simple. No company registered in a tax haven can do business in the US, nor can any company owned by one or even a sister of one. End of tax havens. Also, you want to live in our countries, that we build and maintain, you can pay taxes. No escaping because of residence requirements. We simply tax you pro rata for every day you're here. If you own a house, we tax that. If you own two, we tax them both, the second one double, because we don't have enough houses to go round. If you own three, we just shoot you (only kidding!).

Currently, the clowns who pass as representatives of the people in the States are trying to get passed a measure that will allow companies to repatriate profits from overseas at a reduced rate of tax (the Republicans want 5% afaik and the Dems a smidge more).

This is obviously a terrible idea at a time when everyone's pretending the money's run out (even allowing for the truth that there is no crisis and obviously no lack of money, given that money is points, not prizes). Obviously, it works for businesses: outsource our jobs, then make obscene profits flogging your shit to the people you outsourced our jobs to. But it's hard to see what the benefits of that are for us. We keep hearing that if we don't tax corporations, they will have more money that they will use to give us all great jobs.

But look, there are 10% out of work in the States, so it must be obvious to anyone but the slowest that that's thorough bullshit, and anyway, it's easy to grasp that companies create jobs to meet demand, not because they feel happy because they have lots of money. It's also, sadly, easy for the right to muddy the water because individuals tend to be generous when they have extra money, so companies can be painted as creating jobs as acts of charity, rather than as a way to make even more money. Companies are not people though, whatever the Supreme Court says, and, although they could be, they are not constituted as vehicles for us all to have work but as big money machines.

The sound of waves

2011-08-15T16:08:00.000+10:00

I planned to write an uber post about consciousness but first I started rambling about minds and decided to write an outline instead of the enormous thing the ramble was turning into. Problem is, the outline became another huge ramble! It's out of control and obviously no one will read either, but here they are anyway.

About minds

1. By temperament I am a rationalist, by which I mean I will tend to believe in the products of reason and to dismiss magical explanations. A magical explanation, in the sense I intend, is one that appeals to special knowledge of the world, not available to empirical investigation. Using "see" in a broad sense, magical explanations suggest that the world can be explained by means that cannot be seen. I suppose that makes me something of a verificatonist too, because I would also say that rational explanations can be shared with anyone who has the means of verifying them, whereas magical explanations are only available to those who agree on the magic as an axiom.

Note by the way that I am not saying that explanations are good so long as they are outcomes of your personal experience. I'm not saying that if you can see it, I will believe it. I mean that you have to be able to explain how I could see it too, and then when I pursue your method, I must see what you claim I will.

2. Why introduce a discussion of a concept of human consciousness by talking about rationality vs magic? Surely that's more appropriate to a discussion of, say, the existence of God. Clearly, God is a magical explanation (and now that we understand the composition of the world somewhat, a less and less appealing one, to the extent that it would be surprising if the Christian god survived another century). What isn't so clear is that human "being" is also often explained magically.

3. The thing being explained is what that being is and what it does. I'm going to use "being" here to mean your consciousness, your ego if you like, the thing that seems to be you. Even if we abandon human exceptionalism (and we should, generally) and agree that we are just another kind of ape, it seems clear that we are not quite like other apes, or other animals of all kinds, because we seem to be able to think and consequently direct ourselves to do things. (I am not sure I'm going to be able to demonstrate that this is untrue but I do think it necessarily follows from the explanation I have for human being.)

4. One approach to understanding human being is to say that we have bodies and we have minds. We might then disagree over how distinct bodies are from minds. Some will be dualists, who believe that we have entirely distinct minds that control our bodies: it's important to understand that a dualist is saying that a human mind is a separate substance from a human body--minds are purely mental, bodies are purely physical (and even milder dualisms are only quibbling over the word "purely"). In this understanding, we have no idea what a mind is or how it is able to interact with the physical body.

5. In my view, dualism is a magical explanation. There is no way of perceiving a mind. You may say that you can see outcomes of its actions, and that those actions in some ways define the qualities of the mind. Again, think about God. You may say you can see the outcome of his creating the world and that says something about how he is. But all it says is that he is the kind of being who would create a world like ours and not some other kind of being. So all you are saying about a mind is that it is the kind of thing that would make your body do what it does.

6. Most dualists will say that the mind is obviously within the brain (we do not know of any minds that exist without brains, after all, and if we remove someone's brain, we know their mind also goes away--although it's perfectly conceivable that the mind continues to exist but no longer has the means of making itself apparent). So dualism can shade into physicalism as one moves from believing that the mind is of a different substance from the brain, which it interacts with in a way we cannot recognise, to believing that it is something within the brain that can interact with it physically. However, this seems to be still a magical explanation, although it needs some thought for that to become obvious.

7. Science is a great tool for substituting rationality for magic. We know, for instance, that thunder is not caused by an angry god because we understand how it is caused by charged particles in rainclouds. So science can dispel the notion of a central mind. How? Well, we can wire up your brain so that we can see where there is electrical activity. If you look at a picture, this part and this part lights up; if you move your leg, that part and that part. A problem is immediately apparent. There is no part that always lights up whatever you do, and were there a central mind, there would be.

I had more but that's probably enough to set the scene for the rest of it.

***

A concept of consciousness

1. There is no such thing as a person. I have discussed this previously. Briefly, I subscribe roughly to Susan Blackmore's idea that the person is concocted by the brain moment to moment and only seems to be continuous. This essay is an excellent introduction to Blackmore's thought (apologies for having to use Google cache; seems her site is down.) I particularly endorse her very closely argued view that we do not have a rich internal picture of the world. When I "remember" scenes from my past, the memory is vague and impressionistic. It does not "look like" what I see when I look at things. It's just a bit like it. I'll revisit this.

2. There is no such thing as a mind. This is a magical belief that we hold to try to explain why we seem to be conscious. It can't be found in the brain when we measure the electrical activity that corresponds to things the brain is doing because although different areas of the brain light up when we do different things, there is no single part of the brain that always lights up and there should be if the mind is seated in the physical brain. What we do see is that conscious activity echoes electrical activity (some experiments have, rather alarmingly, found that some things we take to be controlled by our "minds" occur earlier than the corresponding control--this is the experimental basis for my belief that we do not exist, and I believe that any theory that we do exist must successfully explain it). Things that cannot be found in the physical world are by definition magical, and it's a feature of magical explanations that they are circular. Here's an example. You may believe thunder is created by an angry god. But if you do, you must claim that the angry god is simply invisible, and the way we know he exists is that there is thunder. Here's another: we can ask why there is a universe. One explanation is God created it. What reason do we have to believe there is a God? Well, there's this universe... So the cause of the effect we are attempting to explain is not visible, measurable or verifiable, and the only evidence of its even existing is the effect we are attempting to explain. It's clear to see that "God" is as magical an explanation as an angry thunder god--he is just used to explain more. However, although I prefer rational explanations, I am going to allow that magical explanations may turn out to be true, simply because the way that they operate is not known to us. Magic simply becomes less and less probable the more completely a rational explanation describes the effect we are looking at. So angry thunder gods probably don't exist because we understand so well how thunder happens. (If you know any philosophy of science, you recognise that I am invoking Occam's razor while making explicit that it is an aid in deciding between explanations, rather than axiomatic.)

3. If we do not have a mind, what is doing all the thinking? Well, nothing. I've always said that the thinking is just like echoes in a well. A stone is thrown into the water, and the echoes are the outcome. They are shaped by the shape and size of the well and the shape and size of the stone.

4. But what is "hearing" the echoes? Nothing. Stones make echoes whether you hear them or not. Wait though. Surely there are no echoes if no one hears them? Wrong. To make this clear, I am going to define noise and sound as different things. A noise is made when something makes air molecules move. A sound occurs when something captures that movement of air and makes it amenable to interpretation. So trees falling in forests always make noises, but they do not always make sounds (this is not a technical discussion of that question but it does correctly, if not wholly, answer it--of course trees always move the air, but that movement is not always captured).

5. The difference between a noise and a sound is key. Noises in nature tend to be very rich: they contain frequencies across a broad range. However, not only do we tend to experience them as reasonably simple sounds, we also "ignore" differences in detail between noises we interpret as making the same sound. What I'm saying is, we are more likely to say thunder is just thunder than we are to say that there are different types of thunder. It just is true that we only distinguish noises in as far as it's useful to us.

6. Let's take a noise that is very rich, yet we represent it to ourselves as very simple: the crash of a wave. The noise of a wave's crashing is close to white noise: it includes many frequencies. But we hear it as quite a simple sound. It doesn't seem to have much structure at any given point (although we hear it change as it progresses--a crack, a roll, some hiss). Note at this point how simply we describe this rich noise: crash. We can evoke it with one word! And when I say "crash" to you in the context of waves, although you may well "hear" a different sound from the one I do, the difference is entirely unimportant (without going all Wittgenstein on you, when you say you have a beetle in your box, it's immaterial what the beetle in your box actually looks like because when you say "beetle" I use my beetle as a proxy for yours).

7. The noise of the wave contains information (at least I believe it does but I'm not by any means an expert in acoustics--I'm going to ask you to accept that it contains the information I say it does at most because it doesn't matter to my discussion if it has less). It says what volume of water the wave contained and what the shore it broke on consisted of. This information would be hard to interpret and is not available to us within the sound (if it was useful to us, I daresay that would not be true--our senses diminish or increase the natural world to fit the use we make of the information within it).

8. Let's say we were to digitise the noise of the wave: to write it out so that it was fully described in numbers. Here's the key to understanding what I'm going to say: the sound of a wave and the digitisation of a wave are two different representations of the noise the wave makes. Neither is the same as the noise but neither is different.

As an aside, think again about the tree in the forest. Let's say that a mad professor taperecorded the tree's fall, then transcribed the noise it made into a code that faithfully but esoterically represented it, put the code into a sequencer that made it into music, then handed the music to an interpretive dance troupe, which interpeted it into dance. The troupe performs the dance and you watch it on TV, with the sound turned down. Are you hearing the sound of the tree? If you don't think so, why not? How exactly is this process different from air molecules striking your eardrum, making it vibrate and those vibrations being transferred through bones to nerves that carry electrical pulses to a part of your brain that interprets them as a sound?

Note that no matter how the noise of the tree's falling is conveyed to us, it only exists because of the tree's falling. Even if we had some means of faking the tree fall noise, it would still depend on some tree's falling. I don't want to get bogged down in philosophical bullshit here, but the point is simply that when there is a sound of a thing, there is a thing making the noise at some point.

9. Say you looked at the digitisation of the wave and saw patterns in it, but those patterns were purely the outcome of your interpretation and did not correspond with the information the noise of the wave actually conveys. The patterns seem to convey information but they do not. They are artefacts of the representation of the noise of the wave. Like the sound of the wave, they exist because the wave exists. Even if they are not part of the information that the wave conveys, they are still outcomes of the wave's conveying the information that it conveys.

We are saying, if it's not clear, that the patterns are something you may or may not see but if you do, they are entirely artefacts of how you are looking. Particularly, we are saying that they are artefacts of using your interpretation of the numbers that you used to represent the noise. Whether numbers are real is an interesting question in itself (my next post will concern this question because in the process of figuring out what consciousness is, I inadvertently solved the universe, but typical of a humanist, I'm still doing human being first), and I tend to feel that they are something we use as a lens to view the world through, rather than part of the world itself, but that's less important than recognising that the patterns we would see in them are to do with how we look at the numbers. Although the noise contains information, which our representation captures, we are suggesting that what we see in it does not reflect that information.

The reason is that the noise is too rich. As it approaches white noise, there is just too much of it and that swamps the information it contains. It should go without saying that if a noise becomes sufficiently rich, it can no longer contain information.

10. We are not saying that if we change how we represent the noise, we will be able to uncover information. The reason that white noise cannot contain information that we can extract is that it happens all at the same time and the information is swamped. Even though a representation in figures is not bound in time, so we can look at any part of the numbers at any time, there is just too much information. However, the wave's noise is not white; it is merely very rich. This means that because it is not completely saturated, it can appear to contain information (even though the information that it does contain has in fact been swamped).

11. The point of this is to say that first we would not hear information in the sound of the wave, because we simply discard richness when we process the noise and second if we represented the noise differently we might then interpret it as having other information it does not in fact contain.

What does this have to do with human being?

12. What I've said about waves will be true of anything that makes sufficient noise to mask the information that it contains. How much masking the information will need depends on how apt we are to recognise it. The chatter of neurons in your brain creates a type of noise. We are almost entirely incapable of interpreting that noise and even if we were able to trace all the electrical activity in a brain accurately, we would not be able to figure out what it was actually doing.

If you have followed this ramble, you realise that what I am saying is that you are nothing more than the chatter of the electric activity in your brain, which simply does what it does without your input, which somehow is reflected back to your brain, represented to it as a different kind of process. Just as the patterns we might see in digitised wave noise are not "really" there, our thoughts are also not "really" there. They are simply artefacts of how the chatter represents itself in our brains.

The chatter is noise. When we monitor it, we discard the information it actually does contain, and reinterpret it as containing information it does not. So as I type this piece, my brain is shifting messages at huge speed, controlling my fingers and making them say what it wants. I cannot even begin to understand the process that makes that happen. My brain is making it explicit to itself but it is too rich to represent faithfully. Instead, it reflects it much more simply, representing it as the equivalent of a sound to its noise--thoughts instead of the very complex mechanical processes that are actually occurring.

Boom! I just made you cease to exist. I have removed you from the universe of discourse. Don't worry though. In my next post, I'm going to give you the possibility of God.

Millions

2011-08-04T18:03:00.000+10:00

I have been thinking for weeks, maybe even months about reposting this because I think it's gold. People hardly ever think what I write is any good (or never think it's worth telling me they do) but sometimes I do, and I think I'm a good judge.

It's kind of a pity it didn't move the person I wrote it about but at least that taught me not to keep on believing I was actually any good at it.

***

Sometimes I feel like I could believe in your god, because they say he is the love we feel for each other, and I know that it is something elemental and real, which often seems to come from outside us, yet flows through us, yet is bigger than us, so much bigger that we can seem lost at sea, on the point of drowning. But I feel that you can never truly die so long as you have love, that you will be buoyed up just enough.

Sometimes it seems big enough to make everything else small enough that it can be overcome.

Man, how did I become stuck only able to express myself in words, and they are so insufficient. But what can you do in the face of something ineffable, intangible, yet powerful enough that you can be humbled by it?

Do you feel like that? I remember when I saw you, I felt like it made sense in a way that I could not possibly explain, yet if I ever could, I could wrap it up and sell it for millions. And of course I wouldn't; I couldn't. Because if I ever could, I would only want to give it to you for nothing.

And it cannot be your god, because it is not huge and untouchable. It is something tiny and precious, so little and fragile, I snatch it up and hold it tight, so tight in my hand, my fist clenched, afraid that if I open it, it will be gone, that I will open my hand and you really will have flown.

But there is part of me that never lies, a small part, deeper than anything else, and sometimes when it is still at night, when it is cold and I feel like nothing can warm me, it warms me. I know you cannot understand what I am saying and it feels like you dare not, but I cannot write the words it says because they are not in a language I understand, but strange and incomprehensible as it is, I am compelled to try to listen and I will die wondering whether I ever really knew. And I ask myself, does she have a place in her too that sings for me or am I just imagining a world in which I am more than nothing at all? And I won't let go from fear that that world is only something some corner of me has spun from the emptiness that would otherwise engulf me.

Useless

2011-08-04T17:54:00.000+10:00

Nothing I do works. Recently, I had a routine inspection by my landlords' agents. It's the first I've ever had, so I was quite anxious. I cleaned the house very thoroughly and bullied the kids for days not to mess it up. So the inspection happened and it was just some guy, no big deal.

Then at the weekend, on short notice, the landlords themselves came round and fixed a couple of things. They were quite friendly and didn't say anything about the house, except to ignore, as they have done previously, anything I said about what needed to be fixed.

So today I get a snotty letter from the agents, saying blah blah, the house wasn't clean, hire cleaners if you can't keep it up, if it isn't clean it might get damaged blah blah.

I might just as well not have bothered cleaning it in the first place. Nothing I do is ever good enough for anyone. It's like somehow everyone decided I must meet higher standards than anyone else for reasons that are entirely obscure to me.

I have been feeling very down. I know I need to restart the tryptophan because I dropped it when I was feeling well and now I can see the signs that things are not right with me. I think I am overinterpreting, which is a bad sign. I do this by taking small bad things and assuming they are symptoms of a bigger bad, and somewhat overreacting to the bad that I perceive but isn't necessarily there.

Not that bad isn't there. I had yet another job thing I didn't get for really bad reasons. I had to do an editing test and it was way too arbitrary. You could not tell whether someone was a good or bad editor by using it because it involved getting close to the hirer's idea of right, rather than what is objectively right. Clearly I didn't do that well enough and ended up on a reserve list, which is no use to me.

It really sucks because I am truly an excellent editor and I haven't really met that many better. I am not very good at editing but that's a different story: it just didn't make sense to choose it as a profession when I can't focus and get easily distracted.

At least they wrote back to me. Nothing makes me sadder than people I have worked for for years not even bothering to reply to my emails or people who sound positive about jobs who never write to me or reply to my emails either.

I am sick of being insignificant.

I have to go to my "job provider" or whatever the fuck they call it next week, to take part in an "intensive activity". It won't get me a job, obviously. It's not intended to. It's just a way for the government to look like it cares whether I have a job without actually doing anything to create jobs. I feel like saying to them, look, this is a waste of your and my time. I am not going to get a menial job because no one would hire me for it. I'm clearly an intellectual type who would get bored stacking shelves so what's the point of that? I will get a job doing what I do eventually, probably. Nothing the "job provider" does will make that happen any sooner because they have no more idea how I can get employed than I do.

Maybe I will discuss with them the concept of NAIRU, which the Australian government has as an article of faith. This is the notion that if unemployment falls below a certain figure, inflation will inevitably rise. Briefly, the idea is that if labour is tight, workers can bargain their wages up, which creates inflation (it's certainly true that wage rises can cause inflation but the relationship is not strictly causal). So the government purposely keeps 5% of the population out of work. In fact, it describes 5% unemployment as full employment. (It isn't. Full employment is about 2% unemployment: that 2% is between jobs, purposely out of work, whatever (frictional unemployment for those who like to use the jargon).) Indeed, 5% unemployment is not even the full picture. Another 7% have less work than they want (are underemployed) and some percentage of the workforce (possibly a fairly high percentage) is not even looking for work because prospects are poor (we'd include in this group mothers who have not returned to work, graduates who volunteer or intern because they can't straight away find work, others who defer entry to the workplace for various reasons). Possibly as much as 20% of the population who would like more work cannot get it. This is not an economy at capacity!

Given that the government purposely keeps people out of work, why does it punish those who can't get a job? Well, there are obvious reasons, such as that it can't actually admit it runs the economy below capacity or that its aim is not full employment at all, because that would anger the plebs. It can't admit that NAIRU is bullshit because while it may not discipline inflation, it has certainly helped slow gains in real wages, so the increased productivity Australia, like other Western nations, has seen in recent decades has all been captured by the top end of town. Probably more importantly, there are many conservative voters who because they have personally never suffered much misfortune in life, and have a steady job, believe that everyone out of work is lazy or stupid and deserving of punishment. They are terrified of others' getting something for nothing. They are not aware that their taxes do not fund anything because it is not in the government's interests for them to know that for various reasons.

The solutions are simple. The government should offer work to anyone who wants it at a decent wage. It should incentivise employers rather than "job providers" and it should stop punishing people who genuinely want to work but cannot, who are the overwhelming majority of jobseekers in any economy. There just aren't that many people who would rather be given the very small amount of money you can get here, and those who are are not all that economically useful anyway, so never mind.

Of course, a farsighted government would simply do what I urge: abolish the tax-free allowance and give everyone a citizen's allowance. I'll quickly outline a couple of reasons this is not as immoral or poisonous to conservatives as it looks. First, the government is the issuer of currency. It's more democratic for it to issue the same amount to every citizen and allow them to do with it what they want than it is to use it in other stimulative ways. It's effectively what it does with a tax-free allowance in any case. Second, even if it was the case that taxes pay for welfare, it would be better for the taxpayer not to have to fund a huge, unwieldy welfare infrastructure. I mean, why not just abolish Centrelink and "job providers" and give me the money without bothering with it? I need the money, after all. Society has an obligation to provide me with it because we have structured ourselves in a way that leaves some of us requiring support. Simply sending an EFT to anyone on the electoral roll, or an equivalent register, is much more elegant. Then the government can forget having to means test people, having to have an elaborate transfer mechanism to try to make going back to work equitable (in my system they just tax from the first dollar--or in fact, at present, do not tax at all).

But none of that is possible. Instead, I have to submit to being humiliated by Centrelink and my "job provider" so that I can get just enough money to pay my rent to the greedy bastards who own my house. You will never convince me that there is much benefit to a world that has people with several houses and people with none. Any benefit you can assume could be created in a different, more equitable way.

***

There must be an upside, right? Well, I have a girlfriend who I love but. I know, it seems like there's always a but. The but in this case is that she is pretty sharply critical of me quite often, sometimes in quite hurtful ways, and even if some of it, or all of it, is true, it's never anything I can do anything about, just like it was with Bella. I mean, I'm just who I am. I don't see what else I can be without making life an enormous trial. So some days I just feel she puts up with me because she thinks I am or would be a good stepdad to her boys (which is lol, because I'm a terrible father, but obviously a willingness to bully small children into doing what you want them to do is easy to mistake for having a clue). She has just started a job too (which is great, I think it's super positive for her) but now if she moves in with me, I just look like and feel like a sponger. I mean, there's probably nothing wrong with someone who loves you providing for you, and certainly I've done it and would do it without a second thought, but it weighs heavily on me.

I think I have just reached the point where women have too often told me they loved me and then treated me without any sign of love. You can't love me and never talk to me. You can't love me and split up with me because I don't worship Jesus. You can't love me and spend all the time you spend with me trying to mindfuck me.

Some days, most days, I simply do not believe I am loveable at all. How would it even be possible? I do not exist. I am just layers of shit upon shit upon a core of intractable rage. Or I fear that I am. I fear that if I was able to peel away the shit, I would be left only with hatred and spite. I know that the rest of you all think the shit is the best part of you, but you just don't see clearly enough that it's just shit you accreted.

Some days, I think differently from that, but this isn't one of those days. And I was sure that I had revealed something different but the person or people I thought I had revealed it to did not agree. How can I argue with the judgement of others when I am not sure what I am really revealing? If you offer yourself to be judged, you cannot complain when they return the judgement: guilty of being just shit all the way through.

Credit

2011-07-26T21:59:00.000+10:00

Your best may not be any good but it's always good enough.

***

If you do not subscribe to that, we are probably too far apart in our thinking ever to be friends. It just seems fundamental to me in how we should look at each other. When my children bring home their school reports, I am proudest of the marks they get for effort than I ever am of the marks they get for achievement. (The latter is in any case dependent on the former.)

Although of course no one is distinguished from another by just one characteristic, people can often be put in polar camps. Here is an instance: you are either prone to forgive or you are not. I suppose it comes down to whether you believe people should be judged by their outcomes or by their intentions.

It is a small step from believing that you should credit a good heart to believing that a good heart should prevail. Nor is it far to go to believe that good hearts must predominate because we do not strive to be bad.

And quickly we can realise that our sins are born mostly out of confusion about what our aims should be.

***

Did you see that it was axiomatic that you should believe a good heart should prevail?

A short step

2011-07-25T18:07:00.000+10:00

I'd really like to be able to say that things are good. I mean, really. I don't mean I want to be able to pretend, or to be able to look on the bright side, because I could easily do either and it would just be meaningless. Above all else, I write a blog for my own sanity, so what good would lying do? But I'm not someone who enjoys being miserable, however it appears. I like to be happy. I'm easily contented yet contentment never seems within my grasp for long. And really, it has seemed to be close enough recently that it feels even worse that it's such a short step from there to desperation, which is where I am at now. (Luckily, the converse is probably just as true.)

Whenever something has seemed good, it has drifted away or turned to shit. Take work. I had an interview for a subbing role that I would have been really good in. I wasn't all that positive about the interview (haven't actually been to an interview for years) but I emailed the guy after a fortnight or so and he's like, oh no, we haven't decided yet, you're in the mix, will let you know very soon. So after three more weeks, I emailed to find out what was going on. He didn't even bother replying.

You know, I don't have a massive opinion of myself. I know I have flaws that sometimes are really hard to surmount or undermine me badly. But it's hard to believe that I'm just not even worth letting know I'm not good enough for a job. Not even good enough to reply to an email.

Last year, I had quite a lot of work from my people in Singapore, and that was keeping me afloat. Ever since Techniworks reneged on their agreement with me, giving the work they promised me (and underpaid me for because they promised it) to family members (and having the temerity to tell me when appointing the son of the founders that they had finally found someone good for the role), it's been really tough, and the Asian work kept me in the game, just about. But it dried up and now the woman I deal with doesn't even answer my emails. I don't know what I did wrong. I even asked her, what did I do wrong that our relationship has gone bad? She didn't reply to that either.

So that doesn't feel good. I've gone from being mostly employed and getting by to someone not even worth talking to. If you know me, you'll know that one of the best ways truly to upset me is not to communicate with me. Refusing to talk to me will make me sour on you more effectively than just about anything else you do. I think it is because there is part of me that refuses to believe I am not worthwhile, and being left without the oxygen of communication makes me feel worthless. I wonder sometimes whether people forget that I've spent more than seven years working from home, essentially alone day after day. For a sociable monkey, it has been very nearly unbearable.

So I also thought I was building something good with B. We were talking about moving in together and I was quite excited about it although I've been cautious about becoming emotionally committed because the last mad bitch I allowed myself to care about canned me essentially for not being a biblethumper, which given how kindly I look upon the ridiculous beliefs of that crowd was very harsh. I understand, I suppose, how you can mislead yourself into thinking that it's so central to your life that you can't compromise it, although of course for those of us just slightly more rational, it's obvious that other things are much more important. I mean, I didn't hate on her for her wilful ignorance about science and philosophy, and in many ways it's much worse for me to be with someone who is not just uninterested in how things are but gets upset at the very thought that you might enquire. (I can obviously stand to be with someone who is uninterested in life because I married one but it's not a recommendation to me.) But I was getting fond of B and although there are issues that need to be negotiated (which I'm not getting into here but they do exist, and they're not on the whole about me, not that there's nothing about me), I thought it might go somewhere.

So the other day I said if I could change anything about her, I'd change that she wasn't into music like I am. This is in the context of talking about things that are amiss with Brisbane, a place where I meet very few people who have anything at all with me. So I was kind of saying, wouldn't it be cool if you were also into music. She was mortally offended, or so she says, which is ridiculous. She clearly isn't into music the way I am. I seek out new music and enjoy making discoveries. I play the new stuff to anyone who will listen. She doesn't do any of that. The difference is, she'll say "I really like X" and I'll say "I really want you to like X". It's a huge difference.

So she said some things that were in a whole different realm to that, and I haven't been willing or able to spend time with her since. What is difficult is not that she grossly insulted me (and I mean grossly) in a way that simply isn't consonant with how things have been or anything anyone has ever said about me before (and you know, I'm the kind of person people do have things to say about, not to mention that I've had a failed marriage, where you tend to hear the worst about yourself and worse even than that, you get to hear whatever the other person can invent too), but that when we talked about it, she just could not grasp that what I am supposed to have said was meh (you could take offence but it's a real stretch, and when you consider the context, you have really to work hard to make it even slightly offensive) but what she said makes it hard to have a relationship with her. See, I could just say, yeah I'm sorry, I know you love music but you're not into it the way I am, that's all I meant, no big deal, because it isn't really a big deal -- it just would be an added extra but obv. it isn't even close to a dealbreaker: no woman I've ever gone out with has been into music -- but there's no way for her to walk back what she said.

There's a big difference between being clumsy and hurting someone, or not realising what you are saying can be hurtful (and I'm always willing to forgive people for this because I'm not the best at understanding how what I say comes across) and purposely saying something you think is hurtful. Why would you ever do that when you are supposed to love someone? So she says, well you've insulted me some, and I guess if you're really fucking touchy, you could believe that, but what I haven't ever done is try to put the knife in.

So that's fucked.

Well, there's always poker, right? Hold the phone while I laugh hysterically. Actually, what little poker I've played in the past month or two has been very successful but I haven't played much and I am not sure where I will get the motivation and energy to play in future. I need to though. I am now in the second week of waiting to hear about a job for which I did a test that took several hours to do. Will get back to you tomorrow, the woman said. Then the next day, sorry something came up, you'll hear soon. When I emailed during the following week, it was, no it's going to take longer than I thought, but you'll hear.

Yeah, so that's fucked too.

Maybe it will all get unfucked though. I try to be positive. Maybe the woman really does need a week and a half to look over tests and I'll get the job. Maybe I'll meet a woman who actually wants me for me and not for some impossible being that neither I nor any other man can ever be. Maybe I'll win the million-guaranteed tourney next w/e. None of it is impossible. So I know that even if it's a short step from happiness to desperation, it's just as short a step back again. I just have to avoid allowing the desperation to become real despair. BTDT, don't want to wear the tshirt.

Hug the rich

2011-07-15T16:34:00.001+10:00

You know, I think back to that Jon Stewart thing, you remember, when he was saying that what we needed was more civility in politics. At the time, I thought how very fifth column that was. Yeah yeah, the problem is that we aren't huggy enough of the right wing.

Well no. The problem is not that we aren't nice enough to the Republicans. They want to make us basically into slaves. They want to thieve all the value in the world and give it to the rich people who bought them.

They hate us. They want to keep us as close to impoverishment as they can so that we are forced to do what they want, which is create wealth for them to syphon off.

It's no use saying that the very rich are creating wealth or that without them we would lack jobs. Most of the very rich are investors or run hedge funds.

Investor sounds good, right? We have a picture of the business investor, putting his money into someone's dream and sharing in the success that they have enabled. Well nah. That's not what the very rich do. They buy bonds. They trade stocks. For the bonds they give us money we don't need. Money is just the way to keep score. What counts are resources. The very rich do not give the government resources! They give it useless money. And "give" is not the word because they are repaid all the money plus interest. The bonds they buy are like little drains on our economy. Each one syphons off some of the value that could be used on making our lives better. They rarely invest in bonds issued by companies. They prefer risk-free money.

Well, stocks. That means money goes to a company, right? Obviously not! When Intel issues shares, it makes money. But when those shares are traded, it makes nary a cent. The stocks are on IPO day a means of funding a company, but once bought, they become ways to gamble. Yes, investors gamble on the success of companies, but the companies don't gain from it.

Imagine if we held the companies in our commonwealth. Imagine what we could do with the wealth of the dividends. Am I saying nationalise everything? Yes, I am. Let's do that. Who is hurt by it? Who is hurt by a government that makes investments in private firms in our interests? Who is hurt if we get the dividends and not the rich?

Yeah, only the rich, and fuck them, hey?

And hedge funds. What are they? What do they do?

Well, the name is misleading. Hedging is in fact a useful thing. If you are a farmer, you can hedge the price you get for your crops and make your income secure (you might sell an option on your crop at a certain price that you think is slightly below what you might be able to get for it, but above your worst case, and worth locking in).

Hedge funds do hedge. Just not in a particularly useful way. They are designed to allow speculation on the market in a way that makes money however the market moves. Most are not particularly successful at doing this but some have strategies that work well. They do not have a socially useful purpose. They exist solely to increase holdings of money. Am I saying outlaw investments? No. Am I saying that the government should restrict what types of investment are permitted? Yes.

You want freedom? Fine. Let's have freedom but we'll level the playing field first. How about that? Oh no?

No. No libertarian wants equity. No libertarian wants justice. They want their privilege entrenched. It makes me lol to read the silly tosspots claiming that property rights are fundamental. Yeah right. Your right to own 10 million in shares is exactly equivalent to my right not to be shot dead in the street.

Get this though. You don't have a right to property if you don't improve the land you're on. If you don't farm it or mine it, you can't claim it. Now why would freedom-loving types believe that? Why wouldn't they think that pasturing or nomadism aren't legitimate uses of land?

Well, it's simple to explain. They aren't smart enough to know that some native Americans farmed so they are able to pretend that those brave frontiersmen who made America rich did not steal their property from the natives.

About my next child

2011-06-25T18:51:00.000+10:00

So B has been a bit broody (rising *mumbles* so the hormones are telling her her breeding days are ending) but don't panic, no way am I ever having another kid. So I tell her that, and she's like, yeah but it would be a handsome kid. Which it would. I have some great genes and all my kids are choice looking. Hers aren't bad either: she's quite pretty if the light's coming from the right direction.

So we were discussing kids' names and we agreed on Shark Mindfuck because we're both unemployed weedsmoking bogans, so what else would we call him? (And yes it would be a him. I only have man spunk left.) Thinking about Shark has sparked B's creative nerve, and now she has a full picture of him. She pictures him after his birth, being offered the boob and refusing it, demanding warm blood.

I said, well, he'll have the Rule cock gene (skipped a generation but Naughtyman has a wang that would make many grown men envious--I don't get complaints but no one faints on seeing it, let's put it like that) and that means double-figure inches. He wouldn't be a vegetarian. In fact, just like all my kids, he wouldn't go near a vegetable. He'd thrive on steak. Or other children's legs. "Shark," we'd say, "where did you get that bone?" Not that he'd answer. We wouldn't know whether Shark was meeting his developmental milestones in talking because he'd prefer to communicate in grunts.

We imagine the school phoning us. "We're sorry, Mr R, but we have to ask you to remove Shark from our school. We were willing to put up with him scaring other boys with his penis and assaulting his teacher, but he spent second break yesterday with his teeth fastened around little Jasmine's jugular. You do know he files his teeth?"

Not that he'd need an education. He'd steal anything he wanted, or pulverise anyone who got in his way. B says Shark would be giving the education, teaching us things we'd never dreamt of. Like how to get brains out of the carpet.

Rotten RACQ

2011-06-10T16:37:00.000+10:00

So I was delighted when a bit more than a week ago, some guy rang from RACQ Insurance to tell me that the owner of the car I hit on Wecker Road had claimed, and everything would be taken care of. A guy would go out to assess my car and would ring me in the next couple of days to let me know the score and to take me through the next part of the process.

So I didn't hear anything and after maybe five working days I phoned them and said, hey, no one got back to me. Oh, the guy tried on this number, they said, reeling off a number that obviously wasn't mine. But why didn't you use my mobile, I said, which you've used more than once? Oh well, the guy said, anyway, I'll get the guy to phone you. Won't be today, he'll be in touch tomorrow. This was Wednesday.

So by this afternoon, I was beginning to think I'd have to phone them again. But they phoned me. Hi, they said, we have a settlement for you. And we got a wrecker to give a quote. By the way, you'd better get the car out of the holding yard because they're going to charge you a fee.

WTF?

So "we'll take care of everything" turns out to mean "we'll fuck you over". It's impossible to sort out a different wrecking company this afternoon -- the Friday before a long weekend, and if I don't get the car towed out of the holding yard first thing on Tuesday, it starts costing me a lot of money.

I was pretty upset so I wrote an email to complain. The same guy rang back to tell me he'd done everything by the book and basically tough shit.

So I ask to speak the guy's supervisor. She rings me back. She tells me I'm lying about the RACQ arranging a tow, I misunderstood when they said they'd take care of everything, they have no responsibility for the car or anything else.

So I said, why waste your time and mine with this shit? You just want me to go away so I will go away. So I have to add RACQ Insurance to my list of terrible businesses here who love to take your money but do not much like helping you when you need it (or giving good service to their insured, which in this case was the other guy; but I would hate someone to be treated the way I have if I ever cause an accident).

I am particularly unhappy that this woman just flat denied arranging the tow. The only reason my car is in the goddamn holding yard is these cunts had it towed there. No one asked me what I wanted. No one told me I would be stuck with an undriveable car not in my garage space, not in my yard, but in some guy's yard in Cooper's Plains. Instead, they all told me, it's fine, the insurance will take care of it. But no.

I hate Australia. I hate that people will lie to you to make you go away one day and then lie about the lies they told you the next. I hate living in a place where a guy tells you he will get back to you about a job and then never bothers, and then when you contact him, he says he'll get back soon; three weeks later, you are on the ignore list. That's Australia in a nutshell: a place where people think you're shit if they can't get anything out of you, where you basically have a dollar value, no more no less.

About power

2011-06-06T18:22:00.000+10:00

So I was thinking about relationships the other day and how they boil down to a constant ebb and flow of power. I think of a functioning relationship as a continuing trade in power: each empowers the other in some way, or disempowers them if they feel they need to.

We understand this implicitly in the early days of relationships, of course. Who calls, who goes to whose house, who does what the other likes, these are all transactions that empower the other or ourselves. If you ring someone and invite them on a date, you are for sure empowering them. They can take you or leave you as they choose. Naturally, so long as you are reasonably active in dating, you do not have much invested, so the exercise of that power is not crushing. If, however, you are like some who I know, and obsess over one person at a time, that obsessing empowers the other to an extent that is not healthy.

I do not know which is worse, that they should know it or that they shouldn't. In the former case, they are as much burdened as empowered, because they do not necessarily want the power you have entrusted them with; in the latter, they can hurt you a great deal without consideration, where had they been able to consider, they might have spared you some. Let's say that a person is not sure whether they want to go out with you; you are on the borderline. Would you rather they knew you were desperate to go out with them, and that obliged them, creating a little sourness in any relationship you might have, which would never be sweetened but would always remain -- and a huge imbalance in power that you would never be able to recover from ("I only went out with you because you really wanted it" is incredibly disempowering) or would you rather they did not know and could crush you without a thought, which they would not wish to do, because they could have decided either way?

One of the major ways to empower yourself is to be more able to quit the other. Often, this is because you are more desirable than your partner, and can replace them more easily. Take ex-Mrs Zen. When we first married, she felt powerless. She thought I was much more desirable than she was, and could easily quit her if I wanted to. (Strangely, she didn't feel empowered by the reverse of that thought: that being chosen by someone you feel need not choose you empowers you.) Much of her conduct of our relationship was an effort to make me abandon that perceived power, to restrict my ability to flaunt it. Once we had kids, of course, it was restricted in the course of things. She realised my kids were an anchor, that they empowered her because I could not leave them, whatever I felt about her. Whoever says children bring you closer together clearly never had any.

Take Bella as another instance. Although she claimed to love me, to need me, to want to be with me, she had Jesus. She could use Jesus as a tool to leave me at any point. Her message, appended to all transactions with me, was "you don't have me; I can care more about Jesus if I choose".

Once you are stuck with an imbalance in power, what can you do? Sometimes you can compensate your partner in one way or another. You can give them satisfaction that isn't easy to get elsewhere: sometimes a partner will abase themselves, become a demi-slave to try to keep it together; you can ignore the exercise of power, so that for instance if your partner cheats on you, you can pretend it's okay. Mostly, you just suffer until it is done. Largely I think this is why we try to empower ourselves, because we do not want to be passively suffering as our relationships fall apart: we would rather be in the driver's seat than watch as someone else puts the thing in the ditch.

Isn't this one reason we cheat on our partners? Isn't it a way of saying "I don't need you" that is fundamentally untrue? Because we are only empowering ourselves because we want our relationship to continue. Perverse as it sounds, it seems to me that we do not cheat because we lack something that our partner could give us, but because we lack something in ourselves. Among other reasons, I suppose.

Can the tension in a relationship be resolved? In principle, I imagine it can, but it would require the ability to empower your partner equally as they empower you. There seem to me various ways you could do that but I have run out of energy and explaining what I think they are will have to wait on another day.

June 6

2011-06-06T17:49:00.000+10:00

June the 6th, I did nothing. I watched the day pass by, a few chores, a computer game, making myself numb so I don't have to think about how hopeless it is.

I try not to think about what I could have done with my life. This is what I've done. I try not to think about what I might have been able to do. When I enumerate my abilities, they don't amount to much. It seems I am doing just what I was able and that was nothing at all.

No one has a use for me. Yet when I think about it, I understand what's going on. I interpret the world and not everyone can do that. I see what it is. But I never gained any ability to do anything about it. It always seemed like something I was outside, wishing someone would let me in.

No one has a use for me and I'm useless on my own. It's surely not such a sin, to need others to come alive? It takes you to places you maybe never wanted to go, sure, but that only hurts yourself.

***

I was going to write something about Bella, how she decided she loved Jesus more than she loved me, but to be honest, I'm just sick to the core of selfish cunts and dwelling on one or another won't make me feel any better. My views remain the same: only the real is worth fighting for, dying for, living for, loving. The abstract nonsense that we use to shield ourselves from looking at the real only has what impact on our lives we wish it to. In my case, not a great deal; in hers, enough to make her life torturous. So that's that.

Ex-Mrs Zen was the same: she wished only to communicate about a list of things that she was entitled to, never about what we actually had. Still, I sometimes feel I should have been less contrary, insisted less on real life and given her more of what she wanted. The problem is, these women are like terrorists. It is not enough to give them something and hope they will negotiate. They will take it for weakness and demand more. Tell Bella you respect her religious beliefs and she demands you do not talk about science; that you give up wonderment, just as she has given it up, and find that respectable. Tell ex-Mrs Zen that you will give something up for her, the next day there is something else you have to give up, and in the meantime, she is still the same bitch she was before.

You spend, and you buy nothing.

Not everyone can be like that. I mean, I am left hoping it's just Australian women -- because let's face it, it's all the Australian women I've known -- and that one day I'll be able to return home and find someone who believes I am worth more than that (not that I claim to be worth much: I simply feel that loving someone cannot be a matter simply of finding some abstract thing to bash them with).

I know B will think that unfair. But her abstractions are ultimately even more insuperable than Bella's. Sometimes you have to close your eyes and say fuck it.

***

But don't I believe in an abstraction, yearn for it even though it is contrary to anything I can expect? Of course I do, but I do not punish you for it. I know mine is impossible. I am complicated in that I have to see everything as a transaction, a trade in power (I will blog that shortly, I think), yet I want simplicity.

My friend boots -- whatever happened to boots? -- would tell me about his cabin in the wintertime. I did not believe his cabin was anything but wholly imaginary. He would talk about clearing snow, cutting wood, getting by on a little, just him and Mrs boots.

I did not believe it was anything but imaginary because it seemed like he was describing a dream. Because who really could be satisfied with that, this side of ex-Mrs Zen's dad? (Who does not have what I want -- although his life is simple, it is not warm, far from it, and warmth is the key to my dream. In boots' cabin, a stove roared and he basked in the warmth.)

I do believe in an abstraction. I believe in love. I believe it illuminates the darkness, even if the darkness must ultimately win. I know I am foolish. What did my beliefs ever get me but broke, hopeless and scared in a suburb of a hick town without a heart?

Basic

2011-06-04T13:51:00.000+10:00

So the other day I attended a jobseek seminar. Sounds like fun, eh? In actuality, I simply turned up, was ticked off a list and was free to go. I stayed and chatted for a few minutes with a fellow "jobseeker" but that was that.

Someone arranged the letter that reminded me of the appointment time. Someone put the list together. A woman wastes her days ticking people off lists. There is a huge welfare bureaucracy here.

Of course the government has to humiliate you when you are out of work. The neoliberal myth is that we are at full employment. (The theory -- disproved so many times by, you know, reality that you'd think no sane economist would put it forward, let alone that it should be the basis of policy in the Western world -- is that inflation and unemployment are in a balance, and there is an equilibrium point -- NAIRU: allow unemployment to fall below it and inflation is inevitable; allow inflation to rise above it and unemployment is inevitable. The reasoning is that if everyone has a job, labour becomes a scarce resource and the price for it rises -- in other words, there is wage inflation -- and consequently prices for goods rise. Does this mean that true full employment would require carefully crafted policies to manage inflation? Yes. But does it mean that we need to keep 5% of the population out of work on purpose? No, it doesn't. But that is Australia's policy.) So there are jobs everywhere and if you don't have one, you are a shirker. This lie appeals to the public, because Australians are conservative on the whole and strongly believe in the dignity of labour (except for the rich: it's curious that those who need the state's help in hard times are "spongers", but "investors" who simply skim wealth from the economy without giving a thing in exchange are not only not spongers but are consider "high-worth" individuals).

As it happens, unemployment in Australia is 5%, with a further 8% underemployed (people who would work full time if they could but cannot get the hours). This is just those who are part of the workforce -- it ignores all the people who would return to work if there was work, but for one reason or another cannot or do not sign on. By calling this "full employment", the government can pat itself on the back for a good economic job well done, and ignore its responsibility for ensuring that there is work for all. I mean, what else is a government for? Why is it permitted to influence the economy if not for that end?

Is inflation even particularly undesirable? I will note that most of us are net debtors, so it affects us positively. Yes, goods may rise in price but this is not actually the concern of neoliberals. When they say they want to restrict inflation, what they mean is that they want to keep wages down. They want to prevent our share of the national income from rising. And if your wages rise, you can pay higher prices for goods without too much concern. The cool thing is that inflation lessens debt (because it effectively devalues the amount owed). Of course the rich don't want this (it effectively devalues their piles of cash too), but I often think to myself, why should the majority care a less about that?

It's only by lying to us that the neoliberals who run our countries can deflect our attention from our own interests. It is clearly better for most of us that there should be work for everyone who wants it than that savings are protected, given that most of us do not even have net savings (yes, many of us have modest amounts of deferred spending but we also have much greater levels of debt: few of us have savings greater than our mortgages).

It's one of the more pernicious lies that there is plenty of work and only those who don't want to work sign on. I mean, they pay me less than my rent! Of course I'd rather work. But there isn't any.

In any case, as I've noted before, I favour a "citizen's income". We could save a great deal of bureaucracy, accept our responsibility to support each other and provide a method of fiscal support to the economy that allows individuals to make decisions over resources instead of bureaucracy (the latter is the reason this approach has often been favoured by the right: the left, which tends to support bureaucracy because it creates jobs, has not favoured it so much -- indeed, President Nixon came very close to introducing a basic income and scrapping welfare). My allowance for being unemployed is about $600 a fortnight. The government could simply pay $300 a week to every Australian adult. Scrap the tax-free allowance (which is ridiculous anyway) and other tax breaks and tax from the first dollar of income (even better, tax land not income). No need for means testing, no hoops to jump through, no bureaucracy needed (money paid to everyone on the electoral register, ez game). I'd also pay money for each child (scrapping the various family benefits).

Wouldn't it all cost the government a lot of money? Yes, but luckily Australia is the sovereign issuer of its own currency and is not constrained by revenue. It can pay for anything it wishes in its own currency.

But it will never happen. It's easy to predict what the opposition to it would be. Even though none of the opposition would actually make sense, who cares about that? We live in a world of myths and lies, and it suits the people the government serves well. The rest of us, well, we sleepwalk through it, and until you are in need yourself, you don't have to think about it.

About Naughtyman

2011-05-31T22:29:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I just want to sing, I love my son I love my son I love my son. I watch him sleeping in his room and I am robbed of any words. I feel as though everyone should love him: I truly do not believe he has or ever will have a bad bone in his body.

He's gawky. He will never win a running race. He will never do delicate things with his hands.

He's naughty. He does not toe the line. He cannot sit still in boring class. He does not care what other people want and never thinks he has to please them.

He's beautiful. He knows he is charming. He manipulates everyone around him. He is happy.

He is happy! My boy loves his life. He is never troubled, never concerned, rarely angry, rarely sad for more than a moment. He negotiates with life, with me, he makes the world the way he wants as far as he can.

There he is sleeping in his room. He is my son and I love him. When I dream, I want to dream him a life to come as happy as the life he's had. I wish I had a god to bless him, and since I don't, I bless him myself.

There he is in his room. He is sleeping without a care. God, if there ever should be a god, let him remain without care.

Smashed

2011-05-26T17:00:00.001+10:00

So I thought things were pretty bad. I have no work and no prospect of work; I live in a town with very few jobs in my field and I can't relocate; I have no money and no way to get money; my car was wrecked so I don't have a car.

But it's worse. The guy who wrecked my car hasn't claimed on his insurance. So I have to pursue him. But meanwhile, the RACQ arranged for my car to be towed. No one asked me where I wanted it towed. I was led to understand it was being taken where they wanted it taken: "the insurance will take care of everything". But the insurance won't take care of anything. If the guy won't claim, they are not interested. They deny arranging a tow and say that I should have been given the choice where to have it towed to.

The towing company towed it to a yard, where I am on the hook for 55 dollars a day until I get it moved somewhere else. But I can't move it until I get it valued and then have somewhere to have it wrecked. These are things it's easy for an insurance company to sort out: they just ring whoever's on their list. But I don't have a list. I don't know who values cars. I will have to pay all the costs.

And then sue some guy who told me he would claim on his insurance but didn't. I mean, this is some guy who didn't do the right thing. If he didn't intend to make a claim, he needed to contact me to explain how he would set right his liability for my car.

So not only did I wreck my car. The fault for wrecking it lies with some guy who it seems has no intention of taking the course that makes it easy for me but is going to need me to take legal action to get him to do anything.

Everyone involved seems to have done the wrong thing in one way or another, except, for once, me. The RACQ arranged the tow but shouldn't have done (I mean, I suppose the guy who caused the accident should have done; he was responsible for clearing away the cars from the road); the police should not have prevented me from getting the guy's contact details (don't know what the copper was thinking; right now I could really do with the guy's mobile number so I could sort this out with him, but all I have is his home phone and have to try to catch him at home) or allowed me to speak to the RACQ (because it was not up to me to sort out towing or anything like that--but how could I know that?); the towing company should not a/ have towed my car without explaining that I had a choice where to have it towed and b/ have told me the "insurance would sort it out" if in fact the insurance had not arranged to have it towed to a particular place; the insurance company should not have told me that everything was okay because the guy would make a claim and I'd be fine; and RACQ roadside should have said when I explained what had happened that it was not for me to sort out. You would not believe how many times I asked people "what should I do?" "do I have to do anything?" and each one, including my insurance company, said no, there's nothing you have to do, when the correct answer was, "yes, make sure the guy who wrecked your car does something about it".

If I had known, I would simply have got the guy's mobile number, walked away from the scene and suggested that since he accepted liability, the undriveable Camry in the middle of Wecker Road was his problem. Which it turns out is exactly the facts of it.

It seems like I did nothing wrong on my own volition; I listened to professionals around me; I did everything I could, and now I will be faced with a huge bill for towing and storing my car; I have to arrange to have it valued and wrecked; and worst of all, I am out one car, with no idea whether I will ever see a cent for my Camry.

I'd also like to know, given that the insurance company weren't supposed to tell me whether the guy had claimed, how am I supposed to know what's going on? I am literally supposed to sit around, while some shyster holds my car at 55 bucks a day, waiting to hear from an insurance company (the supervisor at RACQ tells me they can't even tell me if the guy has insurance with them) until I decide I can't wait any longer and start legal action! Is this actually how car accidents are meant to happen?

My tiny dream

2011-05-23T16:10:00.000+10:00

The other day I had a vivid daydream of myself in a bath. I often dream of baths. I think the reason is that I'm a big man, and would need a big bath, so if I picture myself in a bath of my own, I know that I must have a level of material comfort that would allow me to have acquired one. I used to dream of a cottage with a walled garden, which had the same nuance of homeliness for me, but not any more.

I am relaxing in the bath, carefree, and I feel I know that somewhere in the house is a woman who loves me. She is not just someone who says she loves me, not someone for whom love is simply an expression of a desire to be loved, but someone who does love me. She needs me, wants where she can to please me and for me to please her, recognises what I need and where possible, gives it to me.

She would never let me spin in loneliness, as I do now. She would find ways to let me know she was thinking about me even when she couldn't be with me, because she would know that I start to cease to exist when no one lets me know they know I am here.

I know, it is just a dream. It is hopeless as dreaming of cottages and pear trees. It seems tiny but sometimes even a tiny dream is not small enough to come true.

Crash

2011-05-20T15:08:00.000+10:00

In the couple of seconds before I collide, I think no more than, I wonder what will happen. I am not anxious and it would be ridiculous to be afraid. Then I think, my car's fucked and then I hit him and my car is fucked.

I don't suppose there is ever a good time to collide with a Nissan Micra that wasn't looking or didn't see you, but at this point, with no job, no money and no income now that I feel unable to beat poker, it feels a bit like a cosmic joke. My best hope is that God is humbling me before doing me a favour.

A few minutes later I am standing in the rain on the phone. I am mostly in one piece, but Lady Jane is not. I want to imagine the workshop straightening her out, restoring her to life, but I know that the callous insurance assessor will write her off on a glance, and I will be given what a car of that age is worth, which is close to nothing. Old cars are always going to be worth more to their owners than they are as goods.

Not to mention that you grow to love your car. You learn how it's best driven, how it corners, how it likes to be accelerated, when it is unhappy or in discomfort. Your driving moulds to the car, so that any other car will at first feel awkward or even unpleasant to drive. A bit like changing girlfriends. Except I don't generally pay several thousand dollars for a girlfriend. Not up front anyway.

May 17

2011-05-17T23:22:00.000+10:00

So I'm saying that you can't just say you love someone; actions speak louder than words.
So someone asks me, how does someone show you they love you?
Which is a very good question.
You don't sit and enumerate ways; you just know it when you feel it. And what does it for one won't necessarily feel that way to the next. So I say something and it's only when she's gone that I realise she thought I had meant something personal by it.
And I am left thinking, some actions are performed in words though.

Still, that reminds me, must phone my mum.

Donations

2011-05-17T22:53:00.000+10:00

You often see people in blog comments claiming that the Democratic Party spends taxes on programmes aimed at certain groups in an effort to buy those groups' votes.

But political parties exist precisely for the purpose of representing interest groups, so what else should one expect? It should not be forgotten that when parties make promises in their manifestos, those promises have benefits (and costs) to different groups. If you say you will not increase spending, you are telling the haves that you will not share with the have-nots; if you promise to "invest", you are telling them that you will.

On another political note, I was writing a post on libertarianism but I ran out of steam, but here's the wreckage...

***

Reading this article and its associated comments, I enjoyed again the spectacle of oh-so-rational libertarians being handed their butts by liberals. Their problem is, as it is so often, that their "philosophy" is used as a defence of bigotry and inequity, but they believe it to be in some way "pure" (untainted, as it were, by the sordid compromises other systems of political thought are forced into).

The chief problem for that branch of libertarianism most commonly encountered in the States is that it depends on a right of property as fundamental, yet because it would be wicked to pretend that one could have property without the means of preventing others from taking it, it requires a government to ensure that right. (Those crazy realists among us might point out to them that all rights are ensured by governments, in so far as governments represent the power to enforce them -- there is no doubt that you could be afforded rights by a group, since this is precisely what human groups do: who has not been a member of something online where behaviour was restricted by the community involved in it?

It's a short walk from there to realising that if rights are things afforded, and not things inherent in humanity -- not endowed by a Creator but endowed by our fellows -- one cannot appeal to some notion that some are prior to others, more "natural". So the right to property becomes just one more claim on one's fellow man: the very things libertarianism seeks to deny. It's foundational to this libertarianism -- propertarianism -- that no rights exist that are not reflexes of the fundamental rights it claims are natural.

Indeed, one could deny the need of the government to assure the "right". It's simple to see what would ensue: a world of rightholders who had no enjoyment of the things they had a right to because the more powerful had stolen it from them. Their "right" would mean nothing. I can accept that you can argue that we do not surrender rights in potentia: we do not say that slaves have no right to liberty just because they cannot acquire liberty. In this sense, we understand that rights are claims we believe justifiable. But we also believe they should be enforced. When we say something like "gays should have the right to marry", we don't simply mean we believe their claim to it is justifiable but also that someone should enforce it.

In any case, any right to property involves denying the right to enjoyment of that property to others. I understand that libertarians like to pretend that it does not because once upon a time everyone did have that latter right but the application of labour changed the nature of the property and thus the nature of the right over it. Conveniently, this means the appropriation of Indian lands by Americans did not infringe their rights, because they didn't have shoe shops or sew crops (ignoring those who, erm, did). So I do have a right to my neighbour's back yard but erm... waves hand... we should go back on the gold standard because gold is so shiny and paper notes do not glister and hey, did I mention income tax is bad?

Well, the Indians' rights were like anyone else's: as strong as the power that backed them.

May 8

2011-05-08T19:30:00.000+10:00

You'll hear in two weeks.

Three weeks pass. I had already known though. So that's that. Some part of me wants to drive round to the guy's office and just yell at him, I'd have liked that job, you cunt, but you can't, can you?

People can lie to you, can hurt you, can disrespect you, and all you can do is curl ever tighter in a ball.

***

So B sometimes reads my blog. She wants to know what I have to say about her. Nothing much is the answer. There is nothing further to say about women who think that saying they love you is a passkey to taking whatever they need without giving you anything.

This is what I said about that six years ago (almost to the day, strangely) and I haven't changed my views, just become more disillusioned by the women I've met:

I am tired of being reflected through a mirror of expectation, but only ever expectation for you and not for me. When do I get to want, to feel, to need anything? It is the downfall of the stronger that they cannot be weak, that they are held to account for every weakness, every small flaw, as though they should be diamonds while all around them are permitted to be coal.

And I am stronger than you. Because I demand nothing, only love, and that is easier to give than service, only you don't know it.

I am tired of falling short of your targets, which you set for yourself but expect me to strike. You knew I was not perfect but you thought that just by knowing you I might become it; and yet, not perfect for me but perfect for you. But you don't care. Because you never asked what I wanted; you think I can just get by without wanting anything at all.

And I can. I can get by on just the whiff of being desired, just the merest scent of being wanted. You girls can troll me to oblivion and back if you will only send me the ghosts of kisses.

I am tired of the imposition of your dreams. I am not a pool you can see your face in. I am not still waters; I am the sea, endlessly turning over, restless and cruel. You think you are hurting me but you are not even touching me. You think you are meaning something to me but you are not even a stone in the water. I can lose anything if I have to. Do you think we get to forty and don't learn how? It is how we become men and you don't understand it.

I am tired of being loved. It is the burden of complicated men that women can see in them shards of what they take to be a whole pane but is only ever the reflection of sun on choppy water. You could love the sea; you could love to swim. But all you ever really want to do is admire yourselves in a looking-glass.

I am tired of you. You want to choke me, smother me, rein me in and cut my wind but I want to breathe. I am worth more than your desires. Come to me when you want to know me, not indulge your belief about what I can be if only I allow you to turn my key. Come to me when you want to love what is real, when you are ready to shed your skin, be my equal and live.

I know, that's fucking gold. It's a tragedy that the world doesn't have a need for someone who can write like that. You can't. No one you know can. I can and I can't even get paid a living wage for it. Sick life.

And B? Well, I guess she will join the crew of women who read my blog as a proxy for actually giving a shit about me. I guess they have their reasons but you know, from my point of view, people's selfish indulgence has zero value. In some cases, less than zero, because it hurts me that they can pretend to care about me by reading about how painful my life is without ever feeling any desire to lessen that pain by giving me some of what I want.

***

I do wish I lived in a world in which people would say, we just won't bother with you if we don't want you. Because the lying hurts more than the not being wanted. Knowing I am stuck in a place where people have no honour, no shame, is worse than anything.

People aren't like that in the UK. I mean, they can be rotten, but if they say you'll hear in two weeks, you hear in two weeks. They do not so frankly treat you like dirt. They have a nagging sense of shame that doesn't permit it.

***

And my people in Singapore have not even answered emails.

I am sick of you cowards. I am sick of people who do not have the balls to say fuck you to me. I am sorry that my abiding memory of B will be of her crying on the stairs instead of standing up for what she wanted, of someone who thought I could be manipulated like that instead of being negotiated with. Which I can. I wanted it to work and was willing to give so that it would. But not at any price. I mean, why should I? What was so good about being used that I would beg for it to continue?

***

When it came to it, I did not do what my sister thought I should. I did not get my family to the UK and then fuck Mrs Zen over. It's not that there's not part of me who wishes I had. After all, she fucked me over. She lied to me so that she could get what she wanted. She did not pay me what she owed me.

But mostly I felt good about it because I had been decent. Shit, I know it's old fashioned to think that being honourable is worth anything. But I knew how much I had hurt and would not do it to someone else.

Even if the whole world around me does, I don't. It's worth nothing -- integrity -- it's not worth a fucking thing, doesn't pay the rent, doesn't keep you warm at night, feeds only the monkey within.

I hate that I'm such an idiot. I could have trapped her there, where I could find work, where I had people I could trust and love, where there was life for me, and I chose honour.

Idiot.

April 19

2011-04-19T22:15:00.000+10:00

They didn't give you an interview. There was no feedback. She had said she would "fix up" an interview. She didn't bother telling me. I had to pester her with emails even to find out I didn't get anywhere.

About once every two months there's a job I can apply for. Mostly I never hear a thing.

At the end of this month I will finally run out of money. I'm not winning at poker, so next month I will have no money. I don't know how I will pay the rent. I have a decent limit on my credit card, so I can eat for a while, but I can't pay it back.

I am stuck in a town with no work for me. I begged Mrs Zen to move back home, so I could have a life. She refused. Fuck off if you don't like it, she said. Eventually, I disliked it enough to fuck off. It took a lot. I was willing to be hurt a lot before I finally gave in. Now she has a life she loves: a job she likes, a home she pays no rent on, a boyfriend whom she feels superior to, a week off every two so she can go out and have fun, a cruise with her mate. All she had to do to get it was destroy my family, wreck my hopes for my life and act in a way that if she knew any shame, she'd be ashamed of herself for the rest of her days. But she doesn't. No one does here. I am marooned in a town full of people who do not have any honour, any sense of shame, any love for anyone but themselves.

The worst thing is to be hopeless. You would not believe it, I used to be a cheerful soul, hopeful of the future. Not any more. Now I have to grit my teeth in the morning because I know I will hate the day.

My girlfriend tells me she worries for my mental state. You're depressed, she says, and she hints that all I need is drugs. I do not need fucking drugs! I need my life not to be shit. I'm not even close to depressed. I'm just banging my head against the wall. It's different. Believe me, I know. I've been pointlessly depressed and I know what that's like. Now I'm down for a reason.

It does me good to know she loves me. I mean, really, people do love me. God knows why. I imagine they see someone who doesn't really exist. I feel like a mirage as it is. I barely exist. I do nothing, go nowhere, think nothing, have nothing to say.

***

I want to say that I stopped thinking I was worthwhile about a year ago. I feel like I have not been able to recover from something that happened, someone telling me I was not worth anything. Would I have been okay if I had got a job, had my kids with me, made a life? I do not even know. All I know is that when people queue up to hurt you, you find yourself tucked into a ball, unable to reach out, unable to live.

What is the point? She nor anyone else cares a less. I am a tiny infringement on the lives I butt into, except those of my children, who I let down constantly, and will, I fear, let down altogether when finally I have no money.

April 14

2011-04-15T00:01:00.000+10:00

So I went for a job interview yesterday and it was relentless: what I haven't done recently, what skills I don't have, what I don't know. They weren't even interested in what's good about me. They asked but they didn't seem to listen to or care about the answer.

I get easily disheartened. I've come to feel I'll never have a break as far as work goes because I applied for a job I used to do and didn't even get an interview. A job I used to do! I did it well too. I mean, I was only on about half power but that's as good as anyone else. I don't mean it boastfully: that's just how I am.

But what's the point of that? If they didn't want me, who would? Now I halfheartedly apply for jobs, expecting to be rejected. There aren't many here, so competition is fierce. There will always be someone better.

In love, I believed I could have a fairy tale. It was foolish to believe but I am guided by my heart; what else can I do but believe in it? But that was crushed too. I was shown that I wasn't worth anything, what little self esteem I had was dashed out of me. I felt my heart wither, so that now I can say I love but I don't ever feel it. I can only feel that I must wait to find out how I'm not good enough. Well how foolish was I, to believe that such a piece of shit as me could ever be valuable enough to care about? I will never be worth sacrifice.

It's very hard to know you are so small. Sometimes, I'm looking at people's posts on Facebook and I can't help thinking that they all seem to have lives that give them joy, that they feel worthwhile. I just dread the end of the day because I know there will be another morning and I will face another seventeen hours of loneliness and despair. I gave up everything for this life: I became solitary and bitter because I had to do whatever I could to make life work for my family. I gave up hope so that I could have my children. It breaks my heart when Zenella says I am the best daddy in the world. I am not. I know I am not the worst but I wish I could find some sunshine so that they do not end up where I am.

I remember how much I loved my own dad, and how little he deserved it. I don't kid myself that children love the man; they love the symbol. I'm glad they do. It's right but it's no comfort when you know you do not deserve it.

Sometimes I wish I could disappear. I wish I could be drowned, murdered, expunged. What was the point of me? I wasted everything I was given, everything that could have been good. No wonder no one wants to give me anything. I'm sure I wouldn't. I hate this cunt more than anyone else could even dream of hating him. What else can you think about him? The people he loved broke him to pieces. He begged them to love him back and they laughed in his face. I could list the ways but what's the point? You know me; you know how to hate me too.

It is no use crying. I still have to wake tomorrow and lose money at poker again, hoping that somehow I can make enough to pay the bills next month. I have to be humbled over and over, spending the lonely hours hating everyone I play and myself, knowing that I am just not good enough but hoping, hoping that somehow not good enough will be good enough. That's my life: endlessly hoping that somehow someone will see enough in me not to boot me even further down.

***

I have been thinking a lot about Zenella. You could not wish to meet a funnier, sweeter child. Mrs Zen says she has a lot of difficulty relating to adults; she is shy and nervous around them. I wish I knew how to tell her that she needn't be, that she has so much to offer that they can't help but love her. I wish I was real enough to tell her about real life. But I'm not and I can't. All I can do is give unremitting love and hope that it will be in some way useful. It never has been for anyone else, but you have to hope. You have to hope, don't you?

Shame

2011-04-11T10:23:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I wake with a start in the night and I am thinking, you are *mumblety mumble* and you will never be the man you think you are.

Think you are? Have faith you are is closer, because there is no evidence of it.

It must be nice to be one of those people who just live their life in the belief that they are everything they should be: decent, upstanding, even noble. Most people seem to feel that. I never see anyone who seems to feel shame. Most people, it seems to me, if their life mistreats them, do not feel it is anything about them. Maybe you need to be able to feel that to stay sane. Maybe to be able to live, and not just die away day upon day, you must not feel shame.

Yet I do. I feel ashamed of myself today. I had my doubts about B, but I didn't express them in a way she could respond to. I was cowardly, and let her spin our relationship into a place she couldn't drag it out of. She was an accomplice, willing to indulge what is bad about her too, but I am capable of being bigger.

I know I am, yet when I'm called on to be a man, I find it easier to be a worm. I wish I could have been her friend, when I know that's what she needed; instead, I am one more shitty man, unwilling to be a little bit better.

***

In the evening, the children were playing a game, way past their bedtime, that involved congaing through the dining room, dressed in sheets. I couldn't enjoy it. I felt the pressure of the oncoming morning, the need to get them up and about. I felt too stressed to laugh along.

I ruin so many moments that could bring joy because I am so joyless now that I cannot see it when it's there. I have such beautiful, funny children. I feel like knowing me is more poisonous for them than never to have known me at all.

***

In the early morning, all three of my children are in my bed. I have Zenita wrapped in my arms, Naughtyman's feet in my back. I am hopeless at expressing love. Hopeless at everything. I feel like I have been cruelly punished for not being perfect, for not being quite enough for anyone to want, to cherish or love.

Why am I so terrified of being judged? Surely no one will hate me more than I do, no matter what I've done? Surely no one will do worse to me than I have? I feel like having to deal with me is more poisonous for me than never to have been at all. Yet I do not have any antidote, or hope of finding one, only shame that I can burn in until finally I die, and am nothing at all.

On taxation

2011-03-30T11:32:00.000+10:00

Further to my post on money, I am going to use Warren Mosler's family coupon analogy to explain how our monetary system works. It's very simple and if you reflect on it, it makes very clear what bullshit deficit terror really is.

Let's say I award my children points each week. I give them coupons, each marked with a point, for things that they do. Each week I demand that they pay ten points back to me; otherwise, I will punish them: they will be grounded or will not have treats that they like. So each week they must accumulate the ten points or suffer.

Where can they get the points from? Only from me. No one else can issue my coupons because they are my own invention.

So each week, they might accumulate a surplus of points, and I might allow them something in return for them. Maybe I will drive them to a friend's house for three points, or give them a bag of lollies for five. They may pay each other points for services rendered: Naughtyman might give Zenella five points for tidying his bedroom; Zenita might give Naughtyman a point for allowing her to be player one on the Wii. They may instead keep their surplus to help them pay their future obligation to me.

The coupons are of course worthless outside of this system, unless I agree with their friends' parents to allow them to exchange them with their friends. I might agree to allow their friends to buy services from me with the points, just the same as they can themselves. What rate they can get from each other will depend on the relative value of points within each house. If their friends' parents need ten points for a bag of lollies, then they will likely want two of their coupons for one of mine. This is quite irrelevant. The coupons have whatever value I place on them and no more: if their friends want my lollies, they must pay me five of my coupons. They cannot use their parents' coupons because I will not take them.

In themselves, the coupons are entirely worthless. I need not even issue paper coupons. I can simply keep score on a piece of paper. The coupons themselves are more useful to the children as means of exchanging services than they are to me. When the coupons are paid to me, if they are ragged, I can throw them away (in pieces of course so that the children cannot retrieve them from the bin and reuse them), and if they are not, I can recirculate them. It doesn't matter to me. I can create as many coupons as I wish.

If the children accumulate a lot of coupons, so that there are too many in circulation for my purposes, I can increase the amount they have to pay. I do not need the extra coupons. I am not using them for anything. I simply use them as a way to discipline the children's "economic" behaviour. I can never "run out of coupons" (if I don't have paper even I can just make a note of the points I issue).

I hope this was clear enough: the coupons are dollars; the payment is taxation (note that the payment itself is meaningless: I don't need them to return the coupons so that I can "spend" them because I can simply make more; all I am doing is removing coupons so that they will continue to need them and provide services that I find useful); the exchange with outside children is foreign exchange. I am not going to consider "debt" here because this system is not complex enough to require government borrowing, but you could imagine a system where I allow the children to bank their extra coupons and pay them interest, to encourage them to learn thrift (this is not why governments issue debt, however!).

March 29

2011-03-29T21:52:00.000+10:00

The girls are jigging and singing a sea shanty. When they say they went on a pirate ship, they mime climbing the rigging; they salute the captain; they rub their tums that are full of rum.

B tells me some longarse thing about Bob Dylan, and the moral of the story is that life is about the simple things. Maybe she is right: I have more pleasure from watching my children dancing than I do from any other thing in this life.

After his sleepover, Naughtyman's scouts put on a show, and Naughtyman's ribbon dance looked the spit of his crazy dance, which has had me in stitches a hundred times. It looks like hilarious uncoordinated, superfast Irish dancing. He is beaming as he jerks like a puppet whose master has been at the billy whiz.

The pleasure of children is so pure because it's so simple. You don't have to ask yourself what it means.

When I read about people abusing their children, I cannot help thinking that the abusers must be the lowest of people, because they are too coarse even to appreciate how much there is to gain in being a parent. They think it is worth less than sex, or whatever approximation to it what they are doing actually is. I mean, whether it's motivated by wanting sex or by needing to express their need to have power or thinking that it is some kind of love.

What would I know about it? I cannot begin to imagine it. I know it is trite to feel that way, but as I said, it doesn't hurt to be human sometimes.

And I know there are many ways to abuse a person. Raising a child brings so much anxiety. What do they feel? What will they feel? Will their judgement be harsh, or will they remember mostly that you loved them, and forget your failings just as you try to forget those of the people you love?

It tortures my mum. She remembers the times she smacked me, and with time they have become monstrous vicious tortures, savage attacks on me with any weapon that came to hand. I remember laughing hysterically as my mum tried to belabour me with a shoe, but it's a tiny memory against the bigger picture of kindness, sacrifice and love. Given how smackable I doubtless was, it's likely a wonder I was not beaten raw.

I admire B so much. I have had a taste of raising children singlehanded, but I hand mine over every other week. She exemplifies that it's how you play your hand that counts, not what hand you were dealt. She approaches her boys always with softness and love: they could never doubt she loves them. How lucky they are! Children thrive on it; it's plantgro for kids.

Ugh, what a dull post! I could have just said I love my kids and I left it at that.

On money

2011-03-26T09:39:00.002+10:00

I recently sent A an article explaining why the deficit terrorists are wrong and why we need bigger deficits. It was a bit on the dry side, and she said she didn't really get it, so I'm going to try to explain in easy terms.

The first thing to get straight is this: we are led to believe that sovereign governments are like households. They achieve an income (in the form of taxation) and then spend it. If they don't have enough, they borrow what they need. This is entirely the wrong way round.

In fact, governments set spending plans and then spend by crediting bank accounts. They do not need money to do this because their spending creates the necessary money. It's important to understand that in a fiat-money system, governments do not get money from anywhere. They simply issue it. They are able to do this because they have a monopoly on money creation (of course, banks create it too, but we won't complicate this story by discussing bank creation of money). I often say, if you had a money tree in your backyard, you would not need a credit card.

"Fiat" means that money is whatever the government says it is, rather than something that has intrinsic value. Forty years ago, money was backed by gold, so that the US government had to back each dollar with an amount of gold. This is no longer the case.

The government's money has value because it is the only thing it will accept to extinguish tax obligations. So everyone must have money because they must pay taxes. (And if this wasn't true, we could not have fiat money.) So the government takes in tax money but it doesn't use it to pay bills or anything like that. It simply credits its accounts, in effect destroying the money. This is in fact the fundamental purpose of taxation: to reduce liquidity in the system. The government puts money in by spending, and withdraws it by taxing.

Only then does the government "borrow" money. It "pays" for its shortfall by issuing debt dollar for dollar. In fact, it should be clear that given that it has no requirement to "pay" for anything (because unlike you, it doesn't have to acquire money but can simply create as much as it needs), the debt it issues is simply a store for excess value in the economy. In other words, it is a way for the private sector to save the excess of its wealth after taxation.

It is probably not quite so clear that the government cannot in fact control deficits, except by setting spending so abysmally low that even a very poorly performing economy can generate enough taxation to "pay" what it has spent. In a recession, taxation falls and welfare payments rise, leading to a shortfall that the government cannot do anything about. If it raised taxes, it would simply withdraw even more money from the economy, lessening demand even further; same if it spent less. This process of generating a deficit is automatic. (The government can of course plan to run a deficit by planning to spend more than it plans to tax--note that in fact if the economy boomed in some unexpected way, and tax receipts rose sufficiently, the government would not be successful in running a deficit either!)

Something that people don't really grasp is that issuing debt is purely voluntary. The government does not have to do it at all. It can spend what it likes, so long as there are things to buy in its own currency. With 10% of the population out of work and factories idle, it's clear that there's plenty to buy. The government could cease to issue debt tomorrow and simply run unfunded deficits. Nothing would change except that rich investors would not be able to leech off our economy in this particular way. The reason it does not is purely ideological: conservatives invented the "balanced budget" as a way to discipline progressives, who they fear would if not checked spend money on social goods that would benefit the masses. I am not kidding. The only reason the government restricts its spending is so that you do not get your share of the value of your nation's economy.

Some argue, and certainly I do, that the government's role in the economy is to create an environment in which all have work and can assure their wellbeing. The way it works is not difficult to understand. People buy things and business supplies those things. If people want more of the things, business hires more people to provide them. If they want less, they lay people off. People want more or less for various reasons: at the moment, less because the economy is poor and people are not confident it will improve, and already carry too much debt.

The government can (and should) make up for the deficiency in spending. It can demand goods and services sufficient to provide work for everyone who wants it. It doesn't really matter what it demands (Keynes said it could pay people simply to dig holes and then fill them back in) but of course it could put people to work on useful projects. Imagine. The US government could build light rail in all its cities, new roads, new port infrastructure (few American ports can handle the new generation of container superships), new school buildings, employing everyone who needs a job.

Isn't that inflationary? If the government creates new money, doesn't that cause prices to go up? Well no. Inflation is not caused by more money; it is caused by more money chasing the same goods. If the economy is not working at full capacity, and demand is deficient, the government would not be competing with others for the same resources or goods. It is only when the economy is reaching full output that the government must step back. The only time a government needs to "balance the books" is when the economy is at full output.

Finally, I want to explain that surpluses are in fact bad for the economy, which is why they are so rare, thank goodness. Ignoring exports, the government's budgetary outcome is like this:

Spending = Receipts from taxation + borrowing

If the government balances its budget, borrowing is zero, so spending and taxation are precisely matched. This means that there is nothing left over for people to save! If the government runs a surplus, it takes more money out of the economy than it puts in, so people must dissave to pay taxes.

Be clear, there is nowhere else for the money to come from! If the American government does not spend US dollars, there are no US dollars. When we say that the Chinese "lend" the US dollars, we do not mean that China creates the dollars. It simply buys US dollar assets, which is a way for it to place its surplus wealth into US dollar form. (The US does not need to permit this, although there is good reason to allow China to acquire dollar assets. It's not the big problem people think: the US could pay China back by simply crediting certain accounts. Hang on, you're thinking, wouldn't that piss the Chinese off? Their money would be worth a bit less, right? Well no, because the value of money is not set by how much of it there is but by what each unit can buy, which would not change significantly. And the truth of it is that the Chinese buy US dollar assets precisely because the US government can always pay them back: they're safe as houses because the US can simply get the money from thin air if it chooses to.)

If the US government ran a surplus in perpetuity, it would in time remove sufficient value from the economy that it ceased to function. No one would have any US dollars to buy things with. Long before that happened, of course, the revolution would have carried the current form of government away. But if it "balances the books" now and then, to the detriment of the population, this has the effect of maintaining the value of fixed assets like land or gold, which have value in themselves and not just because you can get US dollars for them. Guess who likes the policy of reducing the deficit?

March 25

2011-03-25T23:58:00.000+10:00

S is confident and outgoing, and she doesn't like me. She is what the French call jolie laide, gives out an air of good health, which I find attractive, and is thin and lithe. Nothing I say ever seems to please her. It bothers me but I have no idea how to fix it.

Shut the fuck up, will you? a little voice is saying as I am talking. I am surprised for a moment that no one has heard; it seems clear enough.

Why do you imagine that anyone wants to know what you think? it peals. Why do you imagine you have anything to say that anyone will ever want to hear?

Driving through the dark, quiet streets of southern Brisbane, I am listening to The district sleeps alone tonight. It brings on a sense of melancholy: the sound of our bleak lives, wet streets, walking home with tears in our eyes, the frustration of finding out you were not worth having, and knowing that justice is being done.

I look at Naughtyman, fast asleep. He has never been any trouble. It's hard to understand the school's difficulties because he is easy to have around. He is gentle and sweet, a beautiful little boy.

Today they had their hair coloured. It's a charity thing: crazy hair day at the school. Zenita is excited when I pick them up from afterschool care. Everyone agreed that me and M had the best hair, she is saying. When Zenita kisses you, she sticks her belly out and puckers up. Zenella turns her head and proffers you a cheek or her forehead. Sometimes out of the blue she will say, I love you, Daddy.

I was thinking this morning, one day she will talk to me about love, and I will say, proudly, that I have loved her for every moment of her life. I enjoy being able to think something so trite: it makes me feel deeply human.

Not that I am.

***

It is not easy to make someone feel loved. They want it in a particular way, and you feel you shouldn't, or can't. You try to express it, but it's as though you are talking in a language they do not speak.

This is because within us love is wordless and ineffable. I often feel that we are not its agents. It happens to us; we do not, cannot just do it.

Or it seems it is that way for me. Maybe others have learned how. Maybe others are their own master. I think about S. Her life brings her good things because she approaches it as though it is something that belongs to her. Or so it seems to me. I'm not interested enough to think any more than that about it.

March 22

2011-03-22T00:53:00.000+10:00

Cunning (or so they wish) marketers pretend to have created a community of people so taken with a breakfast cereal that they will band together. Are there among us Crunchy Nutters? I would not be surprised if there were or were not. There may be--I know that my father has enjoyed watching videos of a cartoon meerkat that sells insurance and people are on the whole softminded enough to join all sorts of gangs. But if there aren't, it would not matter much. The illusion is sufficient to make its own fact.

For my finals at university, I wrote a dissertation on advertising slogans. It was nuanced and brilliant, and quoted Marshall McLuhan. Sadly, its audacity was lost on the examiners, who I can only guess were hoping for something on syntax.

But syntax is the most utter bollocks. It's the practice in physics to claim that it does not describe the world, but considers a model that approximates the world. Sadly, this has led all those areas of enquiry that claim to be scientific to adopt the approach that their "models" need no ground in reality so long as they explain the facts. So the leading theories in grammar contend with each other in postulating outlandish methods of generating the sentences we utter.

The last straw for me in that nonsense was the suggestion that we form the structure of our utterances before applying a layer of meaning. This seems wrong to me for two reasons: first, that words are so clearly the servants of meaning--that we arrange them thus to have one meaning and thus to have another (so that dog bites man is entirely different from man bites dog, though each are syntactically equivalent and seem to say the same thing, simply exchanging agent with object--but we do not understand the same thing from them: it is in the normal course for a dog to bite, but it is a special thing for a man, so that the two words "bite" have different connotations).

Well, maybe that is how it happens: so many things work in ways you wouldn't credit. Like quantum physics. It's long been my conviction that quantum physics describes nothing at all, but is simply a model that works in mathematics, and is confirmed by figures, which satisfy the model--but do they answer to reality? I have often read that quantum physics has been confirmed by observation, and I understand the import of the double slit experiment and the like, but what I'm not clear on is whether something that a model predicts corresponding with reality necessarily confirms that the theory is describing the world or merely succeeding in giving results that fit it in a particular way.

***

The meerkat is quite funny, by the way. I'm not disparaging the meerkat. But there is a website with meerkat-related stuff, and people like my dad are teased by promises of upcoming videos, which they can watch in advance of their being screened as ads. All this for a supposed slip of the tongue. My dad believes it confirms the often-heard saying that "the ads are better than the telly".

***

I have been reading about Yemen, which will be in the news for the next while. I was much taken with Sana'a, its capital, which has a beautiful old city, full of houses all painted in the same fashion. It is of course now on my list, below Vegas and Vladivostok but ahead of Moldova. Yemen is unravelling, and Syria cannot be far behind. One can even dream of the day Arabia will no longer be Saudi.

March 21

2011-03-21T21:58:00.000+10:00

The geckoes run and bark on the ceiling, whether courting or fighting I don't know enough about geckoes to tell. I feel disconsolate, restless, mal dans ma peau. The night feels long and not long enough: I will run out of time and have to stop reading, stop thinking, stop everything.

How like life. Yet like life, I am doing nothing with it. I am not even reading the books set for my book clubs. I am instead reading, and enjoying, the Aubrey-Maturin series of books. I read the first to see what level one should pitch a romance of the sea at, then the second and third because one can immerse oneself happily in another world so vividly painted. I am not studying, writing or using my time wisely. I am just wishing the hours away.

The light in this room is fluorescent, way too bright, and it is because of the many moths it attracts that I have such a crowd of geckoes. They are my only company: geckoes and ghosts. I am perturbed by thoughts of people who no longer want me in their lives. I did not want to be cast out. It was right: right for them, but I wonder sometimes why no one will do right for me.

If you do not care much, it costs you little to be spurned. And I'm not given to caring much: utterly careless until too late after the fact, when I am all regret that I had never bothered more (or they had, when I am feeling generous about what there might even be for them to bother with).

But if you do care, it leaves you aswim always with the unanswered (and worse, the lacking answers whose questions you would not dare to ask).

Sometimes I have a day terror and I cry out with fear. But I do not know whether I am terrified of dying; or of never having lived. So live: others seem to manage. To refuse to do so is to suffer a terminal illness.

Yet even a doctor might accurately diagnose a disease for which they know no cure. Fear not though: I am applying palliatives. Soon I will be asleep, and awake in the morning, feel good but for a dullness in the head.

March 15

2011-03-15T19:08:00.000+10:00

So today I wake up in a semistrange bed in the middle of the night and it is only B's two year old, who does not want to sleep alone.

Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I used to like to have someone in the bed every night but I grew accustomed to my own company and now I don't care so much. Sometimes the closeness of another person feels good, but sometimes it's just too hot or I cannot get comfortable or some other thing makes it so that I wish I was in my own bed. B does not in any case like to fall asleep with someone close, and turns her back to me in just the same way Mrs Zen used to, so I suppose she too has trained herself over time not to need it.

Life conspires to remind you, often, that you cannot have everything you want, and that no one can give you all you need, even if they are willing.

Later, I drove back home. The second half of the drive is nice, through Toohey Forest and along Marshall Road, and of course it was sunny, so it was pleasant enough. Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing--finding enough things that are pleasant enough that our lives become worth living? It is harder than it sounds though.

I felt the life draining out of me as I worked through the afternoon. The humidity rose and I could feel tiredness creeping in. I feel listless and old: I feel like I have wasted so much of my life pointlessly, and endless walking on the spot has worn me down. But I do not have the energy to make anything more of it.

I wish I could analyse why I can't achieve what I want to. I have studied poker some, but not enough that I'm any better than moderate, and although I can make money, I am short of feeling confident enough to love myself as a poker player. It just hasn't come easy to me, and it is the kind of thing that you can know you fall short, but not exactly how. You are easily confused by seeming to know and by the randomness of it: so that you can't be sure entirely whether you are doing the right thing. I've had coaching, and coaches say yes, you should be winning at this or that level, and the things they suggest I am doing wrong don't seem major enough to get in the way of it. But somehow I'm not there and I doubt I will ever be. I have hardly played this month, and I don't see myself playing a great deal for the rest of it because I have enough money just about.

Neither can I write my book (or books, depending how you look at it). I find it hard to believe anyone will bother, and I hate to do things that no one bothers with. It's like, you cook a great meal--or you feel it is great--and the person you cooked it for eats it but doesn't seem to love it. What is the use of that? I know you should satisfy yourself, please yourself first and then fuck the world, but I am almost entirely incapable of not caring.

Caring will break your heart, and not caring is impossible because you were brought up to have good manners.

Why can't you cast that aside? Others do. Others have no manners at all.

Nor do I work much on my music. It's just so frustrating that it's so uncomplex and boring. I would have liked more than anything to have talent in music. It is potentially such a good outlet for creativity. But I never learned how to make the music in my head work in my DAW. When I was a schoolboy, I had a whole album of music that I could play back in my head as I walked to and from the train station. But I could never render a note of it. Any music I actually made was just so much squalling noise.

It is terrible to feel useless at everything. But the world also conspires to remind you that whenever you feel like you can achieve something, you can't. You do not have the abilities you imagined you did.

Now I am supposed to be cleaning the house. I don't mean anyone supposes I should. Just that that is what I supposed myself to be doing after I had finished work. I did some washing and tidied some things up but no actual cleaning. I only have an hour before I have to pick up Naughtyman from Scouts and here I am, wasting away time writing a blog no one reads. I can't even write about what I want to because I don't want to be misinterpreted.

I already feel like I cannot please anybody, that somehow I am always on trial, always contingent, that I can be sent back to the shop. I don't even know how I feel about it, except that I am torn between wanting just to be myself and wanting to please. As ever, I cannot resolve that. I feel as though I need to be set free from needing to be loved, to be wanted, so that I can satisfy myself. But that is of course impossible just now. Even if it wasn't a Sisyphean task, I am so burdened by loneliness that I don't know how I could stand it if I ended up burning what I have for the sake of loving myself more. The big problem with being yourself, in any case, is knowing who that even is--and fearing that it is someone who cannot please others at all (even though, rationally, you know that must be ridiculous, because others do, and some of them are on the face it quite unpleasant).

After leaving bed, I sat at the back of B's house for a while, throwing her boy in the air and catching him. She loves that I have a relationship with her boys, but I wonder whether she loves me more for what I represent than for anything about me. Does it matter though? Does anything matter but finding enough things that are pleasant enough that our lives become worth living?

More nit

2011-03-12T13:34:00.000+10:00

I can't pretend not to be impacted by the leverage of the word "impact" as a verb. It fosters a climate of not being able to comprehend the writtenness of English and so readers are brought to a state of bewildered boredom and miswillingness to continue to exercise the reading function.

***

In the course of my work, I read a lot of business and management books. I'm usually left none the wiser about what they were trying to say because the "insights" (as they are wont to describe wiffling around the obvious) are buried in an avalanche of jargon and clumsy phrasing. I can only do so much about the phrasing, given that the authors rarely seem to be saying anything of real value, or if they are, they are so impenetrable that the diamonds are shrouded in dogshit.

I do apply some simple rules. If you say "impacted" about anything other than your teeth, I will make you say "affected"; "leverage" is banned, you "use" your resources, your "insights" and your staff; you may not "utilise" anything ever; you "foster" children, but "encourage" or even "build" growth, wellbeing and success; I "enhance" you by using "improve" or "increase" as appropriate, and I do it "timely", "regularly", "daily", "weekly" because you do not need a basis for "periods" (not "of time" because what else do your periods consist of); you may not "as" when you mean "because", or "hence" or "thus" when you mean to "so"; you may only have things "in order" when they line up, and often what you wanted was "so that" anyway; and, believe me, if you are tempted to "prior to" me, remember that I would cheerfully kill you as soon as look at you.

These are of course minor things and they do much worse. Choosing an infelicitous word would not harm most books, but to do it on every page, topping it off with a spew of useless buzzwords, does not confirm your being clued into the business zeitgeist: it makes you utterly unreadable. Which is possibly the point. After all, if no one is quite sure what you're saying, they can't be quite sure you're talking bollocks.

Parrots in my yard

2011-03-03T09:38:00.000+10:00

How mundane it is, ten thousand miles from home. Everyone in their cars, to and from work, everyone in buses and cars. How small our world that we should all live these impoverished lives, set apart from each other by suspicion and fear.

How exotic it is, ten thousand miles from home. Parrots in my yard and a lizard scuttles across the paving. Now I have the love of Australian women, I never would have imagined. Now I am a different person, neither one thing nor another. I thought I would be a good man, at least, something like it, and I find I am nothing like it. I didn't grow; I stayed the same and only my shell changed.

Even my eyes have changed. They were once green, you couldn't have doubted it, but now you can't be sure. Today they are blue, tomorrow green again, and all that you could say is how flat and dull they are. I didn't ever imagine I would become dull, lifeless and inert, although I was never anything else. I imagined I had a motor that could start if I could turn the key.

It is hot. The sky is mostly blue. It might rain later but you can be sure it will be hot. When I first came here, I slept through the hot, still afternoons. I rested. I conserved my strength. What for, I don't know.

I am still vigorous and young. The grey hair is misleading. I don't feel blunted, although I suppose I must be. It all falls away, we know that, and we pretend it doesn't. It all shifts and slides, but it slides downhill. We know that water flows always downhill but we imagine somehow we will climb the slope. We are the reverse of Sisyphus, trying to find happiness by pretending we are going somewhere. At least he knew there was no point to what he was doing and could not pretend otherwise.

The other day there were parrots in my yard. I don't know what they were expecting to find. They came, stayed briefly and then were gone. That is all they did.

Nit

2011-02-24T12:20:00.000+10:00

Reading this piece about Obama manning up over Libya, I had to get my nit on.

Obama is quoted as saying:

The suffering and bloodshed is outrageous and it is unacceptable.

This is all too common these days: a writer or speaker will use a singular verb with a compound subject. Because the two things, suffering and bloodshed, are yoked together, Obama feels they are one singular subject. This is incorrect in English, of course, and he should have used "are", as he continued to do with another compound subject in the same sentence:

So are threats and orders to shoot peaceful protesters

That this construction is wrong can easily be demonstrated by replacing the nouns with proper nouns, thus:

*John and Mary is outrageous...

which is quite clearly wrong.

The article was in any case poorly subbed. It's clearly American agency copy that some poor sod plonked into the page with barely a second look. This is apparent because "neighborhoods" is misspelled and in a couple of places, the phrasing is infelicitous and a good sub would have fixed it even if they were doing a quick runthrough.

It's not personal, it's just business

2011-02-23T11:08:00.000+10:00

I hate the way people do business these days. They can't just do you an honest service at a fair price. They see you simply as a money cow that they have to milk.

I use Optus for my mobile phone provider. They have mostly been a pain in the arse to deal with and I wouldn't recommend them, but the deal I was on was what I wanted and I had used them for prepaid (because it's easy to recharge with them), so I could easily switch to postpaid.

So my contract ran out and I didn't know, because who keeps track of that stuff, and I was shocked by my bill this month. I don't use a mobile much, so I have a $19 cap and my bill is usually just the $19. It was much more so I checked it out online. My value on my plan had disappeared so I wrote them and asked why they had done that without telling me.

So some chick rings me and she is actually very unpleasant and unhelpful. Her line is basically "I don't know what you're talking about". She doesn't know what my plan was, what the new plan is or whether the T&Cs have changed. "You would have got some T&Cs," she said. Well yes, I probably did, so likely it was buried in the fine print that they would fuck me once my plan ended. But I don't recall anyone telling me that when I signed up for the plan and certainly they did not let me know the contract had ended.

My business is obviously not worth much to them, so it won't hurt them much that I move on to another provider. It would have been nice if they had made a token effort to keep me but I guess a customer who actually checks his bill instead of just paying what they demand is not what they want at all.

So I wrote them a message, which will obviously be ignored, and Optus can join my list of businesses that will get reverse word of mouth from me.

I feel really dissatisfied with your customer service. Someone rang me and was not at all helpful. She did not explain why I suddenly lost the value on my plan or where I could find details of the plan I have been dumped on without being told I would be. She could not tell me where in the terms and conditions it says that would happen. It doesn't in the current T&Cs but she said the old ones must just have been different. She did not explain why I wasn't told you would be taking half the value of my plan away so that I could decide to move on or choose a new plan. She could not actually have been less helpful if she tried.

She could for instance have retrieved and sent me a copy of the T&Cs that applied to my plan, so that I could see where it said you would remove half my value when my contract ran out. Can you do that? I haven't kept a copy so I'd appreciate it if you could email me the T&Cs that applied to that plan. I'm fairly sure it wasn't actually mentioned on your webpage, but I accept that businesses hide things in fine print and that you hope people won't actually read their bills but will just pay. It's a bit like "interest free". You offer a good deal up front but hope to make more money by sneaking customers onto worse deals without letting them know.

I know I'm not a high-value customer and you probably don't mind losing my business, but I feel you effectively cheated me this month. I guess that's how you do business though and certainly, if your representative is anything to go by, you don't care about keeping your customers happy.

Cursed all the same

2011-02-14T12:10:00.000+10:00

There's always another side to the coin, of course. You sober up and in the morning your head hurts and you're still tired.

You are reminded often how bad you are at being a father, how like your own dad you are, how long the years stretch before you, that you will have to try to be better than you are and fail, how many years you will have to be reminded how poor you are, materially and spiritually, how trapped you are by circumstances. You hear yourself angry over something small and you think, so much for the positive parenting. Whoever wrote that stuff did not ever feel stressed or unhappy, or had the wherewithal to compartmentalise life sufficiently not to allow one thing to spill over into another.

And you write to the people who give you work and beg for more, and none comes, and each month you wonder how you will pay the rent the next. There is always something else to pay for and you could manage it if you had money coming in and knew how that was, but never knowing whether you can meet your obligations wears you down. Each month the worry grows that you will not get more work, that they don't rate you any more but haven't told you, because that happens and it's not something you can smell in the wind. Or sometimes you do smell it in the wind and have to ignore it because you cannot despair.

And you are stuck with it because you never were happy go lucky but the burden of responsibility has sucked you dry of optimism. You can't just make your meagre living from poker because something tells you that if you try, you will never make it. You can't just write your pirate novel because a little voice says, huh, why bother? No one will want it, just as no one has ever wanted anything you've had to offer. You have nothing at all anyone wants, so give up, drive a bus, work in an office, die as what you were: an ordinary fool with ideas above his station, no one special.

And every time you meet someone you are thinking, let this be the one, let this be the person I will love and who will love me, and you do not know which flaw will be the one she hates enough to let you go, but how can a person as simple as you are have so many flaws! How is it so impossible for anyone to think that whatever there is good about you is enough?

The worst thing is, curses are self-fulfilling prophecies. You expect the worst and that's what you get. Sometimes, I wish I still suffered from mania. At least I had times I felt like life could be wonderful. Now I'm stuck with wondering whether I will even have a life at all.

Blessed

2011-02-11T23:21:00.000+10:00

In some ways I am very contented and cannot think life is so bad.

The biggest thing is I now have my kids and even though I'm useless at it, I am learning and it works in a haphazard way. Zenella comes out to cuddle me when she turns her light out and my heart just bursts and I feel like it is just worth it. Even Naughtyman I get to touch him and feel I won't fuck it up completely.

And I have a new gf who it blows my mind that I'm so into her, and I tell myself I wanted someone so slow down and don't get ahead of yourself. But if she was meh, I'd be meh; I haven't become foolish. I still know what is real.

And A was saying to me today, you hang in there with work, and for years I have. I have had a lot of stress but I still make it. I can eat, drink and be merry, even though I'm not sure how I'm paying for it.

I know how to count my blessings. I don't have a depressive cycle any more. I have times when I feel numb and even facing the day is tough, but I don't feel like I'm labouring under a black mist or so manic I can't feel my feet. Sometimes I even feel like contentment is not totally beyond me.

I am completely drunk btw. My three babies are fast asleep in my house, safe and happy, and I'm ready to sleep. I know how to count my blessings, one two three. I know how to be blessed; I don't doubt it.

Pressed in a book

2011-02-11T08:08:00.001+10:00

If you were walking on a lonely path, and you saw a leaf among the litter, rare and precious, would you pick it up? Would you take it home and press it in a book, so that you could keep it?

But wouldn't its colour fade, and everything that made it lovely leach away, so that in time all that you had pressed in your book was the memory of beauty, the idea of the living leaf? And what if you were to forget your leaf, put the book back on the shelf and never think that you had captured the moment you saw a beautiful leaf within it? What if your children, or their children, or someone else's children's children even, sorting through your books, let the leaf flutter to the ground, so that once more it was just litter, undesired?

You could just walk by, let the moment rest there, the warm sun, the smell of eucalypts, the sound of birds calling to each other, whispering songs of love and alarms to let each other know that you are lumbering through the woods.

You could just let it lie, never disturb it, as it faded.

But when you see a star, don't you wish on it?

***

Last night, Naughtyman called me into his room. Look, he said, at that gecko hanging. I took a look. A gecko had another by the tail, and it swung gently, unable to find anywhere to put its feet.

I think they're courting, I said, although I'm not sure that that's how geckoes court. It just seemed to make sense, because why else would a gecko dangle another by the tail?

And why would they do that? Why would a gecko like to swing powerless in the breeze? Well, we know, don't we? But I couldn't tell Naughtyman why, because he's going to have to find out for himself what it's like to be swinging in midair, no longer the master of his own fate, helpless and dependent.

But we know, if we have ever lived.

You are wrong about me

2011-01-30T23:14:00.000+10:00

You were wrong about me. I cannot say how but I know you were. Sometimes I feel like I have to believe that or I will dissolve and sometimes I just believe it.

I made my money this month. I felt the fear and I withstood it. I won my money back because I'm good enough at it to do that, and I made some dollars from coaching and made my money. I keep turning up. You think I wasn't worth anything and however little I am worth, I keep turning up.

You were wrong about me because you misunderstood who I am. I am humble and I don't think that's a sin. You think you should have pride when there's nothing to be proud of. You think the abstract means more than who we really are, and I never will. I never will, and I have to be happy with that.

You were wrong about me. I am happy with who you are because I'm adaptable. I'll take goodness from wherever I find it and make what I can of it. You think that goodness is not enough, that it's not worth nurturing. You're wrong. I'm not ever changing my mind about this. You're wrong and I don't have to share your belief that people are not worthwhile.

You are wrong about me because I'm trying. I'm willing to fail and I do, God knows I do. You should have loved me. If you had, you would have had everything you wanted. I'm like that. I'm like a well you could have drawn water from if you only knew how. You think there's a secret; there isn't. You are wrong about that too.

How I stopped loving him

2011-01-23T13:50:00.000+10:00

There is nothing worse in this life than falling out of love with someone. It has only ever really happened to me once because I work hard to keep loving people I love--something inside me does not want to let go of it and ticks away forever, trying hard to see the things I loved and make them worth more.

It is hard too, for me at least, not to be loved by someone who once loved me. "Hard" does not begin to cover it. It feels like a terrible sickness that I cannot shake off. It feels as though I have been diminished to a point, as though my worth has been drained to nothing. It has happened to me often in the past few years: either I have stopped being loved or the person who loves me has stopped feeling I am worth showing any love to. From my point of view, it feels the same, whichever is the case. The worst of it is, I need to cure that sickness before I feel as though there is none of me left. I need to be loved: it is the fuel of my existence. I cannot help that; I cannot rationalise it away. It is so deeply part of who I am that it is almost the only thing I am sure about that is true about me. Everything else I have lied to myself about, sacrificed, changed or traded. But that remains.

But once I had a love that died. I couldn't see the good in him any more and I found him too hard to love. It wasn't really his fault. He lost his way and became confused. I have wanted to love him again: that same thing ticks away inside me, but I find that I have too much contempt for him even to want to be with him.

He was always inclined to be a whiny child. His marriage broke up after only a few years because he was unable to love his wife. He treated her badly because he had such a lack of understanding of his own worth. Feeling unworthy of love makes it hard to love others. It was not wholly his fault, of course, but part of becoming a man, for him, was to absolve his wife of blame and accept responsibility. Really, that was the time in his life when he became responsible, stopped blaming others for how his life was, stopped feeling bitter for what he did not have, and started to recognise what he did.

Simply, he abandoned the poisons in his life, stopped thinking he was a special case and found what there was to love in himself. He became confident and aware, capable and unafraid. It was then that I began to love him. I cherished him, took care of him, believed in him. You would have liked him. He is very personable and generous. His wife found she liked him, and they reconciled.

He was very content. Although he didn't love his work, it didn't get him down the way it would have done before, and the rest of his life was enough compensation for that. He was able to focus on the thing that mattered to him: writing, and although what he was writing was not very good, he felt good about it. And, ultimately, that is what matters, because we must please ourselves if we are to please anybody.

When they had a child, he felt fulfilled, that he had found a way of life that gave him what he wanted. But from that point, things began to sour for him. His wife found things in his life that she didn't like and she changed in ways that made life harder enough that his contentment slowly eroded. Some say having children changes a woman, that her all-encompassing love for the child leaves too little for her man. I suppose that may be true, and when you are someone who needs love, losing it can be tough. Still, he was resilient, and made changes to help him cope with that. They changed countries and he found a great job. His relationship was not perfect: it became easier to be frustrated with what his wife lacked and harder to focus on what she had--what she had diminished a little, and sometimes a little is enough, if it is the right little.

But at that point, he could still have been content, but he made a bad choice, a ruinous choice, which he could not have understood at the time was as bad as it turned out to be. It seemed right. At that time, he still had a quality that I loved in him: he would do what he thought was right, not inflexibly but steadfastly.

But it was terrible for him. He had, without knowing it, become sick. Suddenly, he found himself isolated, lonely and hopeless, and too sick to cope. His ability to focus on the right thing disappeared. He couldn't think how to improve his life, to make the right choices. For someone like him, who enjoys being around people, the worst thing to do would be to separate himself from them. But he couldn't help that. He had to work to support his growing family, and his focus on them, on making life work for them, made it impossible to find the energy to make life for himself.

He became broken, trapped in a cycle of mania and depression, alienated and deeply lonely. His wife withdrew her love for him. With three young children, she had nothing left for him. Were he still the confident, resilient man he had been, he would have been big enough to weather that, to maintain their relationship by his own goodness, by having enough heart for both of them. He failed in that; he didn't even try. I became unable to love him too.

If flowers could beg for water, they would take it from anywhere. They would seek it out. And he did. He sought love, and found it. Because he did not go outside, and had no belief that he was at all attractive, physically or personally, he could not--and would not, in any case--find it with a local woman. He did not have the capability anyway: he felt he should spend what time he could with his wife, housebound herself by motherhood, and try, with the few resources he had, to make a relationship that would at least sustain them until... well, it's hard to say until what.

He was desperate to be home, to be somewhere that didn't feel alien and unkind, to have people in his life he felt were at least not hostile to him. I wonder whether he should not have simply done that, left her and the children and tried at least to recover himself, his sanity, his wellbeing. Would it have been a worse outcome?

But he found love. A parched, foolish love that would never have had any attraction for him were he whole, but easy for an onlooker to misunderstand. And it would have been easy to surrender it if it had not been the only love he felt in his life.

It probably seems odd to most people to love and be loved by someone you do not ever meet, who possibly is not even real. I mean, I know how fucking odd his life became! I don't need telling. I am rational enough to know how a thing is, even if in the heat of the moment it seems another way.

And I genuinely believe there is no sin in it. A person cannot help who they are, what they consist in. Particularly not a simple, gentle person like him. There is enough to hate him for without hating him for needing to be loved, when I know that he was so close to dying, and needed love to be able to hope to flourish.

That slipped away though, strangely enough because she was jealous of his life, jealous that he wanted to love his wife. But it didn't help his life any for her to be gone, his relationship with his wife was too broken, trapped in a cycle of contempt and frustration, each unable to be better for the other, each unable to be the first to say, stop.

I cannot talk about the last few months of his marriage and the months afterwards because he has already sung that song and the people he wanted to hear it let it fall on deaf ears. That left him crushed, hollow, almost without self esteem. I do not think anyone intends that to happen to you; they simply cannot love you any more and that isn't something they can help. I wish I had been able to love him then. He needed me. I suppose I can say that I cared enough about him to try to help him recover from what had ailed him, and was successful in that. It seemed so prosaic to have been sick, to have an organic cause for the depression, the confusion, the sadness.

But what good did it do him? The damage was done. He had become someone whom the people he needed, desired most to love him did not love. And when you are not able to say, I am loveable, because you simply do not believe it, you cannot find a way to make that all right.

I could talk about other things that make me despise him: how he lost his livelihood because he was stupid, how he has become a bad father and a worse friend, how he has become so insensitive that even people he thinks are happy with him cannot even stand to be with him, feel he is not worth time or effort, but I have already given enough reasons not to love him. I know that without love, he has no reason to be, and I feel sorry about that, but how can I feel that anyone can love him if I can't, when I know I am capable of love, albeit a small, withered love that no one, except him, wants.

Loser

2011-01-21T18:47:00.001+10:00

I have lost 500 dollars today. It is everything I won this month. It is so lonely to sit here and lose. But I'm a loser. That's what I do best. I fail at everything. Even when I think I'm winning, I lose and lose and lose. It doesn't matter how hard I try.

I am stuck with it because I have no way to make money. Soon I won't be able to pay the rent. I am stuck having to try to make a living in a place with no living for me. What else can I do? I have to try to make a life in a place where life escapes me, where when I thought I had a little bit of joy, the girlfriend I loved dumped me. And worse, thinks I am such a loser it wasn't even worth trying to work out.

Here's my life. I raise KK, and a guy shoves QQ. He hits a fourcard flush. The guy who sucks out on me is a complete arsehole. I know him. He laughed afterwards. Why wouldn't he? Winners get to laugh at losers.

It is going to be very hard to fire up tables tomorrow. Some days it's hard even to get out of bed, to force myself to live my pointless life of losing.

On another table, I yet again lose with QQ in a 70/30. I have probably had 50 70/30s today. I should win 35. I imagine I've won 3.

Here's my life. Tell me, would you live it:

http://www.holdemmanager.net
NL Holdem $100(BB) Poker Stars Game#56296220951

ARFO777 ($2,025)
yedckol ($1,260)
BeesonZ ($1,785)
lonnieboy ($2,565)
Parvatti ($1,925)
sbw_75 ($1,115)
t bone 2526 ($925)
DeathCardSix ($705)
FR Vessant ($1,195)

ARFO777 posts (SB) $50
yedckol posts (BB) $100

Dealt to FR Vessant Qc Qd
fold, fold, fold, fold, fold,
DeathCardSix raises to $705 (AI)
FR Vessant raises to $1,195 (AI)
fold, fold,
FLOP ($1,560) 5c 8d 5s
TURN ($1,560) 5c 8d 5s Ah
RIVER ($1,560) 5c 8d 5s Ah Kd
DeathCardSix shows Ad 3d
(Pre 32%, Flop 17.2%, Turn 95.5%)

FR Vessant shows Qc Qd
(Pre 68%, Flop 82.8%, Turn 4.5%)

DeathCardSix wins $1,560

The weird thing is, I won that tournament. I came back from 480 chips and I won it. Mad. It's basically the only one I did win, but crazy that I choose a hand to illustrate how rotten things are, and it's from a tourney I beat against the odds.

Pity life isn't like that.

Wasps

2011-01-14T22:58:00.000+10:00

When you kill wasps, they freeze in place. It seems a pity to do that to their long lithe bodies, to make them as static as I am. But they are so heedless, what else can you do? The world has so much in it you cannot reason with. Sometimes I wonder whether I am just not sane because I want the world to be.

You know, we have massive ingenuity. When it comes to finding ways to hurt each other, to kill or maim, we are extremely capable. But we did not ever find a way to communicate with wasps, to say to them that we would not hurt you if you simply lived your lives away from us.

Wasps are built so that the thing they have for protecting themselves and their family is the thing that brings their demise. We would not hate wasps if they had no sting.

***

I feel guilty for neglecting the children. Some of the time it feels like I have forgotten how to love anyone. I feel like I have numbed myself.

But other times I am ferociously stinging myself and I've forgotten what I was protecting myself from, or whether I was just in a fury, punishing myself, and what for, really?

What else can you do but spin around in circles when all you want is someone to love but you are no good at loving anyone at all?

Wanting to is not enough, obviously.

***

So, sometimes I think, you have the chance. You could cut yourself loose of it, shed your casing. But I don't know how. What wasp ever lost his sting?

I wanted to be able to bathe in being wanted for a while, and feel the muddy accretion slide away. I know it doesn't work like that but sometimes you suspend disbelief, have faith and miracles happen.

Or not. I froze the wasps to their nest and I could hear a howling wind. I knew it was my soul, hurting for what I've done. Or haven't done.

About Bella

2010-12-25T17:20:00.000+10:00

I can't help thinking about you. You meant a lot to me even if I didn't mean so much to you. I know, I am ready to leap when I should walk, but I never quite learned how to crawl.

I loved your kisses because you had a way of kissing that made me feel like only I existed. Am I fooling myself because I felt good about myself? Maybe I am but I will miss your kisses.

I loved your smile and you often smiled. I am too simple to know a smile can hide sadness; how can I know? I loved your smile because you were beautiful when you smiled; you changed in a way no one else I know does. Your smile seemed to speak of knowledge, that I had made you know something you hadn't known. I am confused to learn that I showed you nothing new, but still I will miss your smiles.

I loved you to hold me because you made me feel safe. You made me feel the world could not be cruel. I did not know that you intended cruelty yourself. I feel betrayed by it, yet I know it is your right to feel however you feel about it.

I am confused because we spent so many hours that seemed right but you tell me they were wrong. I am confused because it seems like if something's sour you should be able to taste it. But you tasted good to me.

I feel sad because I hate to be powerless and I am powerless to change your mind. I feel like we could have done good for each other but what do I know? I am vain enough to hurt but not vain enough to think I know any better.

Reptile brain

2010-12-22T00:26:00.001+10:00

I sat on the front steps, watching a lizard run through the links of the fence between my yard and next door's. I have seen him under the steps, the same lizard, or another like him. He always runs away.

I have hours to sit and think, if I want to sit and think, but it isn't healthy. Sooner or later, I tire of myself, of the incessant voice of a monkey who tells me I deserve loneliness, deserve spite, deserve unhappiness. I don't have anyone who wants me to feel good about myself, only small insistent reminders of what is wrong with me.

It's not that I don't think it's worth trying.

***

The moon is astonishing, full and clear. I stop for a moment because it strikes me how bright it is. I don't know what to make of it: we live under a sun so bright that even a distant reflection gives enough light to see by, albeit our vision is blurry.

And someone says somewhere that this could all be a dream, because it's like Zhuangzi said, and when you are dreaming you do not know you are living. But I always know I am not living when I am dreaming. I ask around and people have dreams that seem real, but mine are like disjointed, vague movies. They do not often seem to have any point, yet they are nearly always oriented at a goal.

I dream of success though and I am almost never made unhappy by a dream. Sometimes I have night terrors but they are formless and incoherent, not something you could describe. I know that this is when I have sunk below the part of me that creates pictures, to the part that knows nothing but to react, like a lizard on a sunny day.

That part is terrified but does not know how to live. That part cries out like a baby that wants to be held. Sometimes I hear a child in a shopping centre, screaming at a mother that won't indulge it. I understand babies better than I understand adults, because mostly all I want is for someone to hold me and make me feel as though there is nothing beyond the moment. I wish I could stop trusting it but it is more me than anything I have laid over it and even if I cannot nurture it and no one else will, it will endure.

***

I no longer feel depressed. The tryptophan and B12 fixed that. Now I just feel numb, and it's worse. I feel as though I daren't feel anything and I know that being risk averse has never been good for me. I never put anything into it and that results in only ever skimming the surface.

But when I have, I got burnt, and it's hard to feel that that is not just something about me, and I cannot avoid setting myself on fire.

It's not that I don't think it's worth trying, it's just that no one seems to think I'm worth anything much. And I have too much of me that wants to believe them to overcome. My girlfriend dumped me because I'm not solid, and it's hard to say, I can be solid, when you are to all appearances no more than a ghost.

But I can be solid. Nothing makes me believe I can't.

***

I was watching Lost and I was thinking about the dog in the plane. It would have no idea what was happening when the plane crashed. It would be entirely incomprehensible to the dog.

The dog would have an entire drama happen around it with no notion that anything in particular was going on. I believe the dog prospers though. It seems entirely unharmed.

I am sure there's a moral in that story but I haven't figured it out yet.

***

I believe in you though. When I am out in the cool night and I look up at the infinite sky and know that we are nothing, our lives meaningless and tiny; I believe in you still. Even though I know that you prosper in this world if you see the weakness in others, if you exploit others and you do, to the point that you leave me breathless with the feeling that you didn't think there was anything you should be giving me; even so, I believe in you and can't stop.

I believe you have good in you and it will always outweigh the bad, even if the bad makes me weep with impotence and frustration. I believe you have good in you that could flourish and I love you for it. I cannot help it. I cannot become bitter, even though I feel a shell of bitterness weigh me down; I still cannot stop believing that somehow there is a golden piece of me that will resonate with the gold in you, that you will see it in yourself and believe too that nothing else is worth quite as much.

I know that this is only an outcome of having no idea who you are, how you feel, what you consist in, and no real idea about who I am either. I know it is an illusion, which you have shattered often enough for me to surrender it, but I won't. Even though I know we have no souls, I will believe we do until I have no breath to proclaim my belief in you. I don't know why; I cannot control it; it lives in that part of me, that flickering faint light that yearns for a gentle sigh to make it blaze, which cannot be extinguished, even on a dark night that even the moon, hidden by clouds, sheds no light on.

***

Tomorrow, I am going to dismiss the first three thoughts I have. One for the lizard, one for the monkey, and one for the dog. I will think what's left and you can take me or leave me for it. I will succeed because you are wrong about me and so am I. Most importantly, so am I.

On deja vus

2010-12-14T21:54:00.000+10:00

So I was watching Fringe, and there was an interesting explanation of deja vu, which I felt was flawed, but it set me to thinking. In Fringe, a character explains that we feel we have done things before because there is a parallel universe that is very similar to this one, in which we actually have done the things we deja vu. However, there was no explanation why these universes should be out of phase, and as far as I can make out, they are not, at least not significantly.

But I think there's a way deja vu can be real. I've never been terrifically convinced by the standard explanation, which is I believe that your brain effectively interprets the same information twice, with a very slight lag, so that you have a "memory" that is formed twice in rapid succession, and you confuse yourself into believing you had previously experienced the thing memorised. Given the haziness of memory, this does work, I suppose, and we're aware that we confuse ourselves in perception all the time. I have another way of explaining it though that I like.

The problem with time is that it is effectively a fourth dimension of space, not really something separate. Among other things, this should make it directionless (in the same way that up is relative to where your feet are, not an absolute direction, and your left is my right). Time should not be seen as "flowing" in any real sense. I won't go any further into discussing why this is true; let's just take it that it is.

The problem of time can be resolved somewhat by the notion of the block universe. In this conception, everything that is, was and will be in the universe exists at the same "time", an eternal present, and we experience time because our consciousness navigates through it, translating a static universe into a dynamic experience, in a similar way to a film, where static frames--pictures--are run one after the other to give the sensation of action. With a film, all the frames exist before you watch the first one. You could in principle reassemble them in any order, and the number of combinations of frames would be very high (I don't know how many ways you can assemble two hundred thousand frames, say, but it must be a very large number, and isn't that the number of frames in a movie of about a couple of hours?). Even though most of those combinations would not make sense, very many would, even though they aren't the "correct" combination.

It's plain that in the block universe, at least in principle, we could "foresee" events simply because they are already there to be seen. We have deja vu because we get a glimpse of another part of the block universe. I have no idea what the mechanism would be.

But wait, there's more. Quantum theory has led many scientists to believe that we live in a multiverse, that at each moment of "decision" for a particle, the particle takes both paths that are possible for it, and two new universes come into being. So there are infinite universes in which everything that could happen does happen. So your deja vu does not need to be quite accurate, because you may be able to see a "wrong" part of the block multiverse.

***

One reason I like the block universe concept is that it makes a lot of sense in connection with the concept of God. God is supposed to be omniscient and transcendent. The latter means that he is not contained within space and time, which implies that all of time exists for him simultaneously. If God was positioned outside a block multiverse, he would be able to "see" everything in this way. (This does not imply that God must only be outside the multiverse. He may also be immanent; in other words, he can be within the multiverse too--being transcendent does not necessitate only being outside the multiverse, only that one must be outside it in some sense--however, my understanding is that Muslim theology struggles with this notion and has held that Allah is only transcendental, because he is not material: this gives him the problem that he cannot create anything because he has no means of engaging with the material--a technical problem because of course he can create by his will, he just cannot physically perform the creation.)

I say multiverse because if the universe were unitary, we could not have free will. I have been thinking about how human beings could have free will when God is omniscient. He clearly would know what choices you would make at the moment of creation, so could not fairly punish you for choosing wrongly. I am not sure how having a multiverse makes a difference, but it at least has potential.

Here's a possibility. See what you think. God chose not to know what his creation would be like and limited his ability to see the multiverse. Now he only permits himself to see his own creation through our consciousness, which is why he created us. Maybe he likes surprises? This makes humans satisfyingly central to God's plan.

It also allows him to make moral judgements, which are otherwise rather difficult. Fundamentally, God made us the way we are, with full knowledge of what we consist in, so he can hardly blame us for being "bad". We are doomed to be. But if he chose to limit his ability to see how we would be, he can then disapprove.

***

On that note, this gets me to thinking about Stephen Hawking. In his most recent book, Hawking embraces the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum theory and then handwaves that into an explanation of how the universe is the way it is. But here's the thing. A multiverse contains every possible universe. Hawking likes this hypothesis because he believes that we no longer need a god to have created the finely balanced universe we see, which is incredibly improbable, because with approaching infinite universes, even the incredibly improbable is inevitable.

But wait, what arrogance does Prof Hawking display here! If everything, even the incredibly improbable, is inevitable, then surely within the multiverse, there must be universes with God? Hawking must be saying that not only is there no God, but that God is literally impossible. But somewhere in the multiverse will be talking fish, right? Because fish could have evolved the ability to speak, they just didn't, at least not on this planet in this universe. It's very close to impossible, definitely incredibly improbable, but not absolutely inconceivable. So Hawking will have us believe that God is less likely than a talking fish?

If God is possible in some universes, of course, he can be possible in any of them. We couldn't know which he was in and which not a priori.

So there you have it. Not only did I just explain deja vus, but I proved that either God exists or he's less likely than a talking fish. If you're not convinced, don't blame me. I got it from Prof Hawking and apparently, he's a very smart guy.

On roadblocks to success in poker

2010-12-13T22:17:00.001+10:00

Of all the things to try to be good at, poker was probably the worst of choices. But surely not? Surely poker is good for a smart guy who can handle the kind of analytical thinking it demands (and I must say it does; those who think that I'm "gambling" don't really understand how hard good players work to take the gamble out of it).

But I am smart in mostly the wrong ways, and I have character flaws that make it inappropriate for me.

1/ I find it very hard to focus. It's a mystery how I ended up as an editor, because I'm entirely unsuited to that too. I need to be doing six things at once (right now I'm watching Fringe on DVD while I write this, writing a poem in my pauses and I'm feeling underoccupied) or my mind wanders from my primary task. I was hopeless at studying at school. I like to read and can often focus fine on books, but I can't work through things methodically. To be good at STTs, the game I play, you need to study spots by looking at analysis, maths, and working on generalising what you've studied to real play. I've done some, of course, but what I need is to sit down and do a hundred hours of it. Fat chance. I can get through a few hands and then I start doing something else. It doesn't help that I become intrigued: I need to figure out equities, start looking at minor issues that don't help understand the spot, find patterns that are intriguing but useless. Luckily, in game I find I can keep track of other players quite well, because I'm a restless observer. I don't know them deeply but I have a basic idea of what's going on.

How do I resolve this? Well, I could try learning some discipline. I could schedule time for it and try to stick to it. I try to get my buddy B to study with me, but he's not interested enough in improving to bother.

2/ I lack empathy. When I say I lack it, I mean I don't have it. I never realised that was a thing about me until someone pointed it out and showed how it was clear that that was up with me. And it's true. I don't see your point of view. I can't. I'd like to, but I'm entirely unable. I have no idea how I seem to you, how what I say affects you: I can't imagine it. This hurts you in poker because you need to be able to understand how your bets are seen by others. I have to analyse my game in terms of value and I've had to focus on a game where a value game is rewarded because it's so difficult for me to "level" my opponents. In some spots I can, because I've analysed them and figured out why they should work, or because I've generalised from what works against me.

When I say I lack empathy, I don't mean I don't care about other people. I mean I can't understand them. I can't see into them. I don't think it's all that rare because I don't see much sign of other people having it either. But it means I'm not very good at manipulating other people. Socially, although I can often see the "right thing", I can't convince other people of it because I lack the ability to see what would work for them.

How do I resolve this? I'm clever enough to analyse other people in the same way as analysing a problem. I can think about why they do what they do. I mean, my first response to them is to be mystified, but I can relinquish that first response and think more about it. I can also stop projecting onto others how I would feel (and as a consequence, how I think they should feel; no one ever does, or ever is going to do, what they should). That's a terrible flaw in poker. Other people do not see spots the way I do. It's just as well. If they did, they'd be as good as I am and I don't want that.

It would also help not to get angry with other players. Nearly all poker players do this: they transfer their frustration with the randomness of the cards onto the other players. We want them to play bad! It's no use getting upset at the guy calling you with a gutshot. You want him to.

3/ I can't stand defeated expectations. I think if you don't share this flaw, you cannot begin to understand it. I create mental pictures of how things will be, and then when they don't turn out right, I find it incredibly hard to let them go. It feels like a disruption in the fabric of the world.

I know you don't get it. It's not rational. If something is disappointing, you shrug your shoulders and make the best of it. I don't. I struggle to set the world back to rights.

I am modestly good at poker. I can beat the game I play and I know I can. Rationally, I can look at my results over time and see that I am a winner and that that isn't likely to change. I'm aware of how relatively strong my opponents, and I'd know if the games got tougher (I won't bore you with how but it would be pretty obvious). Also, I know that poker has ups and downs. It's a game of chance that you navigate using skill. I have enough skill that I know I can't drown, but every time my head goes under water, it feels like I can no longer swim.

It doesn't help to be risk averse. One way I manage not being able to cope with defeated expectations is to avoid risk. I never approached women in clubs and bars; I don't like gambling with money I cannot absolutely afford to lose; I don't take many chances. But in poker, even though I know I can manage risk well, this is a big drawback. I should play higher stakes. I could probably beat them. But every time I try and it doesn't go well, I feel like I am not good enough, the world is ending, wah wah.

Note that the operative word is "feel". It's like a form of panic. Losing fires up my low self-esteem, reinforcing it, motivating the monkey.

How do I resolve this? In poker terms, it will resolve itself. The more I play and win, the easier it is to lose when I lose.

Wait though... isn't life the same? Yeah, idiot.

I don't feel incapable of dealing with any of this. I can rise above it. It's not anything like impossible. I am, after all, winning, and I can even make a modest living from poker, if I need to (although I don't really want to; although I don't have any moral objection to helping entertain people by playing them at poker, I don't see it as a productive or even particularly enjoyable way to make money).

What's more important is that Naughtyman has inherited the same character traits (I hate to say flaws when I am thinking of them in him). I need to be able to mitigate them in myself so that I can be a good father to him. Nothing means more to me than becoming a good dad, something I often feel a million miles from.

To cap this ramble, I have to tell you that the person to blame for all of it is Anthony "Looney" Toohey, who introduced me to online poker. I never played him online, weirdly enough, but one of my fondest memories is playing him heads up at his kitchen table. I crushed him obv. I should have let him win, given that I was his grateful guest, but really, he needed to be punished for cursing me with the frustration and pain of becoming a modestly good poker player. And while empathy is a bonus in poker, sympathy has absolutely no place. It's a contest, man against man (and woman, because there are some women who play--one of the names I hate to see in my STTs is riverkila, a fine female player), and although the best man doesn't always win, sometimes even a man like me, far from the best, rises to the top.

I give in: revised, with added boringness

2010-11-18T12:12:00.004+10:00

Without these small things, I will die of loneliness. I don't know whether it felt worse to write into what was almost a vacuum or to feel like day after day I had no one at all to talk to.

I used to. I used to have people I spent time with, albeit virtually, day after day. But in one way or another, I proved not good enough for any of them. The same is true in "real" life.

It is particularly hard when you feel you are making someone happy, when you can see you are, and they decide that something abstract is more important. I have never done that to anyone because for all my failings, I live in the real and take it as it is.

I probably shouldn't. If I lied and cheated, I'd probably find the contentment that trying to face it honestly has mostly robbed me of.

Maybe I should do the lotto

2010-11-17T18:43:00.000+10:00

I wish I could be looking forward to moving into my new flat, but all I think about is money and how to get it. I have no work and no prospects of work. One client promised me "lots of work". Last month she gave me 1K worth, this month less. My other client has dried up and won't say anything about upcoming work. Her offsider was pissed off with me because one of her books got a bad review on Amazon (which is nothing to do with me, but the review said it was badly edited: they meant badly developed because it was the content they didn't like, and I have nothing to do with that).

And that's it, my clientele. Others have come and gone, but it's incredibly hard to get work here. I've tried. I've emailed every prospect I could think of. Nearly all did not reply. I was offered an interview for a job when I was in the UK, but they simply couldn't agree a time to ring me. They fucked me around for three weeks and finally just didn't bother contacting me to let me know they wouldn't do it. I applied for a job with Wiley, the job I used to do, and they didn't even bother replying to tell me to fuck off. So that's where I'm at. I'm not even worth telling to fuck off by employers. Of course, I did have a job, but I got sacked because some horrid bitch didn't like something funny I wrote about her on my blog.

There's no work in this town for me. I can't retrain because I need to pay the rent now and can't be unemployed or at least doing something to try to make money. That something has been poker. I've had a shocking time. I went okay last month and the start of this one but I've lost 350 bucks in two days. That's pretty bad. I can see from my records that I've been very unlucky, cannot win an allin and so on, but I have to ask whether I'm good enough to rely on it, and the answer's looking like no.

I hurt my neck grinding poker last month, just a couple of hours of sitting awkwardly but it hasn't cleared up, and I've been suffering from headaches, which is very unlike me. I almost miss being a manic depressive, because at least I would have some juicy mania to look forward to, but I don't get depressed any more. I just have a weary resignation to a shitty life that although it has some bright spots is proving tough right now, and doesn't show much sign of getting better.

I mean, things can change. Maybe there will be a job. Surely poker will turn round because swings happen, I know that, and I can't be too disheartened by it. I can tighten up my play a bit and things will be okay. I'd just like a break. Maybe I should do the lotto...

The fine life

2010-11-14T20:42:00.000+10:00

Life has its ups and downs for all of us, so I thought I might celebrate some of the things that make it that little bit finer. They're in no particular order.

Rekorderlig cider

When we were kids in rural Cornwall, our drink of choice was cider, although that lasted only until we were 16 and started going to the pub. You could buy a litre and a half of cider cheap though, so we did, and would go to the towans or some other hiding place to drink it. Cider was never fashionable, always a favourite of kids and deros, but of course even though I stopped drinking it, it kept a corner of my heart, aided by the fact that my granddad also drank it sometimes. He would tell my sister J that he was going out for a cider when he went to the pub in the evening. She wanted nothing more than to go with him and clip out for a slider.

So I was not surprised when I went to the UK this year to find J a devotee of cider, but more surprised to see that it is now quite fashionable (and has become so in Australia, if the springing up of prestige brands in the bottlo is anything to go by). Slave to the trend that I am, I joined J in a pint or two of Bulmers and liked it. It's perfect for summer, after all, light and refreshing. One afternoon, waiting for B in a pub in Brighton, I tried a bottle of Rekorderlig. OMG. Somehow those Swedes captured the soul of an apple and bottled it. I was hooked, and drank it wherever I could find it. Which was not in many places, so I despaired of finding it here in Brisbane. Curiously though, the bottlo I go to for beer carries it. Maybe Australia is finally catching up with the rest of the world for good things. You can even buy Quorn now. Who knows, maybe someone will even learn how to make coffee.

Butnaaaah.

Tim tam straws

It's no lie to say that Australia would prop up any league table for sweet goods, worse even than the States at biscuits, far behind the UK in bread, way off the pace in pastries, yet there is one world-class treat. The Tim tam is a chocolate biscuit, very much like a softer, slightly sweeter Penguin, much beloved by expat Aussies. The key to its genius is that it cannot be dunked but it can be used as a straw, each for the same reason. Because the chocolate covering is quite thick, it won't melt easily when dipped in coffee, so dunking is out; but if you bite off a corner and then the diagonally opposite corner, dip it in and suck hard, the whole of the inside will melt. You can then pop it in your mouth and the outside chocolate will finally melt. It's amazing.

B's smiles

B has two smiles and I get to see both of them a lot. Smile A is an oddity, because the corners of her mouth don't turn up, and she looks like she might burst into tears. She looks like she is thinking, I can't believe you just said that (and you can imagine, with me as a bf, that is precisely what she is thinking). It makes you want to hug her. Smile B is a full-on grin. B has a wicked sense of humour, often very sharp and quick to see an opening to deflate my bubble. She gets in a jab, and then unleashes smile B. It's a real day-brightener. It's by no means the only good thing about her, and she's not the grinning monkey sort (which would unnerve me because no one has that much to smile about that doing it all the time can be genuine) but it makes you feel good about being with someone if you feel you are bringing them smiles.

Winning

I've played more than three thousand $11 sitngoes and I've won 500 or so of them, but I still get a small thrill when I take one down. Even though I know my aim is to make good decisions and make money, I still enjoy being king of the heap.

There are other great things in poker. I make a good call with bad cards, and knock some guy out, and he berates me in chat, telling me I'm a fish, a donk, an idiot. Yes, I say, I'm just mashing the buttons at random. He has no idea why what I did was good. Poker players have a model of the game, and when things happen that are counter to the model, they are shocked and hurt. Sometimes you have to make a loose call because the odds demand it, but for a guy who thinks you should only call with a good hand, that's all wrong. It's even funnier when I shove a rubbish hand and get called by a good one, and then suck out. 32, they cry. WTF you donk! But I knew my shove (putting all my chips in) was good. They'll probably never know why but I took the trouble to learn (it's precisely because they only call with good hands that I shove bad ones, with the times I get away with it compensating for the few that I get called and am beat).

Being next to a loved one

I'm a simple person. I like simple things: plain food, beer, cakes and football. I like to express my feelings, and if possible, I do it physically. I never leave people I care about in any doubt about it, because I am myself so fearful that I'm not cared for. I kiss the people I love often, hug them and get close to them. There's nothing better. If you are lying holding someone you love, the world recedes, until all you have is you and them, as though your two auras are all there are. I suppose in a way it's an expression of narcissism: if you are holding someone, you have someone who wants you to be close to them, who validates you, gives your person meaning.

Tescos chocolate limes

To my dentist's despair, I have a massive sweet tooth. It developed out of all proportion when I gave up smoking, and went way beyond sanity when my marriage went bad and I was smoking a lot of weed. I would munch lollies nonstop. It had almost got to the point where I would smoke a bowl just to have the excuse to eat sweets.

Even though I've given up the weed, I still comfort eat some. Certainly not as much as I used to, but more than a man of my age ought to, I suppose. Having fixed my depressive cycle helps, because I don't need the lift of sugar so much. My favourite sweets when I was a child were Parkinson's chocolate limes--boiled lime-flavoured sweets with a chocolate centre. I don't know what became of Parkinson's but I've never been able to find them, and other chocolate limes don't come close. Except Tescos' version. I brought a couple of packets home from the UK but sadly the ants got into one of them and they became inedible. Ants are one of the menaces of Brisbane life: little ants swarm everywhere, and that's bad enough, but there are also bull ants. They are big, angry ants whose bite is incredibly painful. It's not the initial bite but the continuing hour-long pain that the acid they inject brings, usually to your toe when you've stepped on one.

Twilight

Dusk is very short here in Brisbane. The evenings do not draw in so much as fall on top of you. But for an hour or so, the light fades, and the sky purples. In the dusk, bats fly over the city, heading out from Indooroopilly island and other roosts. They are big black creatures, scary for children I suppose, but they eat only fruit and pollen and the odd insect and are vital to the city's flora. Brisbane is a lowslung city, much of it semirural or at least greener than a similarly sized English city--more so on the northside than the south, which is more heavily built up. I've always lived on the southside, but B lives in the far north (too far north if you ask me!), so I see a lot of the north too.

I'm shortly going to be moving into a unit in Holland Park (which is very different from the London suburb of the same name). It's a fairly typical southside suburb, with street after street of mostly wooden houses, relatively little greenery and not much character. It's close to the Mrs Zen's home though, so easy to take the kids to school. I have never really lived on my own, so I suppose I'm quite nervous about it (leaving aside some stress over how I can pay the rent, given that I don't precisely have a job, or much work at all). I'm very excited about having my children live with me every other week though. I finally get to be a dad again.

That above all is what makes life fine. Being a dad has been the best thing in my life. I'm rubbish at it, but I don't dwell on my shortcomings. You can't, really. You just have to do what you can. Ultimately, all of life is a bit like that. You can't control everything, can't fix most of what's wrong, but you can just be in it, enjoying what's fine as best you can.

Scenes from suburban Brisbane

2010-11-11T10:30:00.000+10:00

I am watching the bats move across Samford Road in a low pink sunset. It's not hard to imagine them flying through the dry scrub and gum forest that preceded the whites. I am eating a mint.

Three days ago, I watched a lizard scuttle through the back yard. It seemed purposeful but no one imagines a lizard has a mind. Who knows what gods a reptile would create if it did.

We are covered with sweat as the night closes in. I love being with her but there's always something that speaks softly: you cannot be wanted, and it's confirmed day to day by the small and not so small acts of spurning that are striped through my days.

Yesterday, I had a long talk with someone who I haven't spoken to for two decades. I try to tell myself he's just bored and I am still nothing to anyone. Sometimes I wish I had the confidence that I am real that others take for granted. I ate a couple of biscuits because sugar works.

The first time I came to Australia, it was a warm night. The woman who came to meet me hadn't dressed up, just a tshirt, but that was her way then: unaffected and real. I felt a stillness within me that I knew could sustain me. But everything dissolves into pain given time, and now I am sitting in a room in a house where I am not really welcome in a country I don't understand or want to, isolated, turning to ice, always bereft, wondering whether there is any good life for me.

Grand designs

2010-11-09T08:37:00.000+10:00

So Hawking's new book is a bit of a disappointment. It boils down to the world is the way it is because it's the way it is; small things can't blow up but big things can and intelligence could spontaneously arise in the Game of Life so from little rules big things can grow.

A lot of what he says is reasonable, of course, and a lot is indisputable. But a signal problem I think he has is that while he does say that we do not have a description of reality, which we cannot achieve, but rather a model that we can investigate to see whether it coincides with reality, he then uses an interpretation of that model to be prescriptive about how the universe must be. What I mean is, we can model the behaviour of electrons using Feynman's sum over histories, and then look at the world to see whether it fits. The world does fit, but that doesn't confirm Feynman, because there are other models that also fit (also, we have to use renormalisation because in fact our mathematics doesn't work--Hawking seems entirely unconcerned that renormalisation only works for the electroweak force so we don't have a full theory of other forces).

So Hawking assumes Feynman's interpretation and draws a conclusion that pretty much wishes away all the questions he asks: why is there a universe? why is it like this? why is it so perfectly adjusted for us? He does this by suggesting that the strong anthropic principle holds but goes a bit further. It's fairly obvious that the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here to comment on it (the anthropic principle) but it has been assumed in the past that the laws of physics are the only ones possible. Hawking says no: there are many universes with different laws, and we happen to be in this one because no matter how probable other laws are, we can only be in universes with histories that lead to us.

This is supposed to disprove the existence of God. I know what you're thinking. God took a great deal of getting rid of if we needed a quadrillion universes to make him impossible. And that's a lot of universes to hang on the double slit experiment (versions of which are the basic experimental evidence for all this). I mean, it's not unreasonable to have your doubts that electrons really do take every conceivable path to their target. It involves some huge mathematical jiggery pokery to go from that to the observation that if you fire an electron from A to B, it ends up at B and not on Mars. The standard answer is that the straight line, and paths near it, is much more probable than going to Mars, which is fair enough, but we are yet to observe an electron straying. Not everyone agreed with Feynman: I think it was Bohm who argued that the electron takes a definite path and quantum theory simply describes our inability to measure precisely what it is. Not everyone believes an observer collapses the wavefunction. It's not at all impossible that the wavefunction describes a possibility but electrons do take only one path.

I'd certainly expect there to be in time an explanation of the nonlocal effects of quantum theory that didn't look so much like magic. Quantum entanglement is the kind of thing that is key for Hawking's thesis. In QE a pair of particles is formed that has opposite values of a certain parameter. One is positive, the other negative. They are separated and taken to different ends of the lab, so that they would need a measurable time to signal their state to each other. Then the polarity of one is changed, and the other instantly changes. Hawking will say that this is achieved by the necessity of the observer being in a universe in which the polarity of the second particle has changed. I am not sure that there's much mileage for science in saying no more than it's how it is because it has to be like that.

I didn't really understand his explanation of how the universe came into being. I have to confess, my eyes glaze over when I see the words "quantum fluctuation". I mean, I don't care that your maths say a universe can spontaneously arise out of nothing. It doesn't actually speak to the question why there is something rather than nothing. Hawking complains that if you say God did it, you simply shift the problem back to a First Cause. Well yes, but how is quantum did it any better?

I also have a lot of difficulty with inflation (not the thing with money although that also is a problem). A central problem for our cosmology is that the universe is too uniformly cool. By the second law of thermodynamics, heat transfers from the hotter to the cooler, but it needs time. The universe has not been around long enough for the even temperature we observe. So someone had the bright idea that in the universe's first second it exploded quicker than the speed of light for a short period, expanding enormously (I say enormously but it's all relative: I think it was something like the size of a grape after inflation). Okay, but what made it inflate? Time to get the hands waving because we have no idea. Some sort of repulsive force that only exists in very small, very hot balls of plasma. Which just happened to inflate the universe in precisely the way that leaves the universe we now observe.

Some of his other discussion is more successful. He clearly explains why we cannot have free will (which I've discussed before but I'm going to return to shortly because it's been on my mind). But he handwaves from that to a defence of strong AI, so that he claims that sufficiently complex computers will be self-aware. We don't know, and have no reason to believe, that's true. It might be, but it's a big claim that it is.

The thing is, there are facts, and there are opinions about the facts. Quantum theory is a good model because it explains how some of the facts work, but it's formal and interpreting it is to say the least difficult. It's also the case that the universe is consistent, so if you successfully explain some facts in your theory, you will tend to be explaining other similar facts. However, as Hawking to do him credit acknowledges, you are simply expressing a framework that fits, not saying what it is. The better our framework fits, the more we believe it is true, but the fact remains, it's just a framework.

Entertainment I have encountered

2010-10-05T12:59:00.000+10:00

Why are children's films so much better than those for grownups? When I look at the cinema schedules, I groan with disappointment because there's just nothing to watch, but when I take the kids to the pictures, I often see something at least enjoyable. The other evening, we all watched The Fantastic Mr Fox on DVD. It was great. I'm a massive admirer of George Clooney and that colours my judgement, but Mr Fox was the kind of animal you wish you were yourself. He personified brio. Like most good children's stories, it ran quite deep: themes of the rise of the underdog (or underfox), inequity, the prodigal son and the desire for a father's love, the impulse to act according to one's nature. Was it a parable about working-class rebellion? Don't be silly, it's a bunch of animals getting up to high jinks. But still, among the fun was some thinking material.

It's not alone in its quality. Wall-E is a wonderful environmental parable that shows insight on love and the human condition that few Hollywood films can match. Shrek is much funnier than any comedy I have seen recently (although I don't watch many comedies because, frankly, I don't find sexual mores very rich material for laughter and most Hollywood actors are close to unwatchable).

While I was away, I also watched Heart of Darkness, the film version of the brilliant BBC series. Like State of Play, it took the original material and Hollywooded it (which, I'm sad to report, does mean dumbing it down), adding a star name. In State of Play, Russell Crowe mugged and grunted in a role John Simm had illuminated. He's an awful actor, with one tone and one expression. He always looks like he's straining to get out a difficult turd. In Robin Hood, he denuded Robin of humour and left him a lumpen boor who it was difficult to sympathise with. He wasn't helped by plainly lacking chemistry with Cate Blanchett. It was flatout impossible to believe that she even liked him, let alone felt any tenderness towards him. But don't get me started. Historical films infuriate me at the best of times because I have no ability to suspend disbelief. People need to at least approach acting in a way consonant with their times and capabilities for me to be able to buy the history.

Anyway, in Edge of darkness, Mel Gibson is the protagonist. I wasn't expecting much because he's such a terrible actor, but he didn't seem to be willing to make any effort at all. I lost count of the number of times his expression and behaviour didn't match what was going on. He was also unconvincing as a hard man. Compare with Liam Neeson in Taken, which made no pretence at being any good but provided what it promised: mindless thrills. Edge of Darkness wasn't dark enough or twisty enough to satisfy as a thriller, and it wasn't hard enough to satisfy as an actioner. Compare with Casino Royale, where Bond kicks people's arse hardcore.

I also saw The road, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. I haven't read the book because I find McCarthy unnourishing. I suppose that's the point but how much of it do you need to read? Blood Meridian is a decent book, for instance, and the sense of place and characterisation are beautifully delivered, but it doesn't include any meaning. The same is true of The Road, if the film is at all faithful to the book. Viggo Mortensen is astoundingly noble and stoic (he's quite brilliant in the role in my view) but to no real purpose. McCarthy is not saying anything. Does he have to? I guess not, but it makes a two-hour film a bit of a grind if you don't have anything to take away from it. I'm quite conservative at heart, and I like films to have a moral core.

I watched In the loop too. It was quite funny in spots, like the show it derives from, The thick of it, without ever really reaching any great heights. When you've seen Malcolm Tucker once, I'm afraid, you've seen the whole joke. The hapless minister was fantastic though, and the slimy ladderclimber works for me soooo much because I've spent quite a lot of time in the company of similar people. And I don't need to tell any heterosexual male that anything with Gina McKee in is worth watching. She's also a very decent character actor.

The Steve Coogan thing with the wall is top class though. He has an unparalleled ability to inhabit the characters of men you would not allow in your house.

***

I have also been reading some fiction for a change. While in the UK, I basically read only nonfiction, and not much of that, but I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri's much-feted The accustomed earth because it's a book club book that I haven't read for once.

I do understand why stuff like this gets hyped. There is a real dearth of decent American literature at the moment. It's hardly a golden age: if the best you can manage is Safran Foer or Eggers, you are up shit creek culturally. So some nice chamber writing, understated and tasteful, that's what we need, right? Well, I don't know. Lahiri's characterisation is excellent but her stories are so dreary. Compare Dubliners, a benchmark for short stories of this type. Lahiri just doesn't have the mastery of tone and theme that Joyce does, not to mention that she is not a great stylist. Her writing has been talked up, but it's not that good to read. It's quite plain. I know you'll be thinking, Dr Zen, you like plain writing, but what I like is writing that is unadorned. That is a different matter from plainness. Hemingway eschews adverbs but his writing has a unique power because you do not feel there's a word out of place. Lahiri doesn't have too much filler but her writing doesn't have the prettiness of the best. It's quite flat and there are some places where her phrasing is not particularly elegant. That may not matter to you though, so you may enjoy the gentle realisations of place and person that her stories include.

I am currently reading Freedom, the very much hyped Great American Novel by Jonathan Franzen. Now we all know that Americans feel a sense of inferiority because we have Shakespeare and Dickens and they don't, and they suspect that Moby-Dick is no Hard Times. There have been some great American novels: Sabbath's Theater, Harlot's ghost, Thin red line, Gravity's rainbow spring to mind, but there's always that lurking doubt that there's more to give. It's not like those guys weren't trying! So is Freedom it? Hmmm, well you'd have to say no. It's a wonderful read, and Franzen captures our America in a vivid, colourful tableau with bags of insight and characterisation that is stunningly detailed and accurate. But it's floppy, sometimes overwritten and not quite as good as it wants to be. It's not far off, don't get me wrong, I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who likes to read. But it won't make you come and that's where the bar is. Roth, for instance, has made me come twice. Sabbath's Theater is genius, and American Pastoral, though flawed, is truly brilliant. He remains for me America's finest writer, although I don't love him as intimately as I do Pynchon.

***

Also a bit thin is new music. There aren't too many releases that I am thinking, oooh yes, must have that. I mean, it's great that Mogwai have a new album, but I don't like live albums on the whole. It's a good live album, sure, but live music is really about being there. Not that I go there much. I rarely feel my age as much as I do when watching bands.

So there's a new Interpol album, and that has had much better reviews than Our love to admire. But it's not very good. That's really an understatement because it's pretty bad, all in all. Where OLTA was mostly bad but had some great songs, this one is just mostly bad. I can't find even one song that moves or delights me. It's all plodding strained rock, more Editors than Joy Division, and it would be generous to suggest it's as good as the Editors.

There's also new Arcade Fire, much beloved of the critics, who didn't adore the previous one, whose name I can't recall. I didn't adore it either but I felt it was at least going in the right direction. The new album is entirely bland. Nothing stands out. It's all nicely put together but I'm not feeling it at all. I've played it twice and I didn't find anything in it that made me want to play it again.

A host of 10/10s and the promise that it "reinvents pop music" had me slavering at the chops for a piece of Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid. I think I may have the wrong album though, because what I have is utterly uninspiring tuneless and ordinary indie R&B. Monae is associated with the equally overrated Outkast, but unlike them, she forgot at least to include one or two belters. I should have known better. When music critics are raving about a concept album about space and future lifeforms etc, which begins with an overture, for fuck's sake, you should know you're going to be listening to something turgid. I didn't get all the way through, so my apologies if there is something good in the last couple of songs.

Dueting with Monae is Kevin Barnes, known to the world as Of Montreal (she returns the favour on his new album). I am a huge fan of Barnes, so I was delighted to see he has a new album, False Priest. Given the fractured weirdness of Skeletal lamping, I wasn't sure what I'd get, but Barnes is a truly gifted songwriter, and I can easily make mixtapes full of his pop songs that better any dozen by just about anyone else. So do we get psychedelic pop, indie, banging rockers, funk strutters or dreary directionless meanderings into his subconscious? Yes! We get all of that. Compared with Skeletal, it's all good clean fun. Okay, who am I kidding? It's no such thing. It's mostly uptempo bouncers about shagging. He sounds a bit more cheerful though. I'm slightly disappointed at the good song/rubbish quotient (his albums do always feature both) and I suppose it's something of a pity that it's unlikely he'll ever write much pop again, and it's true that this will not gain him the wider audience so much of his stuff deserves, but it's still engaging, mad and often funny (the spoken word about banging his gf's cousin because he wanted to feel closer to her is LOL hilarious). I never feel happier with the world than driving along in the sunshine with Of Montreal jerking, humping and blasting on the stereo.

Two cats

2010-10-03T13:03:00.002+10:00

On the road to Ouagadougou I saw an elephant through the trees at the side of the road. Just the merest hint of elephant, so you couldn't be quite sure that he was there. But he was there. A couple of weeks later we saw a herd in a national park in Ghana. We could hear them moving around on the first night we slept there, and the next day we saw them by a waterhole. I felt inexplicably moved in a way you can't put into words. There just aren't any. Words do not describe what we feel about anything; they talk only about the impressions feelings give us, the reflections of what we felt in the broader world. I mean, that we can only talk about resonances because the things we feel are not part of us.

My cat, Ouagadougou, died in my arms on 9th Avenue. A hoon knocked him over and there was nothing I could do but watch him die. I was listening to Mogwai, Come on die young, at the time. I've barely been able to listen to it since. I have always been squeamish. I don't like seeing other beings in pain. I feel it in my self. It is the only way I can feel empathy. When I think about dying, and it upsets me, I realise that it is at least in part because I empathise with the future me.

When I was in Ziguinchor, I was sitting in a doorway with Mrs Zen, drinking a can of fizzy. Some small boys begged us to buy them some fizzy. At first, we were like, no fuck off, because you are begged for things all the time, and it's hard to want to give. I can't really explain why. It's not a lack of sympathy. It's a feeling of hurt at the diminishment of yourself as a person: that all you are is a source of money and goods. It comes and goes. When people have wanted to know you, to know who are you and what there is about you, you feel a greater generosity. But when you have successive conversations that inevitably turn to demands for money or stuff, you feel abused. Objectively, I don't feel bad about Africans who see me in that way. They are entitled. But at the time, it feels sour. But Mrs Zen, who is not on the whole a generous person*, said, they probably don't get much fizzy, poor sods. So we bought them a can of I think it was Fanta. Something orange anyway. I have never seen people enjoy a fizzy drink so much. They relished every drop. Afterwards we laughed about their enjoyment of it. We were delighted with ourselves for bringing that pleasure into their lives, that momentary piece of magic even.

I left my cat, Ziguinchor, with my inlaws when I went back to England. They mistreated him and he went feral. He was a very soft cat and I expect he did not survive for long. I do not blame them for it. I knew that they had no love for animals and would not allow him a life that would be comfortable for him. I feel guilty about it whenever I think of it, which is quite often. I will never allow myself another pet because that act of selfishness haunts me. I have a strong sense of responsibility, of the need for me to be reliable, and I abandoned it as far as Ziggy was concerned. I don't know why I chose to do that. I know that a reason was that I did not have a place to live in the UK, so I couldn't be sure that I could house him when he left quarantine (they still had quarantine then). Another was that he would not enjoy quarantine at all, and I wanted to spare him that. But when I realised that no one who would love him would take him, I should have set those reasons aside. I have never forgiven myself for allowing Ziggy to die and I never will.

The fun of it

2010-10-01T22:50:00.000+10:00

Sometimes the days stretch before you and they are empty, you know, because you are putting nothing into them, just marching up and down on the spot. But you can't do anything with a vague feeling of wanting more than this.

Some things of course I can put a name on. I want more work, so that I have money and don't have to walk a thin wire the other side of which is destitution. I want love that's for me and not just for the person who says they are loving me. I want to stop feeling I am the only person who cares what happens to me. I want to feel worthwhile. I know it's a character flaw that I need other people to make me feel it. But I don't wish to be perfect. I can live with being flawed.

When I was younger, I wished I had a brother. But in time I realised that what I wanted was another me. Sometimes I think about that, and I wonder, would I even like him? Then I think, yes of course I would. I'm not a harsh judge. I like everyone until they really don't deserve it, and even then I wish I could still like them.

I'm feeling a bit downcast because my girlfriend dumped me. I'm not entirely sure why. We seemed fairly happy together. We disagreed about some stuff, but nothing that couldn't be worked out, and it sort of spiralled into bullshit. I guess that's how people are though. There doesn't have to be a good reason for anything.

What's the point of this? Of any of it? My life is just like this blog. Some people look out of idle curiosity but no one really wants it. Not even me.

He's not naughty

2010-09-24T10:04:00.000+10:00

The pediatrician looks very smug. He feels he has nailed his diagnosis. It doesn't change anything, of course. Naughtyman is still the same, whatever label is put on him. Except the pressure will grow to drug him into a stupor so that he can sit through school. I say to the pediatrician, drugs will be an absolute last resort. And he says, for some people they're a very effective resort. He hasn't understood me. I mean, they will be a last resort for my son. I know too much about doctors and medicine. They are barely less clueless about some things than latterday leechmongers. Brain drugs are sledgehammers not scalpels, and a child's brain is fragile and growing.

He doesn't see how beautiful Naughtyman is, what a good fellow he is, how charming and funny he is, what good company he is for us and for other kids. Yes, he rolls around the floor in his class, but school is dull. I used to gaze out of the window, bored with how slowly it all moved. I know it's important Naughtyman doesn't underachieve but the days you are in matter as much as the days to come. We often end up wishing away the day we have for the sake of the one to come.

I think to myself, well the psychologist felt he had an immature nervous system and he can grow out of a lot of his issues. But I realise that in wishing for that, I am wishing away my beautiful son, wanting him replaced with something better. Haven't I hated it when people do that to me? Haven't I wanted more than anything that they would love me for what I am, not what they feel I could be if only... ?

He is not a little dolly, a puppet that we have to manipulate into postures that suit us. He is a human being who I love passionately and without reservation. I had plans to spend more time with my kids, to have them with me some of the time, which fell through, and I'm disappointed, but I will be valuing the time I have him with me more for it. I won't be able to spend the extra time helping him with typing and with his fine motor skills that I hoped to, because the opportunities that present when you have someone living with you don't exist when you only have the odd evening and weekend, but I can still offer what I have: love. That's better than drugs in my never humble opinion.

An evening filled with drizzle

2010-09-21T22:48:00.000+10:00

Come now, come along with me and we will walk the lanes we walked when we were small, the leaves under our feet, and everything is russet as the best of days have faded and a chill is descending that we feel but ignore, warm inside with oats and hot coffee.

Come now, leave behind your burdens, they are nothing that will not wait, hill upon hill, come with me and we'll feel the cold sand beneath our toes, the water is ice on our bodies but we are laughing, drunk on pear cider and the last of the youth we still feel move within us.

Do you remember, we kissed on a misty night in a wide open park? Do you remember you held my hand and told me it was the warmest thing in the whole of that chilled world? Now if he says my name, you'll tell him you do not know it, maybe he's someone I used to know but now, well, memories fade and become lies, stories of how we wish we had lived and maybe we did, because now the day is done, the way we wanted it to be is what we are left with, and wishes are for the future not the past--that is ours for the rest of our time to do with what we want and who can say different? We share no secrets. We did nothing we cannot deny, except for love. I cannot say I didn't love you; I never will. But loving you is whatever I want it to be, and I do not have to believe you ever loved me.

Come with me, come along and we can laugh in the sweatfilled night, how ridiculous we are to be these old, clumsy bodies, still throbbing with desires we cannot name, still fired up, still alive despite the growing death our lives daily become. Come and drink vodka lime until you believe you were her and I was him, whoever they were, until you believe in me and I believe that time is gone and not a grave.

I remember an evening filled with drizzle, out the back of my dad's, looking out over the land I love, over to Hayle, huddled in the face of a storm to come. I am smoking a cigarette and there is nothing in my mind, I am at peace only thinking that soon I will be leaving, and I have always been leaving home, never at rest, always alone. I remember late night in a taxi, unsure where I am, and there is the palace, the arch, the park and here is my home, my small place in a big city, my head is spinning, a joint, too drunk to fuck or even think of the morning, the onrushing dawn, but I am not sick, I was born unwell, waiting always for time to pass until I can be somewhere else, and for a moment, I do not know whether I have arrived or I am out there somewhere, still trying to find the way, wait, maybe the next on the right, but then I am sleeping.

Needy

2010-09-21T13:40:00.000+10:00

I scarcely write any more, although that, like all things, could be temporary. It's just my thoughts seem so scattered and useless. I feel I am done complaining. Now it is what it is and there's nothing I can do about it. I disagree with existentialists who say that the chief feature of the human condition is alienation; it seems to me it is powerlessness.

Yesterday, I was looking after Zenella. I didn't say much to her and she didn't say much to me. I'm not good at being with her. I'm not good at being a father: I didn't like it as much as I thought I would and most of the time I feel like I'm doing it wrong. Most of the time I just want to apologise to them. Even though life just happened to me, couldn't I have done something different? Couldn't I have sacrificed more?

Well, that's the problem. It's not any lack of ability, as such. It's lack of knowing what to do. And how can you undo any of what is done? No one else wants it undone. Everyone else seems content that you should dwell like this, hopeless, aimless, endless. You are left needy in a world that demands self-reliance.

On money

2010-09-17T12:46:00.000+10:00

Get ready to ramble!

First, the financial crisis and the national debt. Everyone has an opinion on it but most are woefully underinformed. To understand the economy and its problems, you need to understand the monetary system, and most people just don't. This is partly because people with an interest in keeping us ignorant spend a lot of money ensuring we are clueless, and because a lot of commentators who pretend to be well informed have no idea what they're talking about.

Sometimes, to show people what money is, I ask them where they think a bank gets the money it gives out in loans. If a bank lends you 100K, where does it get the 100K? Uniformly, they say, from its deposits of course. But this is not so. It gets the money from thin air. When a bank loans you 100K, it credits your account with 100K and creates the money. When you pay it back, it does not just put the money in its coffers. It just writes down your account. It keeps the interest. (If you don't pay, it has a real loss, but that's not important to my discussion here.)

Similarly, when the government spends money, it credits accounts. It does not dip into a pile of money that it has accrued. It doesn't use taxes. It just creates the money. This is hard to believe, but it's true. In a fiat money system, government money is not backed by anything at all. It is just money because the government says so. Many years ago, when we were on the gold standard, money was backed dollar for dollar by gold. But now, for governments that have freely floating currencies, money is not backed by anything, and government spending is not restricted by revenue. A government does not have to gather money to spend it. It can spend whatever it wants whenever it wants.

So why tax? There are two major reasons. The first is that it taxes to give value to its currency. You need Australian dollars because the Australian government will only accept its dollars for the payment of taxes. The second is to manage liquidity in the economy. You can't just pump money into the economy. You must also take some back out. But the taxes do not get put into a coffer, any more than your repayment of a bank loan does. They are simply destroyed.

So why do governments try to balance budgets, and why do they borrow money they don't need? They balance budgets for purely political reasons. They aren't constrained to and there's no economic reason to. Most governments (the US government by law, although the law could easily be repealed) have an artificial constraint that they should "fund" spending. And they issue debt because people want to save, not because they need to borrow. Government bonds are a safe and lucrative investment. They are particularly safe because a government that issues its own currency cannot go bust! It can always pay its debts simply by marking up bank accounts. When we hear horror stories about our debts to foreigners, somehow the people trying to scare us forget to mention that our debts are in our own currencies, and we can repay them simply by ringing up our respective payment authorities and telling them to mark up the Chinese account by however many billion it is.

It just isn't true that the national debt is a problem. Yes, we waste some resources on paying interest, but this is only a problem because we artificially balance our books. If we dissociated spending from taxation, as we easily could, it would not matter that part of our spending was on debt. In fact, we could (and probably should) not bother issuing debt at all. It is only issued so that people who want to can save: we do not have to provide that facility to them. You should remember that when we talk about the national debt, the money is largely owed to ourselves. It's simply saving by the private sector that the government funds. If it didn't, the major outcome would be that rich people would have to find other places to invest. They might apply pressure then to banks to ensure that "safe" investments actually are safe, not simply shit loans engineered to look like good bonds.

So it should be clear that it doesn't matter either that we run a deficit. The way the economy works is fairly simple. People want things, goods and services, and other people supply them. If they want enough things, everyone is employed providing them. If they don't, resources, including people, are not fully used, factories stand idle and there is unemployment. This will happen if people don't spend enough, which can happen for various reasons: they are scared about the economy and save instead; they are paying down debt; they are not being paid enough. The government can make up the shortfall by spending more. So long as there are resources for it to buy, the government can spend.

Doesn't this cause inflation? No. Inflation is not caused by more money. It's caused by more money chasing the same goods. Say the government is building a highway and wants to use Joe's Asphalters. If Joe is at full capacity and the government is competing with other users of Joe's services, this will tend to push Joe's prices up. But if Joe would otherwise not be using his roadgang, the government is simply improving the economy. If Joe has to hire new workers, the government spending directly reduces unemployment, not just because Joe has new guys he's put on, but because those guys can now buy other goods and services. The government will lessen the impact of the increased liquidity by taxing everyone involved!

Second, Australia, like other industrialised countries, particularly the UK and the States, has an unnecessarily complicated benefits system. This is quite easily fixed with a simple, commonsense solution (which rich people hate, so don't expect it to come into effect any time soon). Scrap all benefits and the tax allowance, and give all citizens a cash amount every week. I don't know the figures for Australia, but I think in the UK it's 140 quid for every adult, and something like 50 for a child, more for pensioners. Then tax income from the first dollar and have a fairer progression of taxes. People don't really understand marginal taxation and they are easily conned into believing that if you pay 40% over $100,000, you pay $40,000 if you earn $100,000. This is not the case. If the rate is 20% below $100,000, you pay $20,000, and only pay 40% on dollars above 100K. $100,000 is a lot of money. You can ask, in terms of equity, why a person should earn that much more than others. It is not in society's interest to allow huge disequities in income. It has nothing to do with reward. Even if you believe a lawyer is "worth more" than a sewage worker (and I'd certainly argue they are not), they are not worth four, five, six times more. You are not punishing "hard work". Lawyers don't work any harder than shift workers. They may in some cases work longer hours, but they're not necessarily more productive for it. Long hours for some professions are not about productivity but are simply a means of creating a barrier to entry. You can't be an articled clerk if you're not willing to work your arse off. Fair enough, but you are doing that work in our society. You use our common wealth, our common resources. The money you are paid represents a share of our resources. It's not unfair or unjust that we regulate how much you get. I know this concept is lost on rightists because they have a philosophy that exists to entrench and maintain privilege, but we do not have to oblige ourselves to allow them to do so. When they whine that they will go overseas if they are taxed more, we should suggest that they do exactly that. We do not have a shortage of people who want to be lawyers or bankers, and few of them have skills or talents that most decently intelligent people could acquire. We can easily break the mystique of the professions.

A universal income raises several questions. One, wouldn't lots of people just bludge off the dole? Well, some would, but that isn't actually a problem and we are not talking great numbers of people. When the economy booms, unemployment falls very rapidly. At full output, unemployment would likely only be about 2%. Some of these are people who cannot work; relatively few are people who don't want to. Quite simply, most people prefer to work and have more money than to live on benefits. Some do, there's no denying it, and it makes news in the papers. But while we get ferociously upset by people who sponge off the dole, we are not at all upset by "investors" who live off the income from shares. They contribute nothing at all to society. They don't even pay a full rate of tax on their income. When you sell a share to another person, any profit you make goes to you, none to the company whose share it is. Its share price may rise but this is not a benefit to the company in the general course of things. Again, the income you receive represents a share of our common wealth, which cannot be used for any other purpose.

Two, wouldn't people have lots of kids if they got decent money for them? Again, some would, but anyone who has kids will tell you that they cost a lot more than you ever receive in benefits. The correct way, in my view, to prevent young women from having kids just so they can get more state money is to educate them better, to provide better alternatives and to make it clear that they would get the same money in work as they would out of it.

Three, what about rent assistance and housing benefit? The state should not provide either. This is one of the biggest scams in our age. The state transfers our resources to private landlords. Rentseeking is a scourge in an economy. (Rentseeking is not just renting out houses! It's also what "investors" with shares do: they attempt to gain economically without providing anything to the economy, and use their influence with government to maintain a favourable environment for doing so. Nothing has been so catastrophic for housing for the less well-off than buy-to-let.) The government should instead build houses. Lots of them. We know how many people need housing, and we can project how many will need it in five, ten years. The government is not revenue-constrained, so it can simply build as many houses as it wants. In the current economy, with resources 20% underused, it could build a million houses, sustaining the economy, putting people in work and providing housing for everyone who needs it. I don't need to tell you which pressure groups oppose that! Landlords who have lived off our backs, having us pay their mortgages, hate the idea of decent government housing. Rent assistance suits them much better.

Although the government is not constrained by revenue, it does need to remove liquidity and its spending on housing would need to be funded at least somewhat because if it soaked up the unemployed and the economy approached full output, inflation would become an issue. This is not problematic though. Currently, income is overtaxed and property very much undertaxed. This is easy to fix. We can tax property at its improved value. By this, I mean that we can tax properties according to the value added by society. A house near a train station is worth more than one that has no rail line near it; a house near a good school worth more than one near a bad one. These utilities are provided by us; we have a right to charge for them. A land value tax would help equalise the inequitable distribution of property. It is not right that one person has six houses and another none (and no hope of acquiring one). An outcome of the fiscal policy I am suggesting would be low interest rates (I'm not going to explain why; you'll have to take that on trust), so fair land value taxes would help avoid a property boom. Yeah, it's nice when your house goes up in value, but it's not socially desirable. It has been part of the cause of the current crisis: people have borrowed on the increased values of houses, using debt to prop up the economy. The current recession is partly caused by the unwillingness or inability of consumers to fund further spending with debt. They are not willing to take out another remortgage for that nice new car because they are scared they won't have a job to pay it back with and could lose both house and car anyway.

Three, importantly, women who want to join the workforce after having children would lose out. Whereas a single young man of 25 who has been unemployed has a lot to gain by taking up work, even part-time work, in a system that does not penalise him by taking back his benefits, his (generally) female contemporary who has a small child will lose most of the benefit in childcare. This is not only a disbenefit to the economy (because otherwise productive workers are discouraged from joining or rejoining the workforce, wasting the investment in their skills as well as their potential output) but it's very inequitable to the (mostly) women concerned. I would resolve this by reorganising the provision of education. Children today begin formal schooling at four, which several studies have found to be too young. There's no need for it. Kids can start school at seven, as they do in countries like Norway, with very good outcomes. They "burn out" less, they are mentally better equipped for formal learning and they are old enough to accept more structure and discipline in their daily life. Between two and seven, the government could and should provide universal nursery places. It does not have to do this entirely on its own: it could undertake public-private partnerships. No one would make much money in this system, but why should they? If public provision was actually well funded, and of high quality, there would be no place for people who want to make huge profits from our kids. It's only the lack of provision that provides them with the ability to do so.

We have not made a good transition from the Victorian working world to the modern one. We could improve on it though. We can accept the realities of our world and create a society that didn't leave people behind. I know we're not going to. Even though the things I suggest are a net benefit for most of us, a few people lose out. Those people are disproportionately influential and they have reasons not to want others to gain. They like high unemployment because they can drive wages down. They like rent assistance because they own property. They like restraints on government because they do not want the ordinary people to share the benefits of a wealthy country. They want it all for themselves. It's no use being rich if being rich is not a country mile better than being poor. But nothing in what I suggest prevents you from gaining from hard work. Far from it: a stable economy at full output allows businesses to flourish; a government that makes up for shortfalls in spending prevents recessions that can rob you of your wealth. Talent is not wasted. People like me, who want to work but can't get any, are not underemployed, wasting the investment in our education. Lessening poverty, incentivising work properly and supporting women in poverty are routes to lessening crime. People steal because they are desperate much more than they do because they enjoy a life of crime. This has always been the case. An equitable society would be better for most of us. It's a pity so many of us, who would gain a lot from it, think only in terms of the hard dollar and put no value at all in other gains that would ultimately accrue to us.

Home

2010-08-06T09:34:00.000+10:00

When I was a child, I was lulled to sleep, many nights, by the sound of distant surf. On sunny days, I cycled the lanes behind Hayle, I walked across the farms, I swam in the cold green sea.

When I was a child, I had simple love, undiffused and strong love for the people close to me, and felt loved.

It seems like every summer afternoon was green fields and bees in the flowers. It seems like I had endless autumns, up to my knees in leaves, ripe with potential, the world slowing down, dying, but within that death a rebirth of something fresh and wonderful awaited.

When I was a child I knew who I was.

***

L says, you've even started talking like them.

But you feel it in your blood and you can't help yourself. It is home in every stone in every wall in every lane. It is home in every breath, salty and sharp, damp and heavy with the scent of late flowers and earth.

You feel it in the beautiful, unrelenting green. My eyes are sea green. I captured it and bring it with me. When you look me in the eye, you see the sea that made me, that carved me, that caressed me. You see the sea that lives in me, and our parched summers never dry.

I am still Cornish, despite everything. I still love this land and my place in it. I still know where my home is.

And although there are heavy veils over love, I feel my heart is still strong, and beats with the pulse beneath the stones that litter the moors of my home.

***

Out of the harbour at Mevagissey, I hold my boy, I hold my gentle loving boy, I hold my darling, my beautiful boy, I hold him and I wish we would never have to let each other go. I wish we would never have to leave behind the simple truths of our life, to cloud them over with the dirty encumbrances of everything that we have allowed to come between us and our hearts.

Let me never make the mistake of believing anything means more. I kiss him and I know, with all the certainty I can ever have, that if all I can do is wish him well, I will wish him well. I will wish those I love well. I may wish they can forgive me harm, but that is what they can do, and I cannot choose for them. I can only choose for myself to never believe that anything means more, because this all dissolves, all that we cherish will dissolve, and all we were, all I wish to be, is the sound of singing in a pub late at night, the contented sound of the well loved loving each other, home, safe.

Some movies

2010-07-20T03:24:00.000+10:00

I'm too much the individualist to have heroes as such, but I do greatly admire Nelson Mandela. Most ordinary men, locked away for a third of man's natural span, would find their minds turning to vengeance, but Mandela, equipped with the tools to have his revenge, had a deep well of compassion to draw on, and not only showed forgiveness but taught his nation a lesson in forbearance that may yet be its salvation. Clint Eastwood's Invictus is a slightly odd showcase for Mandela the man and legend, and to be honest, it's a rather mawkish and unsatisfying film, which does not let a button go unpushed, and is somewhat unconvincing in its portrayal of Mandela as born-again rugby fanatic, but it cannot hurt to have such an inspiring man and a genuinely wonderful message play in the cinemas of America and other points West. Matt Damon is terribly miscast as Francois Pienaar but Morgan Freeman is majestic as Mandela, lifting the film above the sea of sentimentality it otherwise drowns in. Mandela truly lived the spirit of the poem that is the centrepiece of the film (which you can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invictus). I still remember vividly the day Mandela was released from prison: he strode through the gates, head unbowed, a beacon of courage and honour in a dirty word. There is a better film to be made about him but in any case his life itself is his memorial.

A better setting for Matt Damon's talents is Green zone, a thriller that is reasonably thoughtful but doesn't let itself get bogged down as these films tend to do. Paul Greengrass knows how to crack the whip, so it moves at a fair pace, with plenty of action and the handheld camerawork and snappy editing that Greengrass is famed for. You might occasionally be left wondering what the fuck is going on, and certainly I was a bit confused about how a reasonably lowly soldier was able to wander Baghdad at will, without anyone interfering with stuff like orders or questions about where exactly are you taking that truck? Damon excels, in my view, as this sort of hero: tough without being callous, with a hint of vulnerability and a calmness that comes over as being in control in a crisis. You'd want him by your side in a barfight, put it that way.

Also thrilling, but slower paced, was Girl with the dragon tattoo. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, yet there's a great deal about it not to like. The eponymous girl is solidly unconvincing, and her hacking talents outrageously unfeasible; the story is a bit meh; nothing happens a lot; the romance is cliched and entirely unnecessary and the ending is like a door slamming on the plot. But it does have a lot of atmosphere, the main guy (sorry, can't remember his name) convinces as a dogged but mostly confused investigator and the villain is delightfully icky.

Also heavy on the atmosphere is Shutter Island, arguably overmuch so. Luckily for me, I don't claim to know a thing about film, so I can happily say that Martin Scorsese's films have in latter days verged on being complete bollocks. The departed in particular was overrated in my view and The Aviator was overlong and dull. The problem with this one is that the story is utter bollocks. Scorsese tries manfully with it but the ending is far too long after the denouement, and the denouement itself is so obvious that there was no real surprise in it. The stormy drama was fun and I'm not one of those people who despises DiCaprio just because Titanic was such laughable shit (although let's face it, he is not the most manly of leading men). No, I dislike him because he so patently cannot act, unless you think acting consists entirely of looking puzzled or frowning, both of which he has mastered. I also strongly dislike Ben Kingsley, who likes to pack a styful of ham into every role, and is grossly bad in this film. Anyone who says otherwise cannot be trusted to have an opinion on movies.

Someone who can act is Michael Sheen, who was a beautifully unctuous Tony Blair in The Queen, where he had to make the most of some pretty poor material, and in The damned United makes Brian Clough, the smirking, irritating, smug imp that he was. Leaving aside the laughably inaccurate portrayals of the Leeds team, particularly Billy Bremner, who I believe was much more dour than the sniggering bully he is made out to be in this film, and Johnny Giles, who would not be seen dead in that hair!, this was a smashing film, a neat tale of hubris and a reflection on friendship and loyalty that also had more than a few laughs. What particularly caught my eye was Sheen's ability to capture a vulnerability in Clough that didn't make its way onto the TV screen until the very end of his career. The film is fictionalised (Clough's widow hated the book it was based on and insisted it was largely untrue) but when ever was there a film about a larger-than-life character that wasn't? Take a film like Gandhi, utter bollocks start to finish, in which Gandhi is painted as a saint he certainly wasn't, entirely without the flaws he certainly did have, yet creating a portrayal of a legend that is probably more satisfying than the truth. As in all biopics, events are telescoped and reordered, but the story is the thing and it's a smashing story and a diamond of a film.

Not a film as such but certainly filmic is The Pacific, followup to the hugely and deservedly successful Band of brothers. I greatly admired Band of brothers so why was I left cold by The Pacific. It has basically the same format -- we follow a group of soldiers through the Second World War, with tons of human drama and gruesome action, yet it's not as effective. Well, partly, I felt the characters were not as compelling, and the acting not as high grade. I cared a lot less about the soldiers, and felt I knew them less well, even though the series tried very hard to make them rounded. Perhaps too hard: where Band of brothers shifted focus from the core group, it did so within a shared context. So we had an episode about the medic and the nurse he meets in Bastogne, but the war continues around him and he's still interacting with the unit. But in The Pacific, we have episodes that drag horribly through dalliance in Australia, homecoming in the States, a character selling war bonds that is a pale reflection of Eastwood's superb Flags of our fathers. It doesn't help that the action scenes are samey and unfocused, so that it isn't all that clear what's going on. Yes, I know war's like that, but you can only watch screaming demented Japs get mown down so often. It may be that there was more conceptual room for this sort of portrayal of war in Band of brothers and The Pacific represents the diminishing returns in shock of the new, or it may just be that the characters and story just aren't as good.

Underwood Road

2010-07-16T03:34:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I dream of walking along a road filled with drifting leaves. It is a memory that recurs; I walk down a sloping long road, coming home from school. I am five years old.

The leaves are golden and russet and the afternoon is a bath of sunshine, the last warm days of autumn. I think I am five, but it's hard to know. Barely five or barely six, anyway.

Soon I will be drawing trains in a small flat in Mullion, strolling with my mother and our dog in the village. It has no meaning. It is just what I remember.

I recall a fat baby in my lap, in a taxi coming home from the Bolitho nursing home. Did I really hold her on the way home? It seems like I did, but maybe it was only for a moment. Maybe it is only a desire to have held her. Does it matter whether what you remember is real or just what you felt once upon a time?

Sometimes I recall a smile or a laugh but cannot, even though I try, imagine what caused it. I remember how much I loved people I loved, but I can't think why.

Against me

2010-07-12T02:40:00.000+10:00

Sometimes, mostly, I hate him. Hate is less painful than pity. His cynicism, timidity and fear are corrosive, they have rusted away my life. I know you'll say, you cannot blame him, he is just the product of chemistry and nurture, but if I didn't believe he was better than that... well, it doesn't bear thinking about. Some of the time, all that keeps me alive is the belief that within him is a small piece, vanishingly small, of something golden.

If I could have loved him, I would have done more for him, but I didn't find him loveable. And that has made him a drain for the love of others, a needy whining child who needs reminding constantly that he matters, believing that he will fade away if he doesn't have it.

It's one of the hardest lessons in life to learn that deserts don't matter, that people do not do what is fair, or even what is compassionate; they do what works for them. If that means you are trampled and broken, well, it's you that is shattered. And he is no more equitable than others in how he is to them. How can he say he is?

I stopped caring about him when the person he needed the most stopped caring about him. (And we did stop caring about him, although we may protest otherwise, because another lesson we learn in life is that nurture is more about giving what someone needs than about giving what you want to give: I hate him more than anything for his pretence that the latter is often enough the former, and for his hurt when others react as they surely must when it is not. As in so many other things, I hate him not for lack of sensitivity, but for his willingness to ignore what he is sensible of because it is too hard, or he cannot gain from it.) But it is very hard not to care about someone you are intimate with (it is so much easier if you can keep them absent). Slowly, contempt fills the cracks that love should be filling. (If you could not be with them, they remain maybe a statue, an ossification of what they were to you; and it may crumble some but its quality would not change--where it was beautiful, it would remain so, and perhaps come more burnished, as you rubbed it with memories.)

I feel burdened because he does not have a future. I feel weighed down by anxiety about how to live. How could he have built so little for me? He has left me concerned that I cannot live beyond this spring, that I will finally have run out of options. Yet I chose to do the right thing; I suffered for years because I had obligations I believed I should meet, even if spiritually, emotionally, my reward for meeting them was to lose everything that matters at all to me, leaving me unable even to be proud that I had done the right thing, because now I must drown in chaos for it.

Why doesn't he think I am worthwhile? Why does he hate me so much? Well, I know, he cannot love because he is unloveable. I have always known that; it's not something you can fix. It is a weight you have to carry, sometimes cheerfully, cynically and brutally, sometimes regretfully, sometimes with despair.

About passion

2010-06-12T22:27:00.001+10:00

I never understood passion until I had children. I thought that I just couldn't feel it; that I was iceblooded and could not be moved much, because I always felt detached and mechanical when I had sex, and I thought that was the only place you could really have passion (it never occurred to me that I was just bad at it--now I am content to recognise that I am doing it wrong and probably always will). I have never really had anything I lost myself in. Always there was some part of me observing, taking notes almost. I might get carried away singing at the football, but I'd need to have way too many drinks to get to the place where that was possible.

But I love my son passionately, and it has nothing to do with sex, of course. I see him lying in his bed, his face beautiful and calm in sleep, and I want to sacrifice everything so that he can remain untroubled. I do not just resent people who want to do him harm; I resent the notion that anyone could want to do him harm, that there ever should be anyone who would want to. I used to believe I was a pacifist, that I would never kill a person no matter how I was provoked, but now I know I am not. I would not kill or die for my country, but for my son, I would not even blink.

That seems overdramatic, but isn't that what passion is? It's whatever can make you fierce, whatever can make you lift yourself above the grind, the shit job you are making of your life, the sweet notes that rise above the noise. I am blessed that I learned that I too could find those notes, in fleeting moments, when I see him sleeping and I think, god I love him, and I know that the capacity to love is what has made being human, having this life, worthwhile.

About Zenella

2010-06-05T22:52:00.001+10:00

i love her, i love her so much that even if i had words, i would not have words enough. I love her so much that there is part of me that only exists to love her. I have a part so empty and unreal that only she makes it real. I love her so much I cry because I cannot hold her.

My daughter, my heart, my beating heart, I love you so much I don't even have words, I don't even have feelings, I do not know how you express it, I do not know, I only have tears, my beautiful daughter, I am so sorry I could not be your father, I am so sorry, I am sorry, I will be sorry forever, I love you.

Missing

2010-06-03T16:01:00.001+10:00

I do not think that missing one dose of tryptophan makes me susceptible to depression, but I do think realising I have breaks the placebo element of it.

So I negotiated a difficult conversation that shouldn't have been difficult but left me wondering where I stand, and I reached for the fortitude, the resilience I've built, so that I could just not care. But it was lacking and I knew that that was because I knew I had missed my tryptophan last night.

It is like a pit opens up and I have no idea what should be filling it. When I feel loved, I know it isn't there. But sometimes I feel like I cannot be loved, because there is no me for them to find.

I know we are empty, confused by the echoes in the space within us into thinking that we can be filled. I know that but I can't stop wanting to be complete.

***

Sometimes I wish I had a friend to tell me, don't be so emo. And then I realise that I am that friend. The world can be dishonest and brutal, and I can be too, but I don't need to be dishonest or brutal with myself. I can hold myself tightly and cease to be anything but the flickers of light that you see in the broken pieces of me that we are pretending is a man.

Pirate as nomad

2010-05-26T10:07:00.001+10:00

I have been thinking about the conceptual framework for my pirate book. I had a good chat with Halina in which she urged me to think of a theme. Of course, I think my theme is "pirates are cool", but obviously a book needs more bubbling under it than that. It struck me that what is cool about pirates (in the romantic conception of them; the reality was rather harsher) is that they are nomads, and have the same sort of codes that nomads do. The similarity is not exact, but it's reasonably close.

Nomads are interesting because they offer a lens to view our world through. They offer different ways of organising ourselves, different conceptions of the world, different ways of relating to our gods (I wrote a (very long) essay about the input of nomadism into Christianity, in particular in the Satan story, here: http://zenmb.blogspot.com/2007/12/satan.html).

In many setting, the nomads despised and preyed on the settled. This is what pirates do, although for somewhat different reasons. They too are wanderers, and although they are tied together by greed rather than blood, they too have a code of honour, are deeply egalitarian, share power among themselves, must master their culture because they cannot transmit it.

In the end, my theme is something like "how is life made without a home?". With swordfights and buggery.

one degree north

2010-05-05T20:46:00.001+10:00

I don't know whether it's true to say that I need somewhere I can tell the truth to keep me sane. I'm not qualified to judge what is sane and what isn't, and to be honest, what does it matter? How it seems to me is how it seems to me.

I was not sane. That seems clear to me, at least. I felt wrong. I felt as though the way I felt about things was wrong, my feelings unmoored (you cannot say unreal, because what we feel, whatever measure we use to judge it right or wrong, is real to us -- I have always had a lot of difficulty recognising that, because when people report something that is very wrong, you cannot help thinking they must be lying or mistaken, but I am opening myself to the idea). Now I feel more like myself, but it's like I got drunk and crashed the car. Now I have sobered up but the car is a writeoff.

It's a good metaphor for where I am at, because I feel as though I can stop asking whether I can get the car to go again, and start to ask whether I could just build a new one, or even just walk, one pace at a time, until I like the view better. That's not easy. I'm still shaken and dazed by the wreck.

***

So I was reading the other day about vichara, which is a technique of enquiry, a sort of meditation, in which the seeker asks in every moment "who am I?"

I was reflecting on vichara, and wondering how I might incorporate it into my day to day, and it struck me, I can answer that easily. I am nothing and nobody.

Of course I am something to someone. There are people who look at me and think they see somebody. They see a father, a husband, a friend, someone they like or dislike, "oh, him", "that fucktard", whatever. But vichara is not about asking what someone else thinks you are. It is about asking what you are really.

I feel like "if anything" should be appended to that. It does seem obvious that we should be something. We are here. We live and breathe. We are sure we are substantial.

In some ways we are. But I feel most often like a being impelled from outside, a leaf on the wind. I can only feel anchored when I feel loved. And it is not enough for me to say, someone loves me. Some love is worth more than others.

I don't know why I feel like that. I've inquired, but there's no easy answer. I think I would change it if I could, because it is part of why I find it so hard to be content.

It's easy to believe in karma when you think it through. Because I am weighed down by the need to be real, and I sometimes feel I would be closer to contentment if I could be as insubstantial as others seem to be. If I could just let go...

***

Someone asked me today, are you happy? And I didn't know what to say, because you don't want to tell someone you don't know all that well that no, you are not happy. So I feel as though I lied. I find that now, every time I talk to people I don't know well, I end up lying, and I have nowhere left to tell the truth. That feels a lot worse than I ever thought it would. It is why I am going to write here. I do not mind that no one will read it, because the people I wanted to know me, to know the truth, did not respond to it as I hoped.

Maybe the truth is better whispered into the wind, and I should not feel burdened by the need to lie. I should think of it rather as a way to be better for others, kinder to them.

I feel as though if I keep lying, relentlessly and without thought of myself, I will eventually be able to lie to myself too, spreading the kindness to myself even, and I will feel happy at last.

Then the wind changes from south to north and I realise that that too is a lie I'm telling myself.

No more bananas; UPDATED with MORE bananas

2010-02-12T10:38:00.004+10:00

I am discontinuing this blog. I started it so that people who I didn't want to know about or read Yeah Whatever would be able to read about what I was doing or thinking or whatever. But they didn't bother. The only person who reads this that doesn't read YW is Mrs Zen, and she only does it so she can get all bitter at the thought that I might find a new woman. She certainly doesn't care about how I feel or how I am.

I don't actually enjoy things that are personal to me being read by people who don't care about me. Mrs Zen never appreciated that I did it for her anyway.

***

Changed my mind. I was going to have a completely separate blog but actually, I like my archives and don't want to dissociate myself from them.

I will never write anything on Yeah Whatever again though. That was the blog of my heart and it went to waste. I am content not to be a writer any more, just another schmuck with a boring journal.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy

2010-02-10T22:57:00.004+10:00

Sometimes I'm just feeling there's a mountain to climb. I suppose in some ways that's better than feeling like you are at the bottom of the ocean, getting the last ounce of air crushed out of you, but it makes you weary to think how far you have to go to have a view you are going to like. And sometimes you are tempted to believe you are Sisyphus and the climb will be in vain, that you will slip, lose your footing and find yourself in a crumpled heap at the bottom once more.

It is not helping that I have regained my sanity only to discover that everyone around me has lost theirs. People act in ways that are utterly incomprehensible to me. Some days I ask myself wtf is going on. Others I just shrug and saddle up my horse and ride out with the fuck-it cavalry.

I do not understand any of it. I don't want to. I feel it is a task imposed on me: become happy with life. But I used to be happy with life! I was content to be a family man. Now I have to be something else and most of the time I am thinking, I want my family back.

No one wants to be a failure. But when you have been, in a big way, you know that it is possible that you can be, and suddenly everything is a task that seems destined to defeat you. I think the best way to approach it is to cut everything as fine as I can, so that I can succeed in each thing small enough to be easy to handle, and make all things that small. And so, upward!

wtf

2010-02-02T10:42:00.000+10:00

Prepare to go wtf.

Ready?

wtf

Two old men

2010-02-02T09:52:00.001+10:00

Today, I'd like to contrast two views from two elderly men. One shows love for his fellow humans; the other not so much. One makes a gentle, heartfelt plea to extend dignity and compassion to humans in suffering; the other a complaint that my home nation extends tolerance to a section of the community that he disapproves of.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's and will decline as he ages, losing the wit and vivacity that define him. I'm not a huge fan of his books but their gentle humanism has surely done no harm to the many people who have read them. He is an outspoken supporter of the right to assisted suicide, and has made a suggestion that resolves many of the difficulties with this approach to terminal illness. It's a genuine concern that many have that were we to permit euthanasia, the elderly would be pressured into it, killed off by relatives greedy for their estate or tired of caring for a sick parent, perhaps unsure what they were agreeing to. A tribunal that decided whether the person was making the decision with reason and sound mind is a fine idea.

We are not lumps of meat. We should not treat ourselves as though we are. Life in itself is not valuable--living is. It's a distinction that I think is valuable. Of course it is difficult to decide whether someone is truly living: many people have a quality of life that we would not accept for ourselves but we find difficult to judge whether it is sufficient for them. I read the other day of a young woman who had contracted severe ME, and could not speak or move. She wished only to die. It is a tragedy that a life should be cut short, but in my view, a greater one that it should be prolonged only so the person should suffer.

I formed my view when my beloved granddad was dying in Arrowe Park hospital. He had lung cancer and was destined to die in the bed he lay in. He was in a lot of pain and wanted only to die. His life had ended; there is no other way to think of it. He had no enjoyment of it. The things he liked to do he could no longer do. Yes, it would distress his wife for him to be allowed to die, but she was concerned only for herself. Of course I believe that is understandable: she had loved him for many years and I know what a wrench it can be to lose a partner that has been part of your life for a long time. She did not want what was true to be true.

My granddad begged to die. He was too weak to find a way to kill himself. Nobody should have to do that. I do not care what your religion says about life; I do not care how sacred you think life is. Living is what counts. I have never forgiven myself for lacking the courage to help him.

I don't know what the Pope's illness is but more and more, this horrible reactionary old man fashions himself into a figurehead of intolerance and hatred. Catholicism is not alone among religions as being a tool for horrible reactionary old men to hate other people with, but you cannot help but feel that it's a pity. In the Bible, Jesus is quite clear that we should love each other unreservedly. There is no codicil stating "except for teh gays". Catholicism could be a force for good in the world (I'm sure in some ways it is). After all, its believers are mostly unreflective, adopting the religion because they were indoctrinated as children, and many adhere to whatever moral strictures are doled out to them by Pope and priest. Sadly, those strictures do not generally focus on loving thy neighbour, but more on petty matters of sexual morality, which are a peculiar focus of a group of celibate men for reasons we need not speculate on.

One has to remind oneself that when the Pope claims that the UK is restricting the "freedom of religious belief" that that belief is that gays are hateful and should be hated. Why anyone even listens to an ancient womanhating clown is beyond me. The guy has no idea how people live. He's never even been married. Indeed, he's never even had sex, as far as I know, so what would he know about the feelings we share for each other. He's spent years whipping his out of himself.

The last three seconds

2010-02-01T22:01:00.001+10:00

Sometimes I feel I have been thrown into a hole and can't climb out. And sometimes I wish someone would care enough to lower down a rope ladder and pull me out, and other times I get my pitons and say fuck it and climb a few more inches up. Sometimes a piton springs out and I fall back down a few more feet, and I curse myself for how weak I am, as though I could somehow have flown if only, if only.

I am not going to die down here because I am determined that my last three seconds I will not spend crying.

I feel tired of feeling that everyone is entitled to judge me, to weigh me in scales of their own devising and discard me because I don't measure up. And none of the people marking me down has done anything to deserve the privilege. I realise, when I think about it, that having a good heart is the quickest route to getting that heart broken, but I don't want to be a coldhearted arbiter of others, enforcing my black and white view of how it should be.

Because what good did that ever do us? To break each other on the wheel of our whatever. What I need is a friend who cares more about me than they do about how much they care about me. It is not too much to ask that someone finds something golden in me because I have something golden in me. I do not believe you if you say I don't. I will not love you for harsh judgements. What good did that ever do us? I do not judge you harshly.

Here's something really good from Beach House. I am dedicating it to Mrs Zen because I don't think she has ever known that I loved her truly and she burned it for petty jealousy. For something I don't even feel, so alien was that to me. To punish me for liking someone. If I had ever had the chance to make account for myself, I would have explained that having a heart big enough to love her meant having one big enough for others. But she wanted something wizened and small like her own, and I didn't get that chance: she destroyed our marriage instead. Still, she deserves something this good--everyone does, and I feel bad about not expressing that I did, do, love her:

When I meet people, I know that it will be them who decide. I will try to find ways I can like them, and they will weigh me in a balance and, it seems, mostly find me wanting. I think it is a virtue to be want to find something in a person to like, even if it's not always possible. But it means I am always the one battered at the end of the night, a week later, when it breaks down.

It feels painful to be putting myself on the line, always saying "like me" to strangers. I don't mean I put on an act. I wouldn't even know how. I just quietly hope someone will.

This next is from JJ's new album. This is for K. It's hard to pick something for her because our tastes do not coincide. But here's the thing. They don't have to. I am lost in a world where people feel you have to have a shitload in common before you can like each other, but in fact, you can just like each other and the rest of it takes care of itself. So I hope she likes it, but if she doesn't, I'll like it twice as much for her:

Sometimes I wish I was somebody completely different, that I wasn't lame, ugly, stupid, whatever. Then I stop and realise, no, I just want to be loved for who I am and most of the lameness, ugliness and stupidity is just accretions, and if you know that, you will not need me to change.

Here's something from Four Tet's excellent new album. It's for anyone who wants it: