Se Habla Nirvana?

(Just ignore the Spanish, okay? We are not here to judge the voice, merely to record.)

Rebecca Traister in Salon: “Psychologist Steven Hayes says the American obsession with feeling good is preventing us from living good—and that living life to the fullest means a lot of pain.”

Quite an eye-grabber. So it turns out this ... this guy has published this book, and I am like, Whoa! You couldn't have done this a teensy bit sooner? Like, I had to slog through all those years by myself?

Alright, not entirely true. But I was forced to learn—alright, dragged kicking and screaming—by that most god-awful of qualities, an unrelentingly painful (is that a word? it is now) condition. Driven to find a better inner life, only it felt whole lot more like driven crazy, so I also had to find a way to bless that.

(Honestly, is there no end to this woman's nobility.)

Hayes: “ ... values require definitions, because there's not a lot in the culture about values. But it's not just a matter of redefinition, it's about changing the game. The natural game most of us are in is how to feel good. That's not the same thing as how to live good.”

I ask you. Do you think this is fair? That Hayes should be Amazon number seventy-three and climbing, while someone too whipped to send off her book because she has already lived his fucking book ...Gee, this kind of thing gets unseemly real quick, doesn't it.

Rebecca Traister is one of the terrific writers at Salon, and Tim Grieves, and Gary Kamiya, don't get me started on Gary Kamiya.

I must admit, this guy Hayes gets impressively bizzy: Just Do It You Big Sissy. Destroyer of lives.

But the path that feels in truth like you have a good life, like you are good. Which is, after all, all anyone wants. (It is? He hasn't met—never mind.) There is this little tiny fork in the mind, exactly like my grandson's Thomas the Tank, where the little train of thought can travel down the bitch-funny track, i.e. love, or the bitch-screw-you track, (which upsets the stomach) depending on how the switch is set.

What I've found is that easing back, in some way that is hard to describe, allows the switches to set themselves on, really, the more happy-making path.

Oh, wait. Maybe this is what Hayes means, duh. When he writes of our pain and crap. That instead of JDIYBS and blowing it off by hurting someone else, someone smaller, one can “carry all that forward down a path that that is neither indulgence nor suppression.”

(And I don't want to hear from any Middle Way know-it-alls, okay? Let the man speak.)

(Note to self: Will you shut up.)

“What they tell me are things like, ‘I want to contribute to other people’ and ‘I want to be a loving person.’ By saying it, you're connecting to it. But it's hard. Because [once you acknowledge it] you know it is not bullshit, and that it's not something you can ever stop doing. If you say that your values are being a loving person, do you ever get to say, ‘That's done!’ No. A value is like a direction, like going west. No matter how far west you go, you can still keep going west.”

I'm glad he mentioned that part. The icky, dark side of right life: it never ends. However. This is the single most powerful illusion, the maya that lays like a filmy, choking veil over all of life. I don't know why it has to be this way, why we just can't have life sweet and pure, why it is not simply ours, at birth.

Why, instead, we are given this task, which is to somehow find a way, in the course of life, to penetrate the illusory meaning of ... well, of task itself. To find, at the price of health and years, the real meaning of the work.

All I can tell you is, I wouldn't have designed it that way.

But, as per usual, nobody asked me.

Biting The Hand

ECMANAUT : “Did you know, that every time Blogger adds a new feature, or repackages an old feature into some other page, they reinvent the wheel, changing CSS classes, id attributes and HTML structure, rather than making reusable standardized components?

They really do!”

Oh, I believe it. I believe, in fact, that although Blogger may be owned by Google, it stands apart and utterly separate, in its own little bloggy world. Perhaps out in the Sunset. Or Noe Valley. Evhead is gone, but Biz Stone, Genius—if we are to measure by Blogger Buzz—still finds it all big fun.

Blogger went down for a night, last week, taking with it, worst of all, any number of Blogspot posts. And when it came back up, having moved to the New Servers every shaky site on the web is about to move to, has only just moved to, or plans or hopes to, one day. Which, to this old hand, has become something like the internet equivalent of, The check is in the mail.

It's all a mystery to me. Well, maybe not the part where things are run by youngish men of uncertain pedigree—no, that, honey, is what we call Life. You mostly stand by, watch them screw up, offer no suggestions 'less you want your head bit off—and pick up after. Unless you are of the generation to whom this kind of work has become available. Me, my choices at that age were, be a stewardess or ... I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

Damn, haven't I just described all of history? It has always been presupposed that we prefer the supportive role, to watch the genius (M) at work. The genius (F) however, upsets the order of things, and works alone. But you knew that.

Hey, Biz and buds? I'll bet anything your bosses know how to do this. Maybe ask Google?

The Name Is Powerbook, Damn It!

You've Got Mail!

Redryder - phydeaux3, he of Blogger Forum fame—you know, the guy who saved your n00bie bacon more times than you care to remember, and why is it you don't send him great wealth—writes,

After reading your last two posts, “Arggggh.2” and “Ewwww!” ... can I make a suggestion on the title for your next post?

“Pfffffft!”

Shouldn't be hard to come up with something for that, should it?

Wiseass.

Runts

PAUL KRUGMAN: A year ago, Dick Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators —although he hadn't yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its ‘last throes’ — was widely admired for his ‘gravitas.’

Which give you some idea of the childish side of Washington, the impressionable, the nitwit.

Which just may play some little part in the mess we're in now.

Gravitas, my butt. Aspergers, probably; ruthless, driven, certainly.

Besides, the word is so pretentious, who can give serious attention to anything other than the desperate insecurity, tremendous falseness and deep-down shallowness of people who traffic in horseshit like this. Our leaders. Doesn't that make you feel real secure. Sorry to say, those who look up to someone like Dick Cheney must be standing in one hell of a hole.

Nature Abhors

You might be a liberal if... You live in constant fear that someone, somewhere, is making a profit.

WTF? What is up with this widespread misinformation as to what a Liberal is. I chalk it up to the pernicious influence of those two great vacuities: TV and George Bush. No, wait, there has to be a third empty space, to absorb the party line, and honey, you need to get the clue that it might be in your head.

You wish that your paycheck was paid directly to your government to keep you from squandering any of it.

Oh, I get this one. I think. So the government can fritter it away on the poor and old? Every Liberal's dream, right? Christ, I wish they would fritter a bit more, right now. So will you, cookie, when your job leaves for India, and you get old and break a hip. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?

You believe that if you reward stupidity, you get less of it.

Which is patently stupid as satire. Which only works when it is based on fact.

You think George W. Bush is a conservative.

Nooo, I think he is a lying piece of shit. And you? (Which, by the way, means Lose the Cliches. It's more interesting when you think for yourself.)

Arggggh.2

“Often,” Dr. Denckla [whoever the hell he (or she) is] said:

[No I am not going to google this just to get aggravated again.]

“adults with executive deficits can be relatively successful, ‘as long as there is another human being—a co-author, a teacher, a wife—who acts as an auxiliary frontal lobe to keep them on track.”

Now why the fork do you suppose I lost that link.

And when the fork do you suppose this 19th century assumption is going to forkin’ die.

Shit, I coulda been a contender. I coulda been another ... Denckla.

If I had those auxiliary ... things, to keep me on track.

Grrrr.