Outlandish Josh

Back when I was a teenager, my Dad took me and my step-mom and sister to Europe. In retrospect, that trip was a big deal for me. It gave me a real taste of (and for) the big wide world. One of the things we ended up doing was peeking in on Palm Sunday mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, and seeing all those Catholics in that beautiful building singing in French was really something. Ever since, I’ve have an abiding affection for other people’s religious rituals.

As a confirmed agnostic and dabbler in personal mysticism, it’s a real treat to be welcomed into another cultures’ spiritual practice as an observer or novice participant. Today I had the distinct pleasure of attending my Nephew Jacob Friedman’s Bar Mitzvah. As the Rabbi rendered, the kid’s a mensch. He did a good job with all the tricky rituals and language, and more impressively rendered a philosophically sophisticated opinion on the meaning of the Tower of Babel story that was the subject of the service.

To wit: if all people were united and making the biggest tower ever, why would God break up that scene? There are traditional answers about idolatry or excessive materialism, and about human hubris, but his reading was a bit deeper I think. If we have everything, we cannot really be happy. Thus the scattering and confusion assist humanity by creating adversity, challenge, difficulty and loss. Only in the presence of sadness is there joy.

Anyway, smart observation; especially for a thirteen year old. Mazel Tov to him.

A few other things came to me in the service. The first and foremost was the primacy of family, both that we are given by blood and that which we take in by choice — close friends, lovers, colleagues and mentors — as well as the wider community we inhabit. These are hugely important things in human life. I sometimes think these are the most important things beyond simple survival, and it’s a worthwhile temper to my internal ambitions and drive to consider what it’s really all about in that context.

The other thought I wrestled with started as a famliar gut level reaction to the implied subservience resident in most religious texts. Exalting your deity, proclaiming his/her/its glorious supremacy and promising obedience aren’t actions I associate with freedom or liberty or enterprise or creativity, so I sort of recoil from that at first; reject it out of hand. But in reading through the accompanying text analysis in the service book around the story of the Tower of Babel, I started digging a little deeper.

As I said, the typical lesson of Babel is that we shouldn’t get too big for our britches as a species, and basically I disagree with that. I believe that people are what should (and in most cases do) matter to people. As per the above note on family/community, first and foremost we are all about us: we exist for, by and through one another. As such, I’m all for the exaltation of human works. Let’s go ahead and build mighty towers — or maybe shoot a few people off to the moon, or whatever — as a way to flex our muscle, make some history, and celebrate ourselves.

However, without some careful steering that line of thought does run us right into the Icarus ditch. Technological idolatry (fanboyism) isn’t particularly effective, and what’s worse it can blind us in important ways. We currently struggle with a global/generational crisis because for centuries we thought that treating the air like an open sewer was pretty much fine because of how awesome coal-fired power was. Flew too high, now the wax is melting, our wings are coming apart, and it’s a hell of a long way down.

It occurs to me that you don’t really need to subscribe to the notion that some sentient force created the universe to realize that the universe is frackin’ awesome, and that some consideration and awe of this creation is justly due. Whether this deference is to creation itself or to “the creator” is largely a matter of semantics, and perhaps the attendant humility is more important as a best-practice compliment to the manic, churning, can-do spirit of industrialized man.

So, for instance, I’m an environmentalist, but only of a sort, more on the spaceship earth trip than concerned with saving the whales per se. I believe need to manage the planet better because if we don’t life will suck and we may die in large numbers. That said, I really don’t want Polar Bears to swim to death, and I think maybe it’s a Good Thing to imbue the rest of the biosphere with a little divinity.

Quite often I find there’s real value in the ability to blend seemingly inconsistent or irreconcilable ideas and traits. The Jungian Thing. In the Rabbi’s discussion of what made Jacob a mensch, she gave a compelling case for moderation — something that’s too often associated with bland, watered-down timidity, or bullshit equivocation (c.f. “bipartisanship”) — by talking about the need to be passionate, but not uncontrollably ruled by passion, and so on. Feels like the old, Romantic Polytheism.

At the end, I come around once again to a familiar vision in which the creator is creation, and moral necessity springs from the necessary practice of enlightened people existing in simpatico. Being right with one another demands some honesty, trust and charitable spirit, but it’s generally not rocket science to do the right thing. Like the soap bottle says, we’re all one or none.

I’m in Philly, waiting for my connecting flight to Raleigh, pondering information asymmetry. CNN is all abuzz about some flight to Minneapolis that overshot for some unknown reason. They just did another segment on it repeating the exact same shit they said 20 minutes ago. Meanwhile, the internet has known what happened for about 45 minutes:

But when the pilots of Northwest Airlines flight 188 became distracted it had more serious consequences as they overflew their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles. “They were in a heated discussion over airline policy and they lost situational awareness,” the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) explained.

That coverage is intermingled with two scare stories on swine flu (don’t trust water fountains!!!!!!@@@!) and important coverage of a Microsoft publicity stunt to sell a Whopper in Japan with seven beef patties.

I am inclined to think this is the sort of thing that helps the terrorists win.

But I’m not just being snarky. Being connected online can give you access to much higher quality data about the world. That’s pretty good. It can also put you in a strange sub-reality bubble. How do you know where you are? Well, really, you don’t. Take your best gut guess. Subjectivity! It could all be the matrix!

However, it seems blindingly obvious that the chattering coming from a 24-hour news network will probably leave you in a kind of info-stupor, if not agressively misinformed, or exposed to financial risk. Or maybe the matrix is just really really stupid. If I could, I’d embed a clip from Idiocracy, but that’s not allowed because NewsCorp doesn’t believe in fair use.

United is the most incompetent, stressed-out airline ever. Everything is always late and overbooked. People freaking out. Lots of meaningless elite classes who board early. One or two people getting on minutes before the rest of us. I don’t understand it. Working for them must be like living in a dictatorship, enforcing cruel and arbitrary rules for a living. The rationalizations that must occur.

Overnight flight. Totally packed. Not really looking forward to it.

It’s a great little suite of posts over there on “Top of the Pops” tonight. People are reading my best stuff:

• Don’t Give Your Heart To Any Old Ramblin’ Man captures the feeling of life maybe passing by while other things happen, and being torn because other things are also important. “I’ve never fallen in love in the midst of a workaholic bender. I’ve never even come close.”
• My Favorite Soul Songs From The ’70s goes right along with It’s Our Turn and all the other good feelings I got out of being in NYC when Obama won; good candle-lit conversations in the back of a bar with very old wooden floors and cold breath-freezing mornings with a long overcoat and Gimme Coffee.

• Johnny Sunshine Blows It On Healthcare is a now outdated topical lead into a good rant about what’s wrong with our system, while Fumbling the Flutter is sadly still kinda relevant.

I’m done with my antibiotics, warn out and paranoid that I’m going to get sick again. Lots of possibilities floating out there in the world, but really I just want to unplug for a few days and hibernate. Maybe a bit of that in North Carolina.

From some focus groups:

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years.

This concern combines with a profound sense of collective identity. In our conversations, it was striking how these voters constantly characterized themselves as part of a group of individuals who share a set of beliefs, a unique knowledge, and a commitment of opposition to Obama that sets them apart from the majority of the country.

There's some parallel trends to how I felt in 2003, save the "secret agenda" part. The Bush agenda was more or less announced, and I never really thought they'd suspend elections or any of the rest. Just fuck it all up and walk away rich.

Anyway, peering into the mind of the Other is a little disturbing. Reminds me of this Philip K Dick short story about a hospital ship of paranoids that crash lands on some other world. They're convinced they're constantly under attack, and develop a whole society based on the notion. But there's nothing out there.

This idea came up a few years ago. It’s been kicking around. Someone finally made it happen:

http://dearmarijuana.blogspot.com

Oh man.

Far too short a visit to Portland. I did the camp and my presentation was very well received. Perhaps more importantly I got to spend some Quality time with the Dauters, including the amazing new human, but other than that I totally neglected all my peoples up here. The only thing for it is to come back sooner rather than later for a longer more social visit. I always have a good time.

I rolled down the I-5 in the fast lane, hanging with the tailgaters and other assholes, listening to a mix of Clutch, Krisna Das, Justice and Old Crow Medicine Show, and thinking about what it will take to get back on top of my life. I’ve got plane tickets to buy and projects to complete — a now-familiar array of demands — and I’m pretty sure I’m scheduled out the wazoo this next week. But I feel like it’s doable. Sometimes you just have to bust out a three-lane sneak pass to get around a glut.

So, you know, there’s hope for me yet. I’ve got a few ideas, and even though I’m physically pretty beat, I feel charged up spiritually from an inspiring weekend. If I can manage to get healthy and work a little daylight into my calendar, all bets are off.

Circa 1956:

For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends, waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man’s era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation — all these would now step forward and say their piece.

Diane DiPrima from “Other Fellow Travelers” in The Beat Reader, p 333

Our generation substitutes the slow agonizing asphyxiation of civilization by climate change for the white-flash terror of a nuclear holocaust, but the feeling remains similar. Even in a post-Bush era, the undercurrent of doom is running strong. Everyone knows that the Present Reality is marked for death, that the center cannot hold.

Pragmatically, the answer surely lies in large part with international governing bodies, multinational corporations, heads of state, and other icons of the establishment. However, from a spiritual/cultural/vision point of view, these forces range from impotent to malign. As the Children of the Millennium come of age, they (we) will grow up in our own way, with different philosophies on life.

Our hope lies in approaching the death of the current moment, the end of the 20th century global egos, as an opportunity for healthy change, for development along a saner sort of line. The prospects here are honestly iffy in the short term. Big ships steer slow, and I wouldn’t buy any real estate in the Maldives (first country to be erased by rising sea levels). However, I remain darkly optimistic that crises precipitate change, and that with the right set of ideas/philosophies and an appropriate institutional setting, the global megadose that is coming down the pipe could be a breakthrough.

I have plans for this old website. Big plans. I’m gonna get famous as a writer yet — though probably not rich. You just wait and see. In the short term, comments will be coming back via some wizardly integration with Facebook. Oh snap!

It’s Autumn again, October already. It’s my favorite season, a time of ripeness, of harvest. I like the clear sharp crispness in the night air, the smell of wood smoke. I like the feeling of things getting done, the world re-engaging after the languid distraction-fest of summer.

Slotting back into the groove I feel myself skipping around a bit, a familiar lack of clarity about “where all this is going.” I feel the need to shake things up, to make some new moves. When the groove isn’t a hot one, it can start to feel like a rut.

I’m happy to be doing a little roadshow as part of my work, and to be generally making steady progress with that. It really starts to feel like that could go through a real transition in the next year, create some opportunities for life-changes.

But there’s a difference between opportunity and action, and even with some flexibility on the professional/work front I’m far from sanguine that my scene will work itself out. I have this desire to really rethink what I’m doing from the ground up; the why, the what, the how.

I still feel young and strong, but I also feel the brevity of existence. I’m free now in ways that are kind of special. Working my ass off is one use for that freedom and strength, and one that’s been paying off pretty well, but there might be other configurations worth considering.

The real question is what the heck do I want to accomplish? I’d like to see my favorite internet building block mature into a real solid thing. I’d like to see more of the world. I’d like to find a means of engaging the massive injustice and inequity that spirals all around us in a way that feels like it might be effective.

The last bit is the really vexing one. I have little doubt in my ability to succeed in my career track. I’m also connected to enough elite/up-and-coming peoples — latest awesomeness: Jason Woliner, mastermind behind the refrain, “at the time of this recording, Dick Cheney’s alive!” is directing network television — I get a feeling that should I need to tap some favors, I can. The whole question is: to what end?

Nationally, politics is a massive disappointment, and isn’t looking to improve much anytime soon. There are some interesting local developments, including this little thing in my old back yard, but it’s hard to see how it really all fits together.

Outside the political, in the realm of personal transformation, lifestyle development, and wildcat DIY action, it all feels so small, undermatched for the task. How can these things scale? It’s a really hard question, and one I don’t have good answers for aside from vague hand-waving about the internet, but this feels less and less real over the years.

This vagueness is debilitating. Sooner or later it’ll have have to come to an end.

Kids doing eurythmy.

Just in case you wonder why I am the way I am.