the shallowness of sanity

Many people assume that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the other would get a better review, the bigger advance, in some way “competitive,” that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest a certain lacunae in the popular understanding of marriage.

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

I could not give away the rest of his shoes.

I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.

The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.

I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.

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I loved Vin like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood.

That’s the problem with boys: They tend to help you only ’cause they fancy you, but there’s no embarrassing way to find out their real motives till it’s too late.

“What if … what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …” Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me. “Sleep tight don’t let the bed bugs bite”; or Jacko and Sharon singing “For She’s a Squishy Marshmallow” instead of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” for every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. “S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost…”

Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

“Now, what can I do for you sweetheart?”

“Not calling me ‘sweetheart’ would be a good start.”

Life’s a matter of Who Dares Wins.

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Gratitude is easy. In fact, it’s so easy, one wonders how a billion-dollar self-help industry can ruthlessly support itself by continually selling “secrets” to gratitude – from journals to meditation. Here, I’ll give the ultimate “secret” away for free: if you covet gratitude, enter a state of deprivation. That’s it, that’s all. Want to appreciate tiresome home-cooked meals? Fast for a few days. Want to adore the jogs your therapist firmly suggested? Break your leg and suffer through immobility for 6-8 weeks. And on and on. The examples are endless. The truth is undeniable. For those last remaining skeptics, the ones tempted to spend $19.95 on that new book Kendall Jenner blurbed with, “I must have bought 15 of these books and gave them out to people!!! I believe this book might have saved my life,” just stick ‘em in quarantine and they’ll swiftly fall in line.

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1. Rarely, if ever, offer your own ideas
2. Aggressively point out mistakes the powerful make
   • The powerful may only be wrong a small percentage of the time, but given the demands of their position, so much material will be pumped out that even a small error rate is enough to feast on
3. If you are wrong, bunker with the logic of I’m no worse than the powerful

“I do understand it: I am right, they are wrong.”

at the beginning of Trump’s reign. But now? Come on.

Just look at the people you know in your own life. Surely you’ve observed that people’s cores rarely change. Why would Trump be any different?

Be pleasantly surprised when people “evolve,” sure, but expecting it is a recipe for a lifetime of frustration as people will repeatedly fail to behave in the exact ways you think they should.

I can’t believe he did that. Yes, you can.

Are you really all that different from the person out-of-work for a year?

Are you really immune to suffering for years without progress?

We say we are thankful, but we can’t really mean it in the truest sense, because we can’t really believe what’s needed for that truest sense of thankfulness: our lives could, with a few bad bounces here and there, be astonishingly terrible by comparison … and this alternate path is always lurking.

It’s probably a good thing that comfort and adaptability shield us from constantly pondering these subjects.

to poke a hole in someone’s argument for being hypocritical.

Just remember: this usually isn’t a hole regarding the actual substance of the actual argument.

If only non-hypocrites are allowed to address issues, no issues would ever be addressed.

When heinous acts are alleged of someone we like and claim to know well, the rush to safeguard character is oppressive.

Substantive it is not, though. For the most-favored defense path – the only one that’s remotely accessible – is to forcefully declare, “This behavior is inconsistent with the person I know.” Yea, obviously. Unless you yourself are an awful person who knew of the alleged wrongdoing and did nothing, of course the behavior is inconsistent.

Furthermore, statements of this sort perpetuate the delusion that we can know someone so well that all chance for surprise is reduced to 0%. I get it: you feel obligated to say something and equivocation would be weaponized against the person you care about. But let us not forget that inconsistency, “I don’t know why that happened – that wasn’t me back there,” and hypocrisy are defining, shared traits among all humans.

I didn’t turn the light on. I should have. Or rather, the programming built into any middle-class child like myself reads =if (and(>=dusk, walk into room), “lights on”). But I’m not some robot. No siree. Like anyone, there is malleability within me deeply connected to my openness to change. Easier said than done since programming is très comfortable and forking, even with promises of potential upside, requires considerable kwH.

Fortunately, less individual energy is required in an isolated system if someone else enters and shares the burden, thereby making isolation not the dreaded variety, just the thermodynamic one. In the case of =if (and(>=dusk, walk into room), “lights on”), you made it oh so easy for code rewriting. For you noticed things I’d never before considered. Texture, angle, color, and the fundamental, vital question: Why are you turning on the light right now? New code crafted itself as a result. Naturally, whenever I fork to post-xxxxxxxxx =if (and(>=dusk, walk into room, light amplitude is predicted to be moderate, visibility is seriously compromised in only sunlight, the beam angles are optimal), “minimal number of lights on”, “no lights on”), I think of you.

Much is lost without human contact. While I haven’t really felt this effect (Will I? Could I go years without touch? Decades? Ha), I have come to think extensively about something that’s diminished in quarantine: the ability to be understood. “Being understood” is usually presented in reference to “serious” personal truths. I now wonder if this focus misses something basic and vital.

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