Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I recently finished reading this book by Robert Pirsig and for most of the 420 pages, i really didn't know what the point was or what i was looking for. Still it was a good book and i would suggest it to anyone willing to take the time and put in the effort to understand a pretty deep and detailed piece of work. A few passages stuck out at me and i wanted to take the time to flesh them out a little further.The author speaks of gumption, an old, underused word which he defines as the desire to complete a task in the most quality way possible. He spends a portion of the book defining the different types of gumption traps, or in other words, the obstacles in the way of you completing a task in the most quality way possible

p. 315 - Anxiety, the next gumption trap is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Of this, rather than "laziness," is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from overmotivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don't need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle.

This particular anxiety trap struck a chord with me, especially of late. When i left my job, i had this grand -- yet obviously delusional -- idea that i would just sit on my laptop and write. I had so many ideas of things to say and topics to discuss when i was stuck in that cubicle that i felt the only thing i had to do was open up microsoft word and it would all pour out and pretty soon people would offer me large sums of money to continue gushing about any topic i felt like writing about. I obviously thought wrong.The thing about my life so far, is that i've realized i'm really only talented at one thing: writing. That and a quarter won't get me a cup of coffee anymore. You have to be a self-starter, you have to be driven and multi-task in a multitude of mediums. You have to be able to market yourself, you have to be confident that your stuff is good and that everyone else is missing out on something spectuacular by not reading what you have to say but you also have to be self depricating at the same time. Well, from what i've noticed lately, the only thing i know how to do worth a shit is write. And i haven't even been very good at that lately. I'm not working at it, i'm not sending out samples and clips, i'm not e-mailing my blog topics to other bloggers, i'm not even working at getting a job writing. At first i thought it was laziness. Then after reading Pirsig's book, it occured to me that it was almost entirely anxiety. It's pretty pathetic to talk about, and even worse to post online for my friends and family to see, but i'm honestly so petrified that i'm doing everything wrong, or that i'll fail when i try to strike out on my own, that i'm doing nothing instead. I have fallen into that gumption trap and it is keeping me from my dreams. It is wasting a lot of time too. Moving on.
I talk about needing to find an "enabler." Someone who is the a-type personality who makes plans and executes them. A partner like that would help me enact these ideas and philosophies and dreams i have. But that sounds more like a babysitter to me, and the bottom line is that eventually you have to man up, take a chance and get something done yourself. Otherwise you get to wallow in mediocrity your whole life. No thanks.

The author then talks about inner peace which is a peace that has no direct relationship to external circumstances.

P. 295 - I've sometimes thought this inner peace of mind, this quietness is similar to if not identical with the sort of calm you sometimes get when going fishing, which accounts for much of the popularity of this sport. Just to sit with the line in the water, not moving, not really thinking about anything, not really caring about anything either, seems to draw out the inner tensions and frustrations that have prevented you from solving problems you couldn't solve before and introduced ugliness and clumsiness into your actions and thoughts.

I don't think there is any real mystery about why i liked this passage, being a fisheman and all. I felt that inner peace on my last trip to Alaska and that is without a doubt why i needed to go. So much so that i quit in order to be able to go. I had hoped that it would follow me home and remain with me for a while but the stress of travelling and the typical nonesense associated with arriving home after 8 days with things to clean, bills to pay, etc. just thrashed that whole inner peace feeling that allows good thoughts and things to happen. Of course you don't need to go fishing to achieve that feeling. Some people can do it by reading or writing or sitting quietly, but i feel like we don't do it enough at all anymore. I don't just sit and eat breakfast quietly, i have the TV on. I don't just go running or work out with a clear head, alone with my own thoughts. I take my iPod. I don't travel with just a book in hand or with a pad of paper. I take my laptop and watch movies. And i honestly think that this attachment to constant entertainment is an extension of what i spoke about above. It's an anxiety blocker. If i don't have to be alone with my own thoughts then they can't scare me, i can push away the realities i don't want to face, i can fill my mind with the useless drivel of Meet the Fockers and ignore the truths i should be facing. I never looked at it as a crutch, but it's becoming more and more obvious to me that it is. Lately i've had a strong yearning to sell my plasma TV for 30 cents on the dollar, ditch my Cox bill forever and only maintain one, small TV with a DVD/VCR combo and only really watch a movie when it's raining or there is a riot outside. I've never felt like more of a slave to an appliance then i have with this TV. It's been nothing but trouble and expenditures and i'm addicted to it and it's keeping me from the potentially good things. I'll never part with my iPod but i feel that is in a somewhat different category. You can passively listen to music and actively be thinking about better things. Or you can actively listen to great music that will make you pursue quality when you are done listening to it. I could live with just my iPod. I could live with just my laptop too, because some pretty damn good things have come out of it, but it's a matter of discipline to keep it from being a distraction at the same time.

Then the author rides his motorcycle out of a big town -- relative to where they've been travelling -- and he talks about loneliness.

P. 356 - Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face - that searching look - then it's gone.We see much more of this loneliness now. It's paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people are so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you'd think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn't see it so much.The explanation i suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it's reversed.There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You can see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.

This one doesn't need a whole lot of explanation and it's one of the few areas in the book where the author actually takes a tone of judgement about the current state of life. But it's not the TVs and the jets themselves that are to blame. It's the way we've been conditioned to think about those things in compartmentalized ways. I was talking to a friend yesterday who has been making friends on-line. Not a dating site or a myspace, but on Craigslist. I had no idea that type of thing even happened on that site, but miraculously, just as easily as you can sell a couch or a used car, you can find a friend. Someone to work out with, couples for other couples to go do to dinner with, someone to carpool with or form a book club with. When i asked why you couldn't just strike up a conversation with someone at the gym or at the bookstore, the friend said, "That's creepy." And i'm utterly shocked but i can't say that i'm surprised in the slightest. When i was younger and AOL was paid for by the hour, it was the weirdest and most foreign thing in the world to meet face-to-face someone that you had talked to online. In fact, it was downright scary. Now it has replaced face-to-face conversation as the "normal" way to meet people. It has gone so far that if someone strikes up a conversation with you at the grocery store, or a restaurant, then they are "creepy" but someone posting an ad for themself and you answering it and hanging out with them is the most normal and safe thing in the world. How did meeting online become more normal than shaking hands and saying nice to meet you? I'm not sure i'm ready to live in that world.

The author refers to college and the university enviroment as the Church of Reason.

P. 390 - The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.

Even though this book was written in 1975, this seems even more true today. Including the college comments, which i believe to be true, this seems to be symptomatic of other things in our culture. Shows like Surivor and Big Brother and other reality shows encourage contestants to band together against the strong contestants. In the business world, talent gets abused instead of cultivated and cheap distractions and overzealousness become rewarded. Politicians don't actually say what they believe, they say what keeps them in their jobs. Pander to the middle, and you'll always get paid.

If you've made it this far in the post, congratulations. That is all.

The War on Terror, and How We're in Deeper Shit than Ever Before

Back in 2004, i wrote this column for the ASU State Press:

I’m not exactly sure how to say this without tempting the Campus Republicans to lynch me publicly from an umbrella in front of Einstein’s Bagels but I think that the War on Terrorism is making things worse. There, I said it and now that it is out in the open I can process it a little better. All around the world (even in Montana) our terrorist enemies are talking to God on their two-way radios and teaching their children how America is the enemy and how they will be rewarded for killing infidels, which I’m sorry to say, is all of us. These children will grow up and most likely take up arms against us because they hate us for our freedom and our prosperity and our Gucci backpacks and Burberry headbands. Something obviously needs to be done about these people and it is being done with varying degrees of success. However I can’t help but feel that all of our aggression is forming a new breed of terrorist that will grow up hating us because one of our bombs missed and hit his house while he was eating dinner and killed his mom and his little sister. Or his dad lost his job as a truck driver once Halliburton came in to help rebuild the country and he was killed at the Iraqi police station while applying for a job. This new breed of terrorist isn’t motivated by virgins or martyrdom, he’s motivated by vengeance. He’s motivated by something that we as Americans will rarely be motivated by. Unlike us, he gets to see the faces of the dead, he lives in the war and his biggest concern on the way to school is not finding parking but dodging bullets. While our government won’t even allow us the reality of viewing pictures of the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers, these people are given the privilege of digging through the rubble of their home in hopes to find enough of their family members to bury. The website www.iraqbodycount.net estimates that over 12,000 civilians have been killed in military intervention in Iraq. That is 12,000 moms, dads, brothers and sisters who have left survivors behind who now have a new reason to hate America. If someone murdered your family (even by accident) you would want justice. I supposed that is what got us here in the first place but would you feel justified in killing three of them for every one of us. That is exactly what has happened. If you don’t see their faces, if you don’t see them as people who get up in the morning and go to work and have the same basic concerns and desires as all other human beings then you don‘t have as much of a problem hearing about their deaths in enormous numbers. The people who hate this country are multiplying exponentially every time they look for a culprit and see an American flag. I’m not saying that we should leave the terrorists to their own devices and turn a blind eye but we are hurting our own cause by not doing the job the right way. Why add fuel to an already raging oil well fire?

And now the New York Times has released this report by the National Intelligence Council that confirms what i've been saying for quite some time now.

Damn, i hate being right.

Jesus Camp : Today's sign that the apocalypse is upon us...

Holy shit. (Literally...)

Keith Olbermann is my favorite

At first, i was sad when he quit Sportscenter, but now i couldn't be happier. His show is consistently hilarious and he puts to task the people who need it the most.

Olbermann comments on 9/11

Ben Dubin Video Montage

This is only a small sample of what it's like being Ben Dubin's roommate. In reality, it's actually much, much more "entertaining" than this. (Kudos to Cameron for cannonballing Tequila at the end to ease his pain.)

Today's sign that the apocalypse is upon us

Martha Stewart can show him how to take it off... Attention high school kids, don't rob the Smoothie king.

"I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.'" - Arizona Senator, Barry Goldwater

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis

It's getting to be about voting time again (Sept 12) and no matter how you feel about "adult-oriented businesses," I think anyone who reads what I have to say would agree that we have to keep the government at bay when they attempt to push their "idea" of morality on us. We decide for ourselves where to spend our money and what small-businesses to support, we don't need Mary Manross (who blushed at the words "Pink" and "Taco" when placed together) telling us what to do. The Scottsdale City Council spent taxpayer money to hire a lawyer from the Alliance Defense Fund to write the ordinance that will put Scottsdale strip clubs out of business. Nothing against my Christian friends, because I assume they are all more enlightened than the people behind this, but taking a backhanded approach to putting a business you find offensive out of business is NOT the role of government, at least not a tyrannical one. (And why the problem now? These business have been open in the same locations for decades and now, all of a sudden, they're hurting Scottsdale's image? Sounds shady to me. And the alleged "image" of Scottsdale is not as squeaky clean as the politickers would imagine it to be in the first place, but that's another blog, for another time.)

Whether or not you would ever consider frequenting one of these establishments and regardless of how you view them morally, this is not a moral issue. This is about government railroading a business out of town and as Americans, as free thinkers and as defenders of the constitution, we are all obligated to vote NO on 401.

Additional reading:
http://www.azcentral.com/news/columns/articles/0831sr-roberts0831Z8.html
http://www.azcentral.com/community/Scottsdale/articles/0908churchpower0908.html
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=55141
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0831sr-stripdebate31-ON.html

McDonald's. So your fat kid can drive a gas guzzling car too.