Late Boomer's Den

  • So Socrates gave birth to Western reason through a religious quest?

    “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David

    I mentioned a while back that I’d been getting into Socrates. Obsessed is a better word, trip down the rabbit hole is fully under way.

    So when my Unitarian church said nobody was lined up to do a sermon this week, I raised my hand and went “me me me me!” I could talk about Socrates!

    Only to realize I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I’ve only read a few of Plato’s Dialogues and watched a handful of videos. I had to cram and write at the same time.

    It went OK. And I learned a few things.

    I was surprised to learn how much of a role the Oracle of Delphi and the temple of Apollo played in his life. For another, just how rooted his rationalism was in his religious faith.

    Socrates’ guiding principles were right there on that temple at Delphi. One column had inscriptions that read, “know thyself,” “nothing in excess” and “surety brings ruin.”

    Socrates was shocked when he learned the Oracle had told his friend “No one is wiser than Socrates.” Seemingly a clear statement, when they were typically riddles.

    Instead of gloating, Socrates’ treated it as yet another riddle to be solved. The meaning appeared obvious, and yet that warning: surety brings ruin.

    Socrates was knew he wasn’t wise. There were so many questions he couldn’t answer, but he believed Apollo could never lie. So he began searching for anyone wiser than himself to prove he wasn’t wise, so he could go to the Oracle and ask what Apollo meant.

    But time and time again, people who claimed or were thought to be wise, revealed under Socrates’ questioning that they had no idea what they were talking about. Which we all know landed Socrates in a lot of trouble after he pricked too many tender egos.

    Another thing I didn’t realize was how many chances Socrates had to get out of it. He could have chosen exile and could have escaped. Instead he drank hemlock to show his dedication to Apollo. He cared about his mission that much.

    Socrates’ method outlived him and changed the world. To me that shows that it doesn’t really matter if a god is real in a material sense. If enough people think it exists, they’ll make very discernable changes to the material world on its behalf. So it might as well exist.

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  • There but for the grace of God almost went I

    Bookworm, dreamer, artist, raised in a tolerant household, English degree… I barely even had the accent. I considered myself more liberal than most everyone I knew. So why was I a Republican for over 20 years? I’ll tell you why.

    Because inside every well-read country boy is a wannabe city boy who’s afraid he isn’t good enough.

    If you judge good enough by ability to afford a comfortable and cultured city life, I kind of wasn’t. I finally made it at least temporarily, after hopscotching from one low-paying small town newspaper gig to another for 20 years until I met city girl with a better-paying job than mine.

    The city was my measure of normal. It was how they showed it in the movies. And the little town I grew up in was not enough for me. Plenty of fun, plenty of nature and plenty of hell to raise, but there was no future for me, not a good one anyway.

    I thought myself a cut above “regular” country boys because look how they were portrayed in movies and on TV my whole life. And how much of an ignorant and racist person I would be if I identified at all with the tribe my people came from.

    I loved rock ‘n’ roll and made a point of avoiding country music. If Satanic Panicking preachers hated it, I was into it. I was jealous of hippies for getting to see Hendrix and getting to be rebels who made a difference.

    So of course I became a conservative at the first opportunity, not that I understood what that meant. Kids in the country are like tadpoles, liberal and conservative larvae. They might turn out to be a frog or a salamander. You can’t tell until they grew up or at least until after their first existential crisis.

    All Rush Limbaugh had to do was tell us Democrats referred to us as “flyover country” and he made me a fan for years. You listen to the people you identify with.

    By the time the Republicans got to be the way they are now I had had enough. I was tired of the crooked preachers, the Iraq War, “trickle down” economics.

    It’s why although I oppose what they say and believe, I have some sympathy for MAGA, for the Red Pillers, for the Incels, for the Fox News and Joe Rogan stans. It’s why I felt bad for the Katie McHugh, the Breitbart reporter who got thrown under the bus by those who radicalized her.

    I was unpersuaded by most of those influences, but I was privileged. Privileged to have parents who taught me to love reading, who were more tolerant than most. Privileged because my family was able to send me to college, barely.

    I was lucky enough to discover the Internet at a time when it could expose me to a variety of viewpoints, instead of algorithmically channeling me to the extreme edges of what I already believed.

    I was privileged to be part of Generation Jones (one reason for the Late Boomer moniker). Old enough but not too old. If I’d been in school during the Cuban Missile Crisis or raised on the Internet, I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t be just like them today.

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  • Lucid dream experience number 2

    I had a shitty night’s sleep last night. Glutened myself last Friday (Hormel Chili) and felt like I swallowed a pack of balloons. Lots of tossing and turning. Nap incoming. But even so, it was cool, because I had my second ever instance of lucid dreaming.

    I’ve always been fascinated by people’s stories about roaming around freely in their dreams, but when I try to do it it never works. Only when I’m not trying.

    The previous time was after I got up to pee one night and found myself in the kitchen of my childhood home. Noticed there was ice in the toaster and figured it out, got to look around a bit is all.

    Last night, after I got exhausted enough to fall asleep, I found myself in the hallway of an empty school building. Dark, no one around. I began trying to find my way out.

    The hallway I chose had a light at the other end, so I thought it might be the exit. But the hall was really dark and kept getting longer. It felt like I was moving through molasses.

    I started to get creeped out, then I figured it out. It was a dream. But I was still in it. So I started to explore. The light turned out to be a window into a classroom. I thought I saw a couple of blurry figures, but when I got close, it was a poster. I peeled it back and saw into the classroom, which was empty.

    I went back to the starting point and noticed some kid’s art on the wall. I was able to touch it and feel the construction paper. Then started touching the wall, feeling the texture.

    Then sat in a chair and just looked around. Then I realized I was in my underwear and thought I probably should be in a school building in my underwear even if it was empty. Wound up in my bed.

    Pretty neat. Maybe one day I’ll figure out how to do it at will.

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  • Eddies in life’s current

    A couple of nights ago, I had dream where I spoke with a wise woman (same woman as in this dream?). It had something to do with loops. Loops that linger and loops that break up quickly. Eddies in life’s current.

    I wrote a post a while back about loops. In that case I was thinking about fugue states, when you repeat actions or thoughts and you can’t seem to break out.

    I have the impression this was about another kind of loop: habit.

    There are good habits and bad habits. For some odd reason, the good ones fade away when you’re not paying attention (like healthy diets and exercise routines), while the bad ones are tenacious as hell.

    If you think I’ve learned how to wisely control my habits, you’d be wrong. They start out OK, then they go off the rails. Every morning I get up planning to spend several hours writing.

    First I feed the dog, microwave some oatmeal, make a pitcher of tea, practice Spanish on Duolingo, social media, check out Beau of the Fifth Column, read, mess with dishes and laundry, check social media one last time, and… doomscroll for hours.

    Before I know it, I’ve barely accomplished the task I really wanted to do.

    Legendary Pink Dots – Encore Une Fois. A song about loops:

    The sun beats down, the world spins ’round, and repeat myself again
    There’s a loop inside my brain. I never learn, I never gain, I only
    Turn, I stay the same, repeat myself again, repeat myself again.

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  • Why the left can’t talk to the right

    I don’t really think in terms of good people and bad people anymore. It’s more useful to say good and bad thinking, good and bad actions. If you just say a person does bad because he’s bad, you can’t work with that.

    If they’re genuinely bad people, they can’t be changed. If it’s bad thinking maybe you can, assuming you’re not thinking badly yourself. A certain percentage of us are sociopaths and can’t be fixed, but that’s not most of us. There’s something you can do.

    If your model for fixing the world involves getting rid of the bad guys – when every bad guy thinks he’s the good guy… You basically wind up exactly where we are now.

    Just had a little social media convo regarding my last post, about how right and left are too far apart anymore and won’t talk to each other, how we’re trying to win without convincing.

    The guy I talked to thinks most of the shit talk from liberals is out of frustration at not being able to get through to hard-headed conservatives. Not to mention there’s a deluge of shit talk coming from the right. Of course you want to clap back.

    I get it. I’ve had my heart broken by things I’ve seen conservative people in my life say on social media over the years. But looking back, I didn’t help matters. I had too much of that edgy Reddit atheist sense of humor. I was being alienated. I was doing the same.

    Liberal and left messaging toward the right has been a disaster since long before MAGA. I have a sense of why, because I was on that side of the fence for many years. I was part of two consecutive tribes: 1. rural evangelical Reagan fanboy and 2. atheist libertarian.

    Inability to see things from others’ perspective is a hallmark of the right, but the same is true of the left – as regards the right. The Internet promotes this, feeding us strawman versions of the other side and steelmanning our own. The world becomes good vs. evil. Opponents (neighbors) become enemies.

    I agree with the progressives on most issues. Racial and income equality, the environment, respect for intellectualism. But the messaging is terrible.

    From liberals there is condescension, which sets country people off like you wouldn’t believe. When I was a teenager in the country, searching for my identity, I wanted out of that little spot on the map.

    I wanted to live in the city and hang out with musicians and artists. A liberal to be, you would think. But somehow I had a sense that the liberals were not on my side. (The left wasn’t even on my radar yet. The Cold War was still on.)

    As I encountered the left in later life, I encountered elitism and puritanism. I didn’t necessarily think they were wrong, just that they weren’t nice.

    When I became an atheist, I began looking for people to talk to. I found a chatroom of mostly progressive atheists and tried to have a conversation. When they learned I was a Republican they called me a fascist and bullied me out of the group.

    I couldn’t talk to Republicans about losing my faith, and I couldn’t talk to these people. Far from seeing the error of my ways, I became bitter and dug my heels in. Who would talk to me? Libertarians. So that’s what I was for several more years.

    You tend to identify with people who are nice to you.

    What had the opposite effect? Making friends with people on a music site where I went on to become an admin. In that space you were respected for your taste in music and if you were nice. I teased the the liberals and lefties I found there (I didn’t understand the difference) and called them hippies, but I liked them.

    They didn’t immediately change my politics. But when the time came to reconsider my outlook, I wasn’t afraid of their ideas, because they weren’t the monsters I had been sold by the Republicans.

    TDLR, if you want to change somebody’s mind, start by finding some common interests and treat them like people first.

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  • Time to get realistic with our prognostication and start talking

    I used to dream of post-scarcity solar system-wide and galaxy-wide human societies, like the one in Star Trek. I wanted to be Captain Kirk as a kid. I at least wanted to be on the Starship Enterprise and not wear a red shirt. But these days I have a hard time envisioning a future that resembles a sci fi world I’d want to live in.

    What happens in the future is anybody’s guess. But I mostly read “hard” science fiction, which to me just means the story seems somewhat plausible, at least for the time they wrote it. “If this goes on…” etc.

    Those books got me in the habit of running scenarios – or “catastrophizing” as my wife calls it. Not that I don’t enjoy utopia stories. “And Then There Were None” about a society based on Gandhi’s philosophy, is a pretty good example of that. Gave me a chuckle.

    Supposing I had a dream that felt like a prophesy and I happened to be right? (Carl Jung did that, kind of). Would it matter?

    As much as I don’t want it to be, the Rapture Machine dream I had way back in college, might have been very close. That was many years before I was able to accept what it was really telling me.

    If an asteroid was headed for the planet, I bet we’d pull together, figure out what to do, put some resources into it. Instead, we’re worried about zombie apocalypses and don’t trust our neighbors anymore. We’re arguing about whether climate change is real, based on team affiliation.

    Meanwhile extreme weather is about to cook us or wash us away. Time for the teams to have a pow wow. Not that I see that happening soon. If I could make it happen I would.

    Another reason for the “Late” in Late Boomer. Now I see things a little clearer than I used to, but man I overslept. I certainly wish I’d grok-ed the system before I got old and decrepit.

    I think it’s time to get realistic and admit we’re in a pull our ass out of the fire situation on planet earth, economically, politically, culturally, and climate-ly. Trying to figure out who gets to control the future is seriously putting the cart before the horse.

    We all have a lot of work to do to fix this planet and we haven’t been working together. Too busy dishing out sick burns, as if that mattered. Time to stop demonizing and start talking. Lead with what music are you into, your pets, etc. instead of your tribe sucks.

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  • Gen Z can groove after all

    Nation of Language – Too Much, Enough. I’m getting a dark New Wave/Postpunk kinda vibe, like Modern English or Comsat Angels.

    Last time my friend shared a song his daughter liked it was a little rough. Some teenage boy singing a sad song about a number. My friend admitted he didn’t get it either. She was little.

    She got older and now her favorites are Icelandic jazz singer Laufey and a band called Nation of Language.

    Nation of Language – Sole Obsession.

    “New music sucks.” I’ve heard that for years from my peers, through the metal years, the grunge years, the hip hop years (which I guess we’re still in?). I never did buy it.

    There’s always good music. You just might have to dig for it. Personally, I don’t care what’s popular. I care if it’s good, and there’s so much available online, why worry about what everybody likes? Find what you like.

    Laufey – Bewitched. This is really interesting, bringing back that orchestrated jazz sound from the 40s and 50s. Why shouldn’t that be cool again?

    Laufey – From the Start. Bossanova a la Astrud Gilberto. I approve.

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  • Be at Office 4 p.m.

    I see old folks like me from time to time, complaining that schools don’t teach handwriting now. Not something I’ve lost sleep over. I’m sure kids learn to type sooner than we did.

    But I am curious if my handwriting has become a secret code? Cuz most people I know tell me it’s totally unreadable. I don’t think it’s that bad, but I’m used to it.

    When I was a reporter people would see my notes and go, “Ah, you know shorthand!”

    Hell no. I tried to learn it once and gave up.

    I had to take a lot of notes and I had to do it fast, at football games, city council meetings, interviews, press conferences. I didn’t have time to worry about penmanship.

    It’s just messy messy scribbles and on the fly abbreviations, a note-taking habit I picked up in college. What I do works for me, but I did realize how it could get me in trouble if I went showing my reporter’s notes around.

    One night I’m covering a high school football game from the stands in a packed stadium, people all around me. Not sure why I wasn’t on the sidelines, like usual.

    Anyway, I look down at my notebook and I see. “Beat Off 4 p.m.” I had an interview that afternoon. It was an abbreviation for “Be at the office at 4 p.m.” Luckily nobody saw. I didn’t know how I was going to explain that.

    I’m a crotchety old man now. That’s when you’re supposed to complain about stuff. But I don’t get complaining about “things the new generation does wrong.” Sometimes they do drive me nuts, but they’re getting older and we’re getting old.

    It’s fixing to be Gen Z’s decision whether or not anyone cares about penmanship. And a whole lot of other things besides.

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  • The map is not the territory, but maps are all we get

    Strange dream last night. I was on a spaceship so large it had geography. It had a sky. I could look into the distance and see bluffs and trees and mountains.

    I was told I was not on a planet or inside a space habitat, but a landscape on the flat surface of a gargantuan spaceship.

    Suddenly I realized I had a job to do. I tried to find my work space. I opened a drawer that appeared to be in my childhood dresser. It was empty except for a smashed orange with white fuzzy tendrils coming out of it.

    The seeds were beginning to sprout. I wanted to plant it.

    My coworkers were talking about something we needed to do. It occurs to me it was in the newsroom at a place I used to work. They said we needed to talk to “the queen.” We needed to ask her permission to do something.

    Not sure who the queen was. I just accepted it. I went outside, where I saw the sky and the mountains in the distance. I saw a lady with a contingent of people around her. I didn’t get a sense of her personality, just that she seemed confident.

    I was told she had the ability to “turn off reality.” I asked her a question I can’t remember and got an answer I can’t remember. Who was she? What did it mean that she could turn off reality?

    I think the dream had to do with something I read about online about Alfred Korzybski who came up with the phrase “the map is not the territory.” I posted a blog entry about that concept before. Descriptions and even the evidence of our eyes and ears don’t really capture reality. There’s always a layer of perception and always something missing.

    I think my dream was about maps and models of reality. Like maybe this was the territory? If so it didn’t make sense. Outside changed to inside. Furniture changed or was forgotten. People were vague. I somehow accepted I was on a spaceship, but it didn’t seem like a spaceship at all. It seemed like earth.

    Maybe it was flat because it was the map?

    Anyway it occurs to me that it’s probably maps all the way down. Turn off one layer of reality and you find another. They’re all “accurate” maps, depending on the scale you want to look at. You don’t really need a globe until you pan out far enough. Flat works as long as you only care about a small area of the earth.

    Maybe that’s how you your “spaceship” moves. By turning off the models that don’t fit anymore.

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  • Between the real and the ‘real’

    There are certain things that aren’t real, but it’s best to treat them as if they were. Money, for example. It’s just an idea, but it’s as real as most other things we believe are real. You can’t just say it isn’t real and get by without it.

    Sometimes the actually real leaks through our projections and we can tell that some commonly accepted idea is a mass hallucination, but sometimes killing it just isn’t worth it.

    Or anyway you know it would take a long time before anyone else admits it. The question is, how much pretending do you have to do to get by? For public show or for yourself?

    What the hell IS real? Wouldn’t you like to know? I sure would. I’ve been struggling with that one all my life. It’s all symbol and metaphor, and meta-metaphors, and meta-meta-meta narratives etc. You don’t get to touch the real thing.

    You can’t see the spot where your optic nerve meets the retina, but you can’t see the hole either. Your brain fills it in. That happens on every level. There will always be something missing, something we can’t know.

    Some people don’t believe there is a bottom floor. Once you figure out how much of “reality” is made up by culture, it’s easy to just say nothing is real, or reality is whatever we say it is.

    I don’t buy that. I do think there is a version of reality that is true no matter what anyone thinks, only I don’t think it will ever be nailed down. It’s beyond what can be proven by science. It’s zero divided by zero.

    But it exists. Or anyway we should pretend it is.

    I’ve decided it’s like the speed of light. You can never actually reach the speed of light no matter how powerful your spaceship. The best you can hope to achieve is 99.9 percent and after that keep adding 9’s after the decimal.

    It’s easiest way to live is to just accept what you’re told is real by the tribe you identify with (whether they identify with you is a different matter) The tribe tends to react badly when you contradict them on important matters.

    But the less real your reality, the more likely you are to trip over things. And knowing that on some level you’re pretending to believe, you’ll never be satisfied.

    Anyway I enjoy the hunt.

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