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September 5th, 2018


Years ago when I was a teenager I was on a camping trip with my relatives and
some of their family friends. I went for a walk in the hills with the daughter
of one of the families. I took my walkie talkie with me and was radioing the
camp. I thought it would be fun. At one point as we were walking down the hill
back to camp we lost track of the trail. I said “We’ve lost the trail” and later
“There are a lot of trees here, it’s getting dark”. I was not worried in the
least. We had no map, and we had no trail, but there was a road by the
campground and all we had to do was keep going down and we would have to hit the
road at some point.

As we approached the camp we were greeted by a phalanx of adults who had decided
to go searching for us. They thought we were totally lost in the woods. The
girls’ brother had had an asthma attack from the stress and had gone to the
hospital. The whole thing seemed totally ridiculous to me. But I realized then
that most people really approach life in a very problematic way. They think you
need to have some sort of certainty of outcomes. Minor things like losing the
trail totally panic them. It seemed obvious to me, if you think about it for two
more nanoseconds, there was zero real danger, given the nature of the terrain.
My own parents were not worried of course. It was all the other parents and
relatives.

I am a pessimistic person. Of all the people I know, probably the most
pessimistic. I don’t expect anything to work out with certainty, and I don’t try
to make things work out with certainty. But my pessimism doesn’t make me upset
or sad or depressed, because I also don’t expect things to go wrong, either. I
simply am open to what happens. If something goes wrong, I try something else.
There is always some way to work with things, even if you are about to die in
the next second. There’s always something to work with.

The Japanese say “gambatte” which means, roughly, “keep going!” It’s meant as an
encouragement to someone going through a difficult situation.

I think optimism can be cruel when it is attached to outcomes. There’s a kind of
open vast freedom which comes from working with every moment no matter what
happens, regardless of outcome. You don’t have to have a map. You can work
without a map. There’s actually no map, there doesn’t need to be a map. There
needs to be working with everything, at all times. Just keep going.

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September 23rd, 2015


I think the problem when people try to compare New York with Los Angeles is that
people tend to compare them as though they were the same *kind* of thing:
cities, or metropolises, or something. But they’re just not the same kind of
thing, they’re not really directly comparable. New York is a city of
neighborhoods, Los Angeles is more like a country of regions. One radio station
here likes to say that it is based in “Pasadena, Los Angeles” — I remember
listening to one DJ saying about that tag line, “I keep saying it because it
keeps being true.” Los Angeles isn’t better or worse than New York, it’s not
really possible to compare the two places, because they’re not comparable. It’s
like trying to compare and contrast Paris with England.

Los Angeles is diffuse, bright, relaxed, open, s p r e a d o u t, fanciful, less
intense and less energized but also less neurotic and less entrenched. It’s
possible to hide in the expanse of LA in a way that isn’t possible in the dense
canyons of New York. The best anything always becomes visible quickly throughout
New York — the best things in LA might just be known only to a smattering of
people who happen to live nearby: LA is an expanse of neighboring small towns
juxtaposed with each other, knit together by the freeways which promise endless
discovery. No matter how long you’ve lived here, even if you grew up here, you
always feel there is something you haven’t yet discovered that may be only a few
minutes away by car. Los Angeles feels like an endless, infinite grid, a slice
of an infinite universe in both time and space. The edge of the city feels like
an abstraction, to come to an edge, except when it is up against the ocean
(another infinity) or a mountain, is a shock, an impossibility.

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January 9th, 2015


Like any non-psychotic human being, I’m appalled at the horrific massacre in
Paris. At the same time, I find many of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo
pointlessly inflammatory and tasteless, particularly those showing Mohammed in
sexual positions. Yes, they targeted every religion and many public figures on
the right and the left — but there’s something dark, mean-spirited, unfunny, and
racist about some of these cartoons, and so while condemning the violence I
can’t bring myself to post “I am Charlie Hebdo.” I am not Charlie Hebdo. There
does seem to be a problematic attitude towards othering subcultures inherent in
these cartoons, which for some reason many in France found funny, but I really
don’t. We can abhor the horrific violence without valorizing everything the
victims did in their lives.

Addendum: this is not about assigning blame to the victims for their murder, it
is about whether or not victims should always be praised as unalloyed heroes for
everything they did. The former is insane, the latter, however, I am
uncomfortable with and have been from the beginning of this.

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December 16th, 2014


An article lamenting the art scene in Toronto…

http://www.artslant.com/ew/articles/show/41530

I think New York sucks people and energy out of many cities in its vicinity, not
just Toronto — certainly the entire “suburban” area surrounding it (New Jersey,
Westchester, Connecticut, Long Island), as well as cities such as Philadelphia
and Baltimore… speaking about the culture as a whole, not just the art world.
Being from Los Angeles, originally, which is a kind of Borgesian infinite
expanse of points which contain all other points, a city with no center, a city
in which things fold in on themselves at increasing distances, it feels
disorienting to be in a place where there’s such a clear center which radiates
itself outward and where everyone attempts to find the last place, closest to
the center, where they can afford to live. Occasionally I drive to Jersey (yes,
I have a car, an Angeleno transplant who cannot fully admit to being in a place
where owning a car is an absurdity) and encounter a world both familiar and
strange — there are the same sort of malls and suburban life, out there, that
exist in my hometown metropolis, but strangely evacuated of what one takes for
granted in California, the sense that nestled in between the gleaming, sprawling
malls and big box stores may be, and are, treasures you have yet to discover.
You can feel it, everywhere there, but it’s been vacuumed out of all but the
most proximate edges of the suburban landscape around New York… and it must be
because it all heads towards the center, towards New York, eventually.

Los Angeles breeds its own kind of one-way rivalry — no one ever says bad things
about San Francisco or Northern California there, but Northern Californians
(people from the SF Bay Area like to call themselves “Northern Californians”
perhaps to establish themselves in a much larger geographical context) love to
hate Los Angeles, seemingly unaware the rivalry is entirely one-sided. Angelenos
have no idea that San Francisco hates them. Even with the rise of the tech
industry and the international significance that has placed in that region of
the world, the one-way rivalry lives on, for reasons I’m not sure anyone fully
understands.

I’ve often remarked upon the culture among the artists of my father’s generation
— the abstract painters and other artists working then — how generous they are
with each other. How unconcerned with commercial success, notoriety, fame. They
sit together, my father (who is completely unknown and has never even attempted
to have a commercial career), and his friends, some of whom sell their works for
tens of thousands of dollars a piece, some of whom don’t even make work anymore,
and they all talk completely as peers, swap work and stories, because they have
a kind of existential appreciation for each other as people, and have never been
competitive with each other. Today’s art world, not only in Toronto but it seems
throughout the world, does seem remarkably less cooperative in many ways, though
that same character exists in New York, as well, but perhaps because it is New
York, that doesn’t stop art from happening here. I’m not sure how long this will
last, however… art now is the harbinger of rapid gentrification and sky high
rents, a trend that cannot continue forever, but one which has already priced
most people out of most of Manhattan and much of nearby Brooklyn. The future
will not be like the past.

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September 17th, 2014


There are so many things that are actually the opposite of what they seem… and
it causes so many life problems. For instance … the usual way people tend to
think about making something happen in life is that you should make a huge
effort, and the opposite is that is to laze around and do nothing. So “struggle”
is associated with “effort” which is associated with “doing things”, and
“relaxation” is associated with “not doing anything”. I.e.:

STRUGGLE <-> EFFORT <-> FOCUS <-> DOING STUFF

RELAXATION <-> BEING LAZY <-> FUZZINESS <-> STAGNATION

But, this is not right, at all. This ignores context, scope, spaciousness. That
is, if you’re making an effort, struggling, and “doing stuff” but it is all
towards some “goal” that is itself conceived of a narrow or limited perception,
in fact you may just be reinforcing the same habits and thoughts and world view
that got you into whatever dead end you might find yourself in in the first
place. Struggling without insight, without spaciousness, is a great way to keep
things exactly the same as they always have been.

There’s another way, of course: relaxation, but not a vague, fuzzed-out, foggy
relaxation — but instead an alert, present, open spaciousness — that can open
you up to possibilities far, far beyond your habits. Relaxing can be
hyper-present and aware and offer the possibility of revolutionary change, and
mindless, reactive struggle can be just another way of embedding yourself in the
same traps. Allow me to suggest an alternate schema:

STRUGGLE <-> NARROWNESS <-> REACTIVITY <-> STAGNATION

RELAXATION <-> FOCUS <-> SPACIOUSNESS <-> REVOLUTION

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July 10th, 2014








Most things, as you progress along, you can see you’re getting steadily closer
to the goal, step by step. But with coding, quite often, you can work for hours
and hours, or days and days, on something and you imagine that you may never get
to the point it is totally working. Everything seems hopeless… until, suddenly,
impossibly, everything works perfectly and you feel like a genius. Again. And in
your mind, the problem that just seemed like a dark jungle of twisted complexity
appears to be “trivial.” Everything always seems trivial when you get it
working.

But then, you voluntarily decide to jump into the darkness again.

After a while, you learn that no matter how dark it seems, the light of
beautiful function is hovering on the unseen horizon. But even with that
accumulated experience, in the back of your mind, you still have that nagging
feeling… maybe THIS time is the time I NEVER figure it out…

The best programmers are the ones who manage to push that thought deep into
their pile of repressed fears, and charge ahead once more into the unknown.

http://steampunkopera.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-two-kings-and-the-two-labyrinths/

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May 19th, 2014


I was walking with Heather and Jungmin today and we were talking about this
and that, and in the context of our conversation, Heather asked, “Why do we
die?” She meant it in a biological sense — why do organisms die, rather than
just live forever?

I said “I don’t know, but let’s think about this a bit… one hint might be that
most species engage in sexual reproduction, which allows for a variety of
different genetic possibilities to be tried. Dying is part of this, because the
species can only explore different genetic possibilities if previous generations
die out to make room for the newer generations. But then the question arises —
how would this evolve?” I paused for a second to think about this a bit more
deeply. “Consider two species, one which had individuals which never died of old
age, and another which explored different genetic possibilities through sexual
reproduction and death. Clearly, the second species would explore a lot more
possibilities, genetically, than the first, over the same time period, giving
the second species a huge adaptive advantage over the first.” We talked about
this idea some more and Heather pointed out that, in some sense, while we all
are often assholes to each other, and are often selfish, we are also all engaged
in a highly cooperative activity, as well; by living, reproducing, and dying to
make room for future generations, we’re collectively helping our species adapt
and evolve.

The most dramatic and meaningful stories and events always seem to have to do
with the boundaries of life: reproduction (love and sex), and death. Somehow
we’re all subconsciously aware of this.

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February 8th, 2014


It’s really a wonderful world. Being. It’s quiet and seems like everything is
still. Yet it includes all movement. All movement is actually stillness and vice
versa. It strips away fake importance and in its place is real meaning. It is
difficult to hide there. Maybe that’s one of the scariest things about it.

Instead of coercive needs, it has acceptance. But the acceptance can have desire
and affection and love in it. The most intense and scary things are right there
alongside the everyday and familiar. but the everyday and familiar takes on a
different, initially unfamiliar cast. Exactly like going through the looking
glass. Everything on the other side is still there, but it’s a vastly wonderous
strange world.

It seems frightening and disorienting at first. Like giving up everything. But
then it turns out everyone and everything is really still there. In being.
Running away from it is like running away from ourselves and everything we love.
It’s a strange and funny and beautiful paradox.

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January 25th, 2014


Years ago I was riding in a car with Sue and she was driving and I was sleeping.
We were driving through the mountains. I woke up just as we were headed almost
off the road into the chasm below when Sue must have nodded off for a second,
just in time for me to yell “HEY!”. I often think that we actually died
together, tragically, two young people in love, off the side of a mountain, but
since everything that can happen, does, in some universe, this is one of the
thin threads of improbability that comprise us surviving and everyone and
everything that has happened since then is like the fever dream in Jacob’s
Ladder except not nightmarish but sort of fun yet a little tragic and sad and
filled with weird interesting characters and people I got to know, like you.

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September 8th, 2013


A young couple goes to a Zen monk to ask him to write a blessing on the occasion
of the birth of their child. He contemplates this for a moment and then writes,
in beautiful calligraphy, the words “Grandfather die, father die, son die.” The
couple is horrified: “You haven’t written us a blessing, you’ve written us a
curse!” The Zen monk responds: “Would you have it any other way?”

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