Craving

Here's an interesting article from Irvine Housing Blog (found via Eschaton) about craving and home equity loans.

"The Second Noble Truth of the Buddha is that all suffering is caused by craving. People who took out HELOCs to fuel consumer spending gave in to craving, and they are about to endure a period of extreme suffering in their lives. People crave for just about everything they believe money can buy: cars, boats, vacations, status, lovers, self-esteem, and many other things or states of mind. HELOCs enabled people to obtain things that would have been denied to them under ordinary circumstances. When people obtain objects of their desire, it leads to a temporary state of satiation followed by an even more intense wanting. It is like drinking salt water: you think it helps, but drinking it makes you even more dehydrated and causes you to crave water even more."

More here.

Every day is Saturday

Mid-afternoon at Galileo today with Kelley O.

More on the past

Once in awhile, I find myself mentally running through the details of some unpleasant event from my past. I used to do this frequently — like a couple of times a day or more. Now it's more like once a month or less. And I've learned to catch these moments as they occur and direct my thinking elsewhere, or just focus on my breathing for a few moments.

I've encountered some truly unpleasant people in my life, especially during my time as a reporter. Obviously there was some exposure to criminals and corrupt politicians, but I'm thinking more about the people I knew who were in the business.

In Generation of Swine, Hunter S. Thompson wrote:

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

I can tell you that from my vantage point, that's barely hyperbole. I knew a great many good people, some of whom I still bump into occasionally, but I also encountered more than a few people who seemed to be truly evil. And at least during the time I was in the business, it seemed to reward people who were devoid of conscience or ethics.

But I'm getting off the point here, because the point is all those people are in the past. In other words, they don't exist, at least for me. So there's no reason to think about them, fret about them or become frustrated or resentful about my encounters with them ten or twenty years ago. Those people no longer exist. My encounters with them no longer exist.

During the present moments I will experience today, I will probably:

• eat some toast with plum jam


• visit with some friends


• go for a walk


• have lunch with some friends


• commune with some cats


• maybe have a mimosa with some other friends


• maybe take a nap


• maybe work in the yard or around the house a bit

And will almost certainly not encounter a single bully, high-rolling swindler, white-collar thief or manipulative office politician.

It's kind of a running gag in my circle of friends that I don't go anywhere or do anything. But in truth, almost every waking moment of my day is a celebration of the fact that I no longer live as I once did.

It's a lot easier to be at peace if you can liberate yourself from hostile or unpleasant surroundings. I'd like to say that my own small-"e" enlightenment freed me, but it had more to do with circumstances beyond my control.

I'm grateful — immensely grateful — things turned out the way they did.

Postscript: The Hunter S. Thompson quote posted above is often followed by the additional sentence, "And then there's a negative side." This appears to be apocryphal, as are versions of the quote in which the description is applied to music or some other business.

The past

One of the basic teachings of Buddhism (and other philosophies as well, I suppose) is that there is no past. The past is just something that exists in your mind — your perceptions and opinions of things that happened previously. We each remember the past with varying degrees of accuracy. Sometimes what we remember isn't what happened. We can't even agree about the lyrics to old TV theme songs, let alone things of significance.

My memories of my own past tend toward the negative. It seems as if every mistake, every embarrassment and every failure is as clear now as if it happened last week — even things that happened in sixth and seventh grade. There were things I did well, but the memory of them isn't as clear as the things that went badly. If I think about my past, my thoughts will most likely focus on something I did that I wish I hadn't done, or that I had done differently.

I don't know if I've forgotten or suppressed all the good things that happened or all the positive things I did, or if there just weren't very many of them. I know I sense a certain discomfort remembering things I did well, as if that were some form of egotism or puffery.

It may also be that I've inflated the significance of the negative memories. Maybe those things weren't as big as they seemed at the time. It's hard now to go back and clear those things up because I've lost track of almost everyone I knew prior to about 2002, and all of my immediate family has passed on.

I moved a lot as a child and adolescent, so I was able to leave a lot of stuff behind. No one where I live now knows anything about my junior high and high school days because they happened in another city.

One of the advantages of retirement is that I don't have much of a practical reason to think about those things now. A retired person doesn't need a 'reputation,' and there's not much reason to worry about what I did five or thirty-five years ago or what anyone else knows or thinks about those things today.

There are always things from the past we have to carry with us to the present — how to get to the grocery store, where we put the car keys, our friends' telephone numbers and so on. We must sometimes remember mistakes to avoid repeating them. The problem I have is knowing how much significance I should ascribe to things from the past.

Festival of the Arts 2008

Soartstar and me at the 2008 Festival of the Arts.

Hey, ho... let's go!

Blow up your &%$# TV

While everyone else is talking about the PA primary tonight, I want to respond to a comment Blogblah! left here a couple of days ago:

"Although you are rather well situated to do so, you didn't write about something I've noticed over the past few years that I'd like to have you consider.

"Several years ago, I gave up television. I don't have cable and I don't watch broadcast with the rare exception of a sporting event (about twice a year) or some such.

"Television is NOT an entertainment media. Television is an advertising media.

"I find that once I was not subjecting myself to constant attempts to manipulate my materialism, my consumer urges dropped off considerably.

"Moreover, once I quit filling my head with such trivial matters as who lost the most weight or got kicked off the island or purged from Idol, I had the time and the urge to think of weightier matters: is this all there is?; do I really need that?; isn't contentment more important than almost anything else?

"Since you were once in the belly of that beast, I'd really like to hear some of your musings on the subject."

As most of you know, I haven't watched TV regularly in years. I don't think there's a single show on TV today that I've seen a full episode of — except The Simpsons, which has been on forever. There are a great many shows — the vast majority of them, in fact — that I've never seen at all.

I consider myself much the better off for that.

And I haven't worked in the TV business for almost a decade.

Most people in the TV business (or the TV news business, at least) look at it this way: the newscast is the product, and the audience is the customer. That's the way I looked at it, too, and it wasn't until I had been out of the business a couple of years that I found an accurate description.

The accurate description is this: the audience is the product, and the advertiser is the customer. The company's sole loyalty is to its customer, the advertiser.

This is true not only of television, but almost all advertising-driven media.

Advertising is there to sell you stuff, and as part of that process, to make you want stuff you might not otherwise desire. Your will to resist may be enhanced if you realize how you're being manipulated, but even then, it may be hard to say no to some of it.

Media in general also seem to be developing a growing acceptance of the so-called 'advertorial', in which editorial copy is tailored to benefit advertisers. Even the pretense of a 'firewall' between sales and advertising has begun to break down. It's not uncommon on blogs now to find glowing reviews of books or computer software followed by a link to a web site selling the reviewed product, and returning some small payment to the blogger as a 'commission' on the sale.

Americans are now surrounded by pressure to buy, not only in the advertising that's on our TV and in our magazines and at the beginning of our movies and on the sides of our buses and flashing on our scoreboards and in the middle of our web pages, but also in the very content that we may mistakenly assume is 'neutral,' and not intended to sell us anything.

And hand-in-hand with the pressure to buy is the implied notion that there's something wrong with you if you don't buy. You aren't sexy enough without this toothpaste. You aren't getting any respect from other drivers because you don't have this huge SUV. Your children resent you because you don't buy them this snack product.

So, everywhere you look, advertisers are telling you not only that you need their clients' products, but that your life sucks without them. And if you can't afford the products, or have some other reason you can't get them, then you're just left with the notion your life sucks.

I think one way to save money and feel better about yourself at the same time is to isolate yourself from all the people who are telling you you're fucked up, and that the best way to improve yourself is to buy something from them.

Here's a related post from August, 2006.

And another from February, 2007.

And yet another from January of this year.

Make of this what you will...

Standard of living

Statisticians and economists may have some technical definition of the term 'standard of living' of which I am unaware.

But when most lay people use the term, they're considering three things: how much stuff they can buy, how big is the stuff they can buy and how many ways they can be entertained.

I know very few people who measure their standard of living in terms of stress level or time to spend with their families.

It's no surprise. Most of our definitions of success have been given to us by people who have a vested interest in keeping our noses to the grindstone for as long and as cheaply as possible, while also encouraging us to buy more and more consumer goods of dubious value.

But it's a racket. The more crap you buy, especially on credit, the more of your independence you surrender. And the harder you have to work to pay the bills. And that's your 'standard of living.'

Non-attachment... or else

I have a couple of links I want to share.

First, Robert J. Samuelson at newsweek.com:

"For the past quarter century, Americans have gone on an unprecedented consumption binge—for cars, TVs, longer vacations and just about anything. The consequences have been profound for both the United States and the rest of the world, and the passage to something different and unknown may not be an improvement."

And the second from a web site called Financial Sense, and an article by financial consultant Peter Schiff:

"As the dollar continues its historic decline, imported goods will become too costly for many Americans. In addition, more of those products still made (or more likely grown) here will be exported to wealthier foreign consumers whose appreciated currencies increase their purchasing power. As a result, fewer products will be available to fill our shelves and those that remain will carry much higher price tags.

"In addition, as defaults on credit and store charge cards continue to increase, the market for such debt will soon disappear. As a result, the credit crunch will spread from subprime mortgages to all forms of consumer credit. Therefore, not only will Americans be staring at higher prices, but they will have to pay in cash."

I hope you'll take time to read both these articles in their entirety.

The time seems to be coming when some of us are going to have to let go of two SUV's in the driveway; plasma TV's in the living room, den and kids' room and many of the other gadgets and status symbols we cherish.

I don't know many people who live that way, although I once did. Most everyone in my circle of friends lives in a small house, drives an old (and paid for) car and keeps their expenses down. I don't work, and neither do many of them. It's not because we're rich, it's because we keep our cost of living low.

I spend too much eating out, but I don't have cable TV, or take clothes to the cleaners (or wear anything that needs to go to the cleaners) or take expensive vacation trips. Even the skyrocketing price of gasoline hasn't affected me much, because I live in an old central city neighborhood where everything is close by and I don't have to drive very much.


These were all decisions I made not because I needed to but because I wanted to. If I was still spending money like I did in 1990, I would have to keep working.

I have made this suggestion before, but I'll make it again: if you haven't read Thoreau's Walden, do so. It will clear a lot of things up.

---

In case you're wondering, by the way, whether Schiff knows what he's talking about, here he is August, 2006 debating the possibility of an impending recession with Reagan-era economics guru Arthur Laffer.

I hope you didn't try to call me

I left the house with the cell phone still on the charger.

There's too much stuff for me to remember.

Rob Schadel

Back in January 2006, I posted an item about my friend Bob Schadel, who had died suddenly at his home in San Antonio at the age of 59.

There is a comment there, added tonight, about the death last December of his son, Robert Schadel IV, just a few days short of his 37th birthday (if I've done my math right). My belated condolences to the Schadel family.

Okay, you can call me

The phone was in my second, small bathroom.

Don't call me

I know my cell phone is somewhere in the house because I heard it making that ba-loop ba-loop noise it does when the battery is about to die. But I didn't find it before it went out altogether.

I'm sure it will turn up eventually.

Heart-warming campaign video from Microsoft.I.Am

"Vista, gotta get me some."



I hope Springsteen sues.

Early retreat

A couple of us staged an early retreat from dinner tonight. We didn't know when we arrived that this frequently-visited neighborhood establishment was hosting "Howlin' Redneck Night."

Fire Hazard on wheels

For those of you who are interested but don't do MySpace, Sonya reports on her MySpace blog she has purchased a motor scooter in Asheville.

...i have an scooter. totally legal. here you do not even need an tag or insurance for the small ones. just an helmet. but since i..m german, i..m used to helmets and i do not even want to drive without one.

Doing nothing, waiting to die

This is not as depressing a topic as it sounds.

At lunch Tuesday, the subject briefly turned to people who have 'done everything they want to do, and are now just waiting to die.'

I didn't volunteer myself as a role model, but that rather accurately describes me.

I'm not waiting to die in the sense that I think death is imminent and I'm just drumming my fingers on the table waiting for Brad Pitt to show up and bore me for three hours. But knowing death is inevitable, and mindful of the number of people I've known who died when they were about my age, I've tried to mentally and emotionally prepare myself for the day when it comes.

Part of the reason I decided to retire early was the death of a coworker at my office, which was followed shortly after my departure by the early death of another coworker who had previously retired because of deteriorating health.

My earlier coworkers Bill, Bob and Jim all died when they were about the age I am now.

(Okay, maybe this is a depressing topic.)

And I have done everything I want to do. I've told friends that there are some places in the world I would like to see if I could teleport there instantaneously, but there's no place I want to go that's worth the current hassle of getting there.

I've never been out of the country. But I've travelled all over the United States and I've seen as much of it as I want to see. Maybe I could handle a road trip if some willowy, ethereal, gauzy hippie/Buddhist woman went with me, but on my own (which is my current state) it doesn't seem very interesting.

The citizens of an enlightened state, a sage once wrote, never travel abroad, even though they're so close to the border they can hear the sound of the cock crowing in the next kingdom. This is because in an enlightened nation, their needs are all met at home.

My home town may not be all that enlightened, but I know that the sky is pretty much the same shade of blue no matter where you go. A sycamore tree looks the same from one place to the next. An afternoon breeze blows about the same way.

Of all the things that are important to me personally (which excludes most tourist attractions), what is available somewhere else that I can't get here? I can walk through the neighborhood, stop at the coffee shop and visit with my equally inert and indolent friends and come and go as I please.

What could be better than that while you're waiting to die?

Cat playing with theramin

You remember the theramin. It was used to make all that spooky music in "Forbidden Planet.'

Here's a YouTube video of a cat playing (with) a small theramin.



Other than that...

nothing to report.

Speaking of history...

I saw a book at B&N last night called, I think, The Patriot's History of the United States, featuring a foreword by the noted historian, Rush Limbaugh, plus some article or interview that previously appeared in 'The Limbaugh Letter.' All this was prominently mentioned on the cover.

I guess I'm not a patriot. "If this be treason," as Patrick Henry is quoted as saying, "make the most of it."

Tuesday AM

I have to mail in my taxes today. Turns out I owe money - I guess about as much as I expected to, but still, it's been almost ten years since I owed money to the government, and it feels kind of odd to be writing them a check instead of receiving one.

I am not opposed to paying taxes, although I wish I had more control over how the money is spent.

---

As I have mentioned previously, I've been reading my way through H.G. Wells' Outline of History. I am nearing the end, which is 1919, the year of the first edition's publication.

It's interesting to notice how much the Bush administration has conducted business along the lines of the royal houses and foreign offices of 18th and 19th century Europe. As Wells points out, America was once unique in the world because it repudiated the international intrigues of the European nations – intrigues which Wells says were largely inspired by Machiavelli's The Prince, which served as a handbook for several generations of European ministers and diplomats.

Well, that was then and this is now, and we seem to have proudly established ourselves as one of the Great Powers of the 19th century.

---

There is a Taoist parable about 'the useless tree.' This is a tree that is twisted and ugly – but because it is twisted and ugly, no one wants its wood for furniture or carriage-making. So the useless tree survives while the more attractive trees are cut down for their lumber. The moral of the story is, as we would say now, to 'stay below the radar,' and in doing so, keep yourself free from the intrigues and selfish intentions of others.

That's the goal I've set for myself. I don't think there's much hope of saving humanity from itself – the majority of people on this earth would rather have constant scheming, conflict and uproar, in spite of the misery it inflicts on their own lives. For myself, I would prefer to just be the useless tree and stay the hell out of their way.

Politics

I suspect Dick Cheney has shot more people on hunting trips than Hillary Clinton has animals.

It's Sunday again...

and guess what:

I have nothing to report.

Proof again that both non-attachment and retirement work.

"But how you can you just not care about anything?"

There are some things I care about, but they fall into two categories: things about which I care, but not passionately enough to consider them worthy of writing about; and things which can be read about in greater depth and detail elsewhere.

I'll tell ya what, man...

...the human condition.

Thursday PM

The clouds have mostly gone, but the sky is full of dust, even after last night's rain. I guess it didn't rain much in the Wichita Falls area.

Except for getting out briefly for lunch, I've again spent the day mostly closeted in the house.

Thursday

It looks like today's weather will be a lot like yesterday's weather. I may spend the day holed up in the house again.

I wonder if we're going to have another rainy spring like last year's...

Also: I got the Mac back up using the Time Machine feature built into Leopard. I've decided this thing is worth its weight in gold.

Years ago, I did regular backups to a tape drive using Arcadia/Veritas/Norton backup for the PC. But drives got bigger than the tapes could hold and tape, although cheaper than a hard drive, was still slow and expensive.

Nowadays, hard drives are dirt cheap compared to where they were even five years ago. So I've got a one terabyte drive (which didn't even exist back in my PC days) set up just for backups.

A day at home

Except for a brief trip to the grocery store, I spent the whole day in the house. No coffee shop at all, dinner at home.

It was so gray and rainy out I didn't want to do anything. Mostly I slept. I also continued reading Outline of History, and have made it through Napoleon. I didn't realize his time in France between his first and second exiles was only 100 days – or that he divorced Josephine to marry a Habsburg trophy wife.

I did a considerable amount of house cleaning today, especially in the den.

I also totally crashed my desktop Mac while trying to resolve a software issue. I finally got it to boot back up, then crashed it again while undertaking further tweaking. As of this moment, a long, slow restore from backup is under way. It will probably take all night.

And that was my day.

Worry

I try not to worry, and I'm better about it than I used to be. But my mind is always fast-forwarding to doomsday scenarios based on the smallest of issues.

For example, I'm doing my taxes (or actually, my CPA is doing them), and for a variety of reasons, they're more complicated than they've been in years past. So I've been struggling to clear my mind of the doomsday scenario where I'm audited, the IRS finds a $50 error, and I'm off to federal prison for ten years.

I have to remind myself that not every sniffle or sneeze is the avian flu.

In all the times I've imagined some sort of total disruption in my life on the horizon, it's come true only a couple of times. In the vast majority of cases, things weren't nearly as bad as I had anticipated they would be.

Part of my continuing fascination with the 'Cold Mountain strategy' is that following the example of the reclusive Zen/Taoist poet would physically isolate me from all the things that make me feel threatened. But it probably wouldn't help my state of mind.

I'm pleased to announce I'm an Internet illiterate

I watched a video clip of the recent South Park episode in which the characters meet all the 'big stars' of Internet video. (I don't have cable, so I haven't seen South Park on TV in years.)



...and I didn't know who two-thirds of them were. I recognized Tron Guy, Numa Numa Boy, and Dramatic Gopher. And I'd seen Laughing Baby only from the "We are Clin-Ton' video John posted on blogblah!

But I had to look up Chris Crocker ("Leave them alone!"), Afro Ninja (who actually doesn't appear in the clip above, but turns up later in the episode), "Chocolate Rain" Guy, Star Wars Boy, Sneezing Panda and the "What What" guys. I guess I don't spend enough time on the Internet, because I didn't recognize any of them.

Later, after having done all this research myself, I discovered someone else had already done it, and the results are all here.

I also notice South Park had no 'Smoke on the Water' performers. I guess Matt and Trey don't spend enough time on the Internet, either.

The Wilhelm Scream

Found via neatorama.com:

Here's a YouTube video with clips from a number of different movies and TV shows. Can you tell what they have in common?

(The title of this post is a hint, of course)

























More on this beloved sound effect here.

Sunday afternoon

This blog has been rather devoid of content lately.

That's because there hasn't been anything going on. I took on a freelance project last week – my first in several months. I'm still trying to collect my poorly-organized invoices from last year for my tax preparer. It's only a few hundred dollars, but I want to make sure I have everything the way it should be.

I'm still reading The Outline of History, and am now on the Renaissance.

If I were to draw a graph of my life the past few months, it would be an almost straight horizontal line, with just a few gentle, barely perceptible ups and downs. Nothing makes me deliriously happy and nothing makes me depressed and despondent. I became very frustrated about the 'Sonics to OKC' deal, which I still think is a poor investment of public revenue, and that has probably bothered me more than anything since the first of the year.

In terms of personal stuff, well, there just isn't any. I'm still struggling with getting rid of junk in the house, although I've given away and thrown away quite a bit. But that's not so awful that I feel traumatized about it.

A story I liked

Right here.

Free at last, free at last

I read Blogblah's recent post about how much he has come to loathe the practice of law.

That's about the way I felt about what we euphemistically called 'journalism.' There were days, as I may have written previously, when I pulled up to the gate of the newsroom parking lot, sat there for five seconds, then backed out of the driveway and went back home. That's how much I despised it. And yet I plugged away at it, with a couple of brief interruptions, for 25 years. And if I hadn't been forced out of my last TV job, I'd probably still be miserably slogging out to live shots and homicides and possible potential maybe wall clouds even today, because I would never have been so fed up that I would have risked living under an overpass to get out of the business.

TV news looks glamorous from the outside, I guess – or at least it used to. But the glitter and excitement of it were mostly invisible to me. Most days it was just drudgery.

And parts of it were harder for me than they were for many of my colleagues. I am a good writer, and a fast one as well, and both are valuable skills for a reporter. But there are other skills which are valuable as well, and I possess none of them. Most of you know that I am not a very garrulous or outgoing person. I never had any talent for 'cultivating sources,' or as a lay person might say, 'kissing ass.' I hated schmoozing cops and politicians.

And I always had problems with my weight, which can be especially problematic in the TV side of the business.

Frosty Troy, the firebrand progressive Oklahoma commentator (and that's the first time in my life I've used 'firebrand' in a sentence), used to encourage reporters to have a 'go to hell fund,' which is to say enough money in the bank to be able to tell an editor or publisher to go to hell and still be able to eat for awhile.

I imagine every salesman, cop and convenience store clerk ought to have the same thing. But it's damn hard in this day and age to save an appreciable amount of money, especially if you have a family. I was never able to do it. It's just ten years of strange twists of fate that have left me more or less the master of my fate at this point in my life.

Wednesday PM

Well, I've gotten past Charlemagne and Pope John XII and the Crusades, and have saved Genghis Khan for tomorrow.

I also have a dab of freelance work to do tomorrow.

Wednesday

...and I still have nothing to report.

Not that it's especially interesting to anyone else, but I've been immersed for about eight days now in H. G. Wells' The Outline of History.

I'm reading the original 1919 version, now in the public domain, which begins with prehistory and ends with what was then known as the Great War. Because of its age, a lot of new information, such as the Leakey discoveries at Olduvai Gorge and the recent discovery in China of what turned out to be the world's oldest printed book (a copy of the Diamond Sutra which predates Gutenberg's Bible by several years) are not mentioned.

Even so, Outline is interesting because of the way it puts events in historical context.

Wells shows, for example, how the Roman Empire was far less than Western history has traditionally made it out to be, with more advanced empires coming immediately before and after it. Even during its height under the emperor Trajan, he says, Rome was not as large, as well-organized or as cultured as China was during the same period.

Among the people who he believed have been overrated by history are Alexander the Great and the Israelite kings David and Solomon. (At what point in history, by the way, are we supposed to switch from 'Israelite' to 'Israeli'? I had a friend when I first started in the news business – a fundamentalist Christian – who wrote news copy referring to the modern state of Israel as 'the Israelites.')

So that's what's happening with me. I also have Eckhart Tolle's new book, recommended by a friend, which I'm sort of browsing through. I haven't read any Tolle before, and I'm having some trouble warming up to him.