On History
A few months into the COVID pandemic, the Daily Show Social Distancing Show, published on YouTube by Trevor Noah and crew, put out a video that took the political issues happening during COVID-19 and compared them against the same political issues that arose during the Spanish Flu epidemic of the early 20th century. They're over a century apart, but the similarities between the two pandemics are stark. A few examples: there was mismanagement of the...
On Writing
I grew up a cynic, someone full of piss and vinegar in the face of all authority that presumed to tell me what to do. This is likely due to my upbringing. I came to learn in my teenage years the lesson that comes to us all eventually, the disillusionment that adults don't know much better about the world than children do. Like so many of us, my strategy to cope with this uncomfortable truth...
The Asymmetry of Compassion
I have been extremely busy as of late, what with traveling from Michigan back to California, visiting cities along the way, and stopping en route to set up a life in central Colorado. While I could use all of this as an excuse for why I haven't been writing on here, that isn't actually the truth. As any creative person knows all too well, the struggle with any creative endeavor is that the work produced...
Animal Intelligence
There is a book, written by Frans de Waal, the eminent primatologist of the 20th century who popularized the bonobo, titled, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?. I haven't read the book, but I'm quite taken by the title alone. The little aspie that tends to govern my brain, always the literalist, insists that we humans must be that intelligent, otherwise someone couldn't have written the book...but, of course, the question...
As If
I made a resolution earlier this year to post smaller updates more frequently, to keep myself expressing myself in public. I haven't done a good job of this in the last couple of months, but am also keenly aware that Google has kept the contents of this blog in its sandbox for the last 5 years and refuses to index most of the entries on this site. Hence, I've become more cognizant of the fact...
Revelations of the Self
I actually think there's a scientific question to be asked about world religions. I've pondered this at some length over the past year, and while I've heard it touched upon in passing, I haven't heard it drawn out at any length. I'm going to take the trouble here to outline the basic question. In his Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell relates a story about Cortés's men encountering the Aztecs in Mesoamerica for the first...
Place of Origin
For the last few years, I worked at one of those genetic testing companies that was most well-known for its genealogy arm. My focus was on the health side of the company's consumer offering, which was just as well because I have never had much of a penchant for genealogy. My father made a hobby out of this, going to halls of records and digging up memorabilia from distant relatives to figure out who is...
Return to Normal
My parents have started to go shopping out to grocery stores on a regular basis. Just today my mother was telling me she was popping casually over to Whole Foods to pick up a few things, and asked me if there was anything she could get for me. It almost feels like 2021 might actually end up in a passably normal state for all of us. I have an excruciatingly boring diet. This has just...
On the Question of Psychics
About seven years ago I was on a beach for a late-night bonfire in Santa Barbara with my girlfriend at the time and many of her friends. One of her friends, I had been told in advance, was in the process of coming to terms with the fact that she seemed to have a high attunement to the thoughts and feelings of others. I don't recall if she was described as a "psychic", but in...
Cacao Buzz
Just over a month ago, I gave up coffee and all forms of caffeine. This is something I'm accustomed to doing on the regular. Caffeine is a socially acceptable and pervasive psychoactive substance, but every few months I dry myself out for a week or two, just to recalibrate to the baseline mental state, before I start having my two or three cups of strong brew per day. I had a lot going on in...