How to happy

Heh — felt momentarily unsure of the day while brushing my teeth this morning, so I reached over and hit play on The Flaming Lips' classic "Turn it on".  It's probably gotta be good for your brain to see yourself rocking out in the mirror.

Later, while getting coffee, I notice myself practicing bedtime story voices for children I don't have yet. Awesome.

This isn't such a bad day to work with.

The Listener goes to Church: "Godwin's Law" ≠ the "God Wins" Law

Most importantly, I want to help. I mustn't, e.g., pick a fight.

So I wasn't looking for anything to go wrong when I went to church with my good friend this morning. My first voluntary attendance, ever: cool! — and so much did, indeed, go quite well. (My role is to listen; I am far too scrutinous to be converted to.. well anything except, like, a mess if shot or something).

But – eek – it did kind of seem like the pastor maybe misinterpreted the internets when he saw something he thought was the "God Wins Law"... so maybe that's how he got the inspiration to rhetorically employ, proudly and with a smile, Nazis and images of swastikas flying over the White House.

(Aw man, just hear yourself — what kind of god needs an agitator, anyway?)

I will try to schedule a warmly congenial lunch with him and his superior. I'm thinking I may forego all declarative (particularly imperative) statements, beyond those relating to the meal: I need to hear more, and asking questions and listening is easy.

While the pastor may have some good intentions and decent messages to share, some of the methods he employs cannot be anything but toxic. I'm surprised to find myself concerned that maybe the techniques of his which sow the seeds of a misery-generating hated/loved grandiosity in people may be worse in the long-run than his (perhaps unwittingly) corrosive, jingoistic hyperbolism.

Plenty-scary-enough, though: hearing "Oh, there is an enemy, oh yes there is!" —breathlessly uttered, from an otherwise quite lovely beaming woman afterwards. (And at a place one would generally describe as warm, friendly, musical, and terrifically popular.)

Surely that must still a heart, some.

I just smiled and patted her arm. Um, to love one's enemy is not to love having an enemy, dear — but she so clearly needed that enemy that I naturally left the happy couple to themselves.

—I know we can do better; I just need to learn more and keep at it (while I'm trying to start.. how many other projects?!? heh).  Cheers —

Blog update

Since nobody's watching right now, I'm going to let the blog stall and just write out the majority of Human Think Self in full, and then people can respond to the interesting or helpful or provocative parts on their own.

I just needed to see that my day-to-day experiential needs as a human have nothing to do with the surprising efficacies that can be derived from the thoughts I've worked out and hope to share. So the serial "blog-live-blog-live"-cycle is an artifact of implementation, and not necessarily integral to my intent.

But if you feel that you are unhappy or confused about something and have the patience to try to explain it to someone, fuck the blog, just call me, let's talk: 734-846-5464.

A harmless moment outside of the meaningless boundary of one's anxious expectations can be cool, even if it doesn't fix anything big.

Take care, world.  You're a strange uglybeautiful.

Mental health day

—wherein I make a lovely sobronade; organic hot roll dough #16; and possibly dabble with one or both of ... ooh, okay maybe any of: cute gluten-free artisan bread, nice low-fat olive oil egg salad (both using the amazing power of bacteria snot), and candying tons of nice ginger for later use in chocolate truffles (who needs a reason? because you can just do that!  ..like, you know, without a license.. in city limits.. amphibious rodent...).


Then visiting with a really cool friend, taking comics (they're literature!) to a house-bound chum, maybe making cookies, and seeing if we can turn one of my ideas into work for another friend. And figure out why Facebook won't let me in.

Okay, actually I'm going to be busy. Here goes —

How to happy

So, getting involved volunteering at the local alternative high school is not unlike delivering Zidane's epic riposte to any bad mood that wants some.  Just saying.

Meanwhile: I am grumpy, so I thought of Holi..

The clever thing from yesterday? Here, world: saw a dumb thing on (I admit) Cheezburger about how to make large, "unpoppable" supertotalfun bubbles using corn syrup and dish soap.

Okay, so how about you play around and make a simple device with an adjustable mouth for shooting bubbles of different sizes, which are formed and lofted with a simple crank kind of like a large (but very light) pepper mill. 

As the crank turns past a certain point (coinciding with near-complete bubble formation), an integral spoon flips a measure (proportional to bubble size) of an array of brightly colored powdered dyes into the bubble, which then seals and drifts aloft (or is driven there with fans).

I'm assuming one has tuned the bubbles to not be entirely unpoppable, but rather merely of a roughly-calibrated robustness (doubtless also related to size) that will, on average, ensure a lifespan of perhaps seconds or minutes.

Naturally, the particulars of the bubble recipe (e.g., bubble-popability-relative-to-ambient-humidity particulars) could be more finely-tuned for the various places in India where this cheap, recyclable device could be made, sold, and used — to what I imagine would be just phenomenal effect for India's Holi Festival .... having countless little melon-sized bubbles floating lazily upward into the sunset, bursting and falling on laughing kids in the river as the bauble-bombs are felled with squirt guns and pebbles.

I'd really like to see that. (And that's see that, not sell that.)

image credit: imovies4u.com via Unsung India

Of course, we would also need to experiment and see if we could, say, build fog up there — yeah, inside the bubbles (different bubbles this time). One could loft entire little science fair projects from these things — of course I want lightning in a bubble, but I'm an even bigger fan of water-soluble colors and things that don't hurt the environment, so I can stick to cleaner forms of madcappery.

I mean, who's to say that it wouldn't dramatically improve the lives of young squid if they were lofted in airborne seawater-filled bubbles for dozens or hundreds of miles, flying high above the ocean destined to reclaim them, dreaming newly-enchanted fishy little squid dreams ... 

It could be a thing of real beauty. Well, one of them, probably. Maybe. Definitely a mess. But a happy one.

Meanwhile: not a house on fire

Once again, today my brain was going somewheres elses when all I needed to do was drop down the first section of the Zen stuff.

The more I thought about how easy the Zen stuff would be, and how good it would be to move things forward here (get to the fun bits) — the more I frustrated myself.

I started in on a habit of mind I just can't wait to shed: that of comparing what I've done today against what I'd planned on doing, trying to see if Princess Me can mine a pea's worth of misery out of hazy inequalities along the way; disappointment-stalking oneself in realtime.

—Pthbthb.  I'm learning to give a little bit of rein to the unplanned-but-not-amiss things that can crop up and, I'm glad to say, generally with great return.

My last good thought of the day had me quite excited: I didn't know if I should do some (maaybe-not-all-that-)cursory patent searches, or try to (jokingly) become a Pinterest superstar, or maybe help +Martin Murray perpetrate some brilliant neohooliganism at DEFCON this summer — each use sounded better and funnier than the last.

[If anyone knows anything about amateur inventing and/or how to attempt to engage companies for limited partnership projects, please click my name below and mail me — I'd appreciate it. Some of these are too good to leave on the floor. Thanks]

But my stupid can't-stop-comparing brain kept trying to remind me about Zen...

And yet, I did have a number of good blog ideas I slotted into the future plan. And I needed to remind myself that while I was supposedly "off-course" today was also when I saw and joked with Miah and Alexander and Bria, and when I made new friends in Dave and CJ (so many CJs lately, what is that?).

By an objective measure my output today was great, and I had a good time, too — it's only the Zen thing that was bugging me. But it quieted: I just had to admit to myself that it wasn't a house on fire; it was a false urgency.

The only thing at risk were expectations, and they have been gently declining in the pantheon of my conscious esteem for some time now, I'm pleased to say.

(Plus, if I were desperate and/or willing to spend a lot more time with it than I think I'd want, I could make a million off the idea I had tonight. But I really can't help thinking that I would be the absolute coolest dad ever if I made one for my own— Okay, that idea's starting to go off-track.. :)

Which means I guess I'm done with a day I'm pleased with; neat. More soon.
Cheers—

Permission and the "how" of things

It's strange how knowing the "how" of something can be so powerful.

Sometimes it's liberating. For example, my sister – step-sister, actually, but that matters only in that we don't share genetic material – is an absolutely lovely person. Seen in photos, she can be intimidating: she is tall, slim, beautiful, fit, and .. well, if you saw her, you'd understand why on a trip when we were kids a small Jamaican boy ran after us and desperately tried to buy her from me with a large outstretched handful of (presumably) drugs. (He was like 10, his brain had just fallen out of his head.)

The point is, without context or familiarity, something that powerful (i.e., a presence like my sister's) can evoke unbalanced responses.

What people come to realize is that perhaps my sister's greatest inborn strength is that she seems truly natural to herself. Over the years, she's had to work hard to get where she is, to become who she is, but somehow she's only seemed to grow more available to others while she's done this.

The result is that you should really see her enter a room of mixed friends and strangers – first, everyone notices. But any sense that she'd take that reaction and use it evaporates immediately: she's happy to be there, to see people, to interact. She's not there to be distracted, or to be seen, or to act.

Her easygoing nature and lack of anxiety dispel a lot of distracting vibes around her.  People warm as she talks to them and, you know, allows them to respond. They realize that she's not going to start acting ... well, she could get away with a lot, you might say.  

But she's not like that, and something about her silently grants a kind of permission to those around her to relax, just a bit. Something in their brains is telling them that this knockout isn't competing with them or about to belittle them, that she's not a threat at all.. and hey, isn't it kind of weird that beautiful people can even be so threatening anyway? Everyone's anxious little mind unclenches in teeny increments.

Now, I don't mention this as a paean to my sister's grace of character, or whatever. Actually, it was just that I saw a different lovely young woman the other day perform a similar thing — enter and effortlessly defuse a room that was suddenly much happier and pleasant with itself for having her in it, and without all of the ego-tumult that happens if people start jockeying for attention. Just, bang, a slightly better room with people who're slightly less on-edge, and therefore better all-around.

It's almost as though people like my sister and this woman can subliminally confer a different idea of what might happen next, and people see a different "how" for the occasion, a way which might not be as tiresome and catty as one had feared.

It is in this frame of mind that I've been considering that in seemingly having so very much of his  "how" – the vectors and pressures in his life, his mechanics of thought – exposed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it may be difficult for readers to look and see Robert Pirsig as, at least in part, an (unwittingly?) unreliable narrator.

But I spent too long thinking on permission and anxiety, so we Zen on the morrow.

Cheers—

The necessity of "how", and realizing an asset from callow feckless shitbaggery

I've been given pause over the last day while reflecting on something that occurred on Google+. A well-intentioned Indian gentleman posted a warm spiritual comment – a sort of gently-encouraging nonspecific benediction – of some particular cultural relevance where he is.

At first it was well-received by whom I presume were its intended recipients (likely in the same time zone and awake). Later, others chimed in... less helpfully: of course someone posted huge tracts of irrelevant Christian scripture and then sought an argument; others later swept in decrying the-doubtless-repulsively-titanic-ego of this strange Indian man, and how dare he wish us well? The nerve!

This worried me some, because my ego will surely be a(n occasionally, I'm afraid, quite valid) target.

At first, I thought to write this blog anonymously, to try to remove my own errors and foibles (and the occasional callow, feckless shitbaggery) from the equation. Fortunately, I realized how crap that idea was pretty quickly:

See, in order for people to take you seriously, they have to find you believable. A number of presumably-white guys named Gareth seemed not to find Mr. Shankar believable, so they belittled him and themselves and generally breathed through the mouth.

So, in order to make sure my story is believable, it's essential to show the "how" of it — and I'm lucky enough to have as a useful basis of comparison the well-known book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by the brilliantly contemplative Robert M. Pirsig.

And – since I'm nothing of the luminary he is – mine will be a humbler story that will briefly use his to illustrate how the fallout from one's own callow feckless shitbaggery may, carefully applied, pay dividends later on — and that's for tomorrow! Cheers—

Spring: at the equinox, and just now..

—cheers from Michigan

Welcome, Humans!

Hello and welcome to the Human Think Self blog, which will seek to explore many ideas relating to something congruent with a simple, pragmatic humanism — because hey, if it doesn't touch down here in my life on Earth – where I keep all my stuff and where most everything I care about is happening – then it's not the kind of humanism that's going to help actual breathing humans.

And since I generally tend to like other humans, I thought I'd begin with a brief introductory musical welcome to kick off the audio channel of Human Think Self – I hope you enjoy it.

My qualifications for the entirety of this undertaking are sufficient and simple: I have been a human being my entire life and am sympathetic to the human project overall. At times, when circumstances collide felicitously with your inclinations, you can find yourself able to do a little more to help out — and I do, and so I will try.

I will err, and I gladly welcome all feedback (save belligerence, because why bother? I'm nobody).
Skepticism is merely one's price for taking the next tiny step forward in an engagement — and I'm seriously not a fan of big steps, because they start to look like leaps, and that means you skipped something.

That is: one cannot respond to skepticism by asking the skeptic to take anything on faith — but that's great because if you narrow your focus and come at it in small steps, it's easy to stumble onto common ground with the skeptic and then, shazam, you're suddenly working together, if only briefly. Doubt and criticism are essential to any self-respecting pack of ideas.

So, here we go, then — I'll be sketching the contours of what I'm all about soon enough (and I'll hope the guitar helps you be patient with me while I try to make sense and learn how to make the blog look like not-crap).

All right, let's get started — there's work needs done.