Such a strange book. I think I only understood what might have been happening after talking to my wife this morning. 

The book begins as a dark noir mystery, draped in southern moss and twisted as a mandrake, but it never solves its own mystery. But I believe that's because life and death are a mystery that there is no pat just-so ending for, and McCarthy's ambitions, with this book were higher - or maybe he just tapped into something deeper - a dream like unconscious space where this is what came out. Or maybe he's just lazy and doesn't give a fuck anymore, because he's Cormac McCarthy, and he doesn't have to. 

The most compelling and memorable thing about the book are the characters, Bobby Western and his sister Alicia Western. Both are the children of a brilliant Jewish physicist who working on the Atomic Bomb. The second most compelling thing is the language and the ideas and the simple evoking of a sense of place - New Orleans before Katrina, before cell phones, before the Muggers, before "NOLA" - early 80's. The charm of walking Decatur Street without tourists and stoners. Being able to go to Du Monde and just get a cup of coffee. 

The elevation of language and the conversation that happen - it's almost as if someone said, hey Cormac, you never write dialogue - so he created a book of complete dialogue. 

After reading this book, I find myself actually speaking better. 

As to the action, it begins with Bobby Western and his partner diving into the swampy Bayou around New Orleans to inspect a downed small jet. There are about 12 people on board and one passenger is missing. Bobby gets the sense that something is missing and no good will come of this dive. He is soon visited by two curious Fed types who want to know if he took anything from the plane. The expectation of the book is that we're going to follow up and find out more about the plane crash.

The name of the books is The Passenger after all - who is The Passenger? This is never settled in any manner other than super obliquely. 

Bobby revisits the site once, and then, after that, the story drifts into a dream-logic mashup of remembrance and the un-answerable questions that old men can't ever stop asking when they wake up at night. 

Bobby had a sister and she was brilliant and beautiful. Beautiful enough to make a man reconsider all of his decisions in life; smart enough to get into the University of Chicago at 13. 

Bobby and Alicia were in love. Bobby was brilliant; Alicia Western transcendently so; so much so that it was nearly impossible for her to have a conversation with anyone on earth. Bobby & Alicia were in love with each other - it's like, no one else could be at their level. It was an incestuous love that was apparently never consummated. We meet Alicia through Bobby's pining, the memories of others and through her conversations she has with "The Kid" and accompanying apparitions that visit her when she goes off her meds. The Kid is some sort of creepy smart ass humanoid creature with flippers for hands. He's accompanied by other creatures - a sort of little vaudeville of horrors. 

Bobby eats and drinks and converses his way from one really swell New Orleans restaurant to another, speaking with a series of ne'er do well characters who all seem appropriately world-weary and well-read, with criminal records and a shared history. Long John being the prime example. 

Bobby is constantly pursed by two guys who seem like Feds that come to check in on him - they eventually seize his car and freeze his bank account. The sense is that they're looking for something, but it's not clear to us - or even Bobby - what they're looking for. He goes to see a lawyer who recommends he switch identities and leave. He drags his feet as he goes home to see his grandmother. He goes to the asylum where his sister checked herself in and speaks to some of the patients that knew her. He goes to ground, lives in a shed on the Bayou and then turns north and drives north to spend a survivalist winter in Idaho in an old farmhouse owned by a family friend. The travels and the sleepless nights are all described with proper McCarthian oomph, like no one else can write - muscular, dark, foreboding and melancholic without sentiment. 

The end effect is of: a dream and that pit in your stomach. This book leaves is like a nightmare when you can't shake the feeling all the next day. Grieving. Loss. 

I guess the operative question at the end is, who is the Passenger? And what really happens? Is it some sort of 6th sense thing - did he actually die in the plane and his soul is wandering through these uncomfortable realms, searching for the peace of at least official bardo? 

Not really completely sure what I expected to get out of this book but I gotta say, every page was a surprise. In a sense, it starts with compassionate listening - people sharing about how much they hate their jobs because they find now sense of purpose or meaning in it, and then from there, he proceeds to dismantle the entire capitalist-western-democracy-edifice, one accepted brick of commonly-held wisdom at a time. 

It took me a while to get through this and I only just now finished on the plane to Seattle. So I need to refresh what I was reading about. I think it would be best to look at the chapter titles and section summaries (which, with Graeber, are always entertaining in their own right.) 

****

Book Report on Bullshit Jobs, a theory by the late, great David Graeber.
 
This book had so many ideas in it and it stirs up a lot of stuff and I read it in two parts - finishing the last 1/3 on the plane out to Seattle (and now I’m writing this on the plane back). So first of all my disclaimer I use with other people is that you don’t have to agree with everything he says, after all he’s an admitted and avowed anarchist. But I think that’s a bit dismissive and letting people off the hook, ie, because of the name of the book and the author’s extremist leanings, you don’t really have to take it seriously, haha, and don’t imagine for a second that I do. But as for the book, a lot of the questions are absolutely spot on, logical and society-changing if we could address them; and as for being an “anarchist” - well, after talking the ahimsa course and the encouragement to think of what your Utopia looks like, sounds pretty good to me.
 
Anyway, the book started because he wrote an essay called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” for a radical magazine called Strike! The response was so overwhelming that concept went instantly viral with people writing to describe their own bs jobs - which he used as the raw material to write the book. So basically, I’ll just go through chapter by chapter and give a quick summary. This is in no wise meant to be a substitute for reading the book, as many of the most thought-provoking elements are sub-threads or sociological/economic theoretical asides from the main topic.
 
Chapter 1. What is a bullshit job?
 
A bullshit job is not something that someone else judges as detrimental or useless. For example, the first section is entitled “Why a mafia hitman is a bad example of a bs job” and he also uses Douglas Adams’ making fun of hairdressers as another example of a job that’s not necessarily bs because you’re performing a creative service. A bs job is pretty subjective but basically it’s a job that seems pointless to the person doing it and is definitely depressing and unfulfilling and seems to have no actual purpose - after all, who would know better than the jobholder themselves?
 
Chapter 2. What sorts of bullshit jobs are there?
 
There are five. Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers and Taskmasters. I think this is self-explanatory, but flunkies are there being useless, doing meaningless task so that someone who has money and/or power can boss them around; goons enforce meaningless rules; duct tapers fix shit that’s probably not even a valid system or group activity to begin with; box tickers - yeah, we all know what that is, because even if it isn’t your only job, more and more of us are asked to do more and more bureaucratic box checking, simply as part of our regular non-bs jobs all the time; finally, a taskmaster is just a middle-management person, and no doubt a flunky for someone op the foodchain.
 
Chapter 3. Why do Those in BS jobs Regularly Report themselves unhappy?
 
This chapter gets into the concept of spiritual violence, and how shitty we all feel when we don’t have a purpose and he goes back in time to show that the very concept of buying and selling our time, as if it’s a thing, is pretty new in the human experience and sort of sets us up to feel like we’re just cogs. This is the best part of this book, because it brings up stuff you haven’t thought about - I hadn’t thought about time-as-a-commodity and how dehumanizing that could be. (And yet I time everything, from meditation to work …)
 
Chapter 4. What is it like to have a bs job?
 
(on spiritual violence, part 2) This chapter just basically goes through the ways that people deal with it - probably the chapter that draws most heavily on the case studies in the form of letters and emails that people wrote. Some people find other things to do - writing plays or contributing to Wikipedia while they’re getting paid. Etc.
 
Chapter 5. Why are bs jobs proliferating?
 
This is where it starts to get interesting cuz we’re getting into conclusion-land. People think that bureaucracy is the government and socialism and the epitomy of bs jobs would be the old Soviet Union (“we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”) But the rise of the new bs jobs really started in the 80s with the urge toward privatization. You would think that this wouldn’t have eliminated bs but it actually increased it. One, because there’s no this money out there and people aren’t really interested in getting the job done, but rather in creating processes of man hours and then going and getting funding for those people hours. So the bigger your staff of consultants, the more money in play, the more money made by those at the top of the foodchain - but like I said, no real work is getting done. Its just people checking boxes, making tasks, enforcing rules without purpose - doing bullshit without a true purpose in mind. The movie industry and primarily the financial industry are given prominence here as examples non parallel. 
 
Chapter 6. Why do we as a society not object to the growth of pointless employment?
 
Basically, this goes back to ye olde “protestant work ethic” “work as a virtue in its own right” -  “oh yeah, we’re all working so hard and so unhappy and super happy about it because we’re working so hard and that’s how we find value in life even if that value is hard to pin down.” Yeah, but there are a lot of interesting threads to pull out here. First of all, he goes into pinning down the actual tradeable value of what we do and how anomalous that is. Secondly, he goes into the seeming inverse relationship of the level of meaningfulness in a job and your monetary compensation. For example, teachers - useful job, low pay. Financial CEO, totally useless, highly compensated. (his judge of usefulness being thus: if that class of person were to disappear off the face of the earth, how fucked would we be? Teachers and garbage collectors - we’d be very fucked. Advertisers and finance guys? We might be better off.) From this, he goes on a minor tangent about moral envy - that sense that we resent teachers and others of the “coastal elite” because they think they’re better than us, and therefore since they actually have meaning in their lives and get to be useful and creative, they have no right to ask to be paid. He then goes into a little economic history and how capital-ism grew as a way to redistribute wealth from the landed gentry, but then because a way to exploit labor. Along came Marx, with his theories and the labor theory of value - basically, pointing out that the wealth of the robber barons was based on the effort of the proletariat. But then, the capital-ists turned that on it’s head and said, you can work and then you get a better life - look at all these things you can “consume!” and then the capitalist/consumerist model was born, where we all work at job we hate so we can have Big Gulps, jetskis and Netflix and destroy the world even as we numb the pain.
 
Chapter 7. What are the Political Effects of BS jobs is there anything that can be done about this situation?
 
By this time in the book, his nomenclature is full developed - “managerial feudalism” vs. “The Caring Classes” - and I’ll just kinda riff here my conclusions and may or may not clearly communicate Graeber’s.
 
Managerial feudalism is of course, the creation of economic empires of bs; there are piles of money out there, either created by extra profits or govt subsidies, and the bs empires expand to fit. Instead of just having people work less when we have more profits, let’s just hire more consultants and middle managers. It’s sort of a sneaky social welfare program because what’s the alternative? We all just hang out?
 
The caring classes comes out of this notion that our labor actually can’t be quantified. What we do as humans can’t be done by robots, and the rise of robots and systemization doesn’t actually save labor but creates more bs jobs. What we mean by “caring” in this instance is not necessarily giving a shit, but actually caring for other people. The example being ticket takers on the London Tube - it’s fine if they are replaced by machines if everyone’s healthy, not disabled, old or young or tourists from Akron.
 
While admitting that it’s a book that simply points out out a problem, in the end he does offer one solution (even though he is at great pains to qualify it, because he doesn’t want the book to be dismissed as simply a book about Universal Basic Income - but his premise is that if we uncouple work from “making a living” then a lot of these problems will disappear.
 
I would add that if we had free college education, then our young people wouldn’t be in debt. That would eliminate a lot of bullshit.
 
If we had universal healthcare, that would eliminate a lot more bullshit.
 
            *****


What a personally took from the book:
1)I think I have a clearer view of what my utopia looks like. Lotsa art, with an educated populace with an emphasis on learning, science, community, kindness, cooperation, an appreciation of beauty, simplicity and the creative arts. 
2)Leisure is a good thing.
3)I don’t think being “driven” is really that cool. Just seems to create drama. Whatevs. Let’s hang out.
 
 
 
  


​

ofGreat title, huh?

So this is about the most depressing book I've ever read. The reason is the current context and the war in the Ukraine - this book predicts it and not only explains the current war but show how it is inevitable. 

Masha Gessen gave us a 500+ page crystal ball. The author, a native Russian expat who grew up and lived through all the changes she talks about, traces the time from the fall of the Soviet Union until a few years ago through the experiences of a few real people, most memorably a woman journalist whose politician/activist father is murdered *(that's her, right?), a sociologist, a psychiatrist and a gay professor who she follows through the process of coming out, getting a degree, teaching and finally leaving Russia when it becomes untenable. 

The book begins with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It all happens faster than Gorbachev can handle. He's overtaken by the populist Yeltsin, man of the people. He declares Russia for Russian. He attempts, in his drunken inconsistency. But in this revolution, there's no constitution, to transition, no balance of power. Some legacy systems are left from Soviet Union. Basically, it's just a feeding frenzy and opportunists thrive. Two things happen here, and she uses Erich Fromm's book Escape from Freedom as a touchpoint. In his book, Fromm talks about two kinds of freedom - "Freedom from ..." and "Freedom to ...". "Freedom From" is the most basic kind of freedom. Freedom from oppression. Freedom from physical violence. Freedom from physical constraint. Freedom from hunger, etc. Freedom to ... is more complicated - it implies responsibility. It means that you have freedom to go, and choose, and decide. "Freedom To" can be terrifying. Alot of people don't want "Freedom To" - they want their choices made for them. That's why there are charismatic leaders, henchmen, yes-men, cults and gurus to lead them, and of course, totalitarian states. So basically this is what happened. Russia achieved freedom and open-ness, ie glasnost, and everyone's lives increased incrementally while the people at the top grabbed for more and more and more. And even though people could now get cheese and toilet paper and Starbucks and McDonalds hamburgers (who pulled out of Russia because of the invasion of Ukraine, btw) they looked around at the people at the top and particularly at The West and they felt envy and a loss of identity. They had always defined themselves as other and now they were on their own. In steps Putin. He gives them back their identity and takes away their scary freedom - one again, they know who they are. Conservative, not Western, they people that complain about their lives but since they can do nothing about it - once again - they are released from responsibility. 

But not everyone. The interesting thing to note in light of current circumstances is how Kyiv & Ukraine came to be the anti-Moscow - the pace where the dissidents and rockers gathered. Those with a rebel attitude. This is explained by the concept of schismogenesis, as defined in The Dawn of Everything - (see review below) - the idea that cultures and people define themselves in reference to neighbors - a sort of nation-state version of sibling rivalry. So, the tighter the repression became in Moscow, the more Kyiv became the anti-Moscow. Which is one dynamic that made this present war inevitable. 

The second thing that's just horrifying and I mean I was literally highlighting passages on every page - is the alt-right ideology and propaganda coming out of Russia and particularly Putin's mouth. He told us what he was going to do - and moreover, since the anschluss of Crimea and the invasion Georgia & eastern Ukraine, with every engineered election, his approval ratings go up, even as people's true freedoms and quality of life go down, in terms of food they can buy, places to go, charm and art and all the beautiful choices, little and big that make life as a human being worthwhile. 

I'm summarizing here, but as a final point, I'd like to note how jaw-droppingly similar the "conservative" narrative has been in Russia to what we have on the alt-right here - the emphasis on "family values" - the mistrust and despisal of other in the form of gays, people of color. The constant public red-herring dialogue about issues that don't really matter - stuff that's completely made up, ie, in case of Russian, pedophilia, in the case here, the emphasis on "gun rights" and "pro-life" as badge issues, which in the scheme of things, should not be public issues at all. I've got to say it was very eye-opening - and even more terrifying that the foregone conclusion of Russian interference and manipulation in the election - skills that happen to be old hat for them - the state has been creating entire fake political parties in order to put on a show for a sham-election; creating a few fake Twitter feeds and Facebook groups was absolutely no problem at all. Again, the worst thing is the conservative alt right narrative. (frankly Fascist, I don't know what else to call it). it's the same line of BS we have going on here - it's like Trump, and now Le Pen are taking notes. This is how to harness people's hate, insecurities and fear and create a power grab. In the book, they talk about how La Pen's narrative is proving surprisingly effective, when she came in 3rd in a Municipal election! She gave Macron a run for his money in France's most recent Presidential election. 

Anyway, Ukraine knew this was coming. They knew they would fight. No surprise on their part. As for the rest of the world, I hope they continue to surprise us - Russia, the U.S. and everyone. 

​

My God it took so long to read this whole series that I forgot what happened. Nonetheless, a satisfactory series on a lot of levels. Plausible characters, plausible science, a legitimate story arc with a sweet spot for people-kind and all of our foibles, despite our character flaws. Highly recommended. Anything else I could say will summersault into a spoiler and/or I'm just feeling lazy. In terms of memorable science fiction/fantasy series, The Expanse is right up there with Brandon Anderson's best work, the Game of Thrones, with Lord of the Rings and Narnia being the bar, with Harry Potter close behind. 

So you can stop here, if you don't want spoilers. 

My son Will - a voracious reader - was sort of underwhelmed by the ending. And I think it is sort of a cheat to never really reveal who the gatebuilder civilization was, or reveal who the unseen evil is that threatens from another dimension - it ends up really being about "what it means to be human" - but in that sense, it's the right close. Some of the characters are the most memorable ever - Jim, Naomi, Alex, Bobby, and of course Amos - even as he's transformed. 

I also really enjoy the tv series. Okay, that's enough for now. 

Everything? Really? Everything? 

So, where do you start to unpack everything? 

"By David Graeber & David Wengrow." That's as good a place as any. So David Graeber, intellectual iconoclast and erstwhile thought-leader of the by-definition leaderless "Occupy" movement left us a thick orange brick of an epitaph. (He died last year, still intellectually very active and too young.) It's conclusions are ambiguous and motivated by pure heart. It's faith in humanity and and simple ability to say "no" to stupid rules is gorgeously, entrancingly naive. But there's so much good here that that's going to be end of my critique and I'm going to start unpacking the 692 pages of goodness here. 

Before I do that, here's a link to Graeber's NYTimes obit. (Bonus points if you find the typo. Hint; it's a double use of the word "in.") 

David Graeber has written books such as Debt, the first 5000 years, Bullshit Jobs and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology - so this is social science with an agenda.  

David Wengrow is an archaeologist who has written books like The Archaeology of Early Egypt, Social Transformations in North-East Africa, c. 10,000 to 2,650 BC; What Makes Civilization, the Ancient Near East and the Future; and The Origins of Civic Life, a Global Perspective. 

The Dawn of Everything is fascinating. first of all, as a broad survey of the latest archaeological pre-historical findings, and the conclusions that can be drawn through cross-referencing. Secondly, for its redefining of the conceptual framework arounds the whys, whats and hows of political control and personal freedom. And finally, for the impassioned ways in which in pokes holes in our current historical/sociological "just-so" story.

"The Dawn of Everything, a new history of humanity." As a generalist whose mind gravitates naturally toward pattern recognition and grand pronouncements, the sheer ambition of the title is irresistible. The promise is that I'm going to learn, get a fresh take; this a both substantial and informative. The book started as a sort of lark with the two of them. The question on the table was, and has been since the age of Rousseau - "When did inequality begin?" The first chapter of the book is a exploration of the exploration of this question throughout socio-philosophical history. There's the Rouseauean take - People were basically good, then came the rise of agriculture, someone had to own the land, thus was born social hierarchy like kings and serfs, as well as a bureaucrats to count the bushels. Now that there was and underclass we gathered, inevitably, in cities so that the elite could keep an eye on us and make us work every harder. The opposing view, the Hobbesian view, is that before civilization, life was "nasty, brutish and short" and that sure, modern society has it's problems, and a lot of people suffer so that the aristocracy can have foie gras and go fox hunting, but thems the breaks and it's better than the alternative. Maybe find some succor in Christ, ye meek. This material world isn't worth a damn anyway. And what David & David, henceforth, D&D do with the rest of the book, is look at the latest findings in archaeology - a lot of which is specialized and silo'ed - and start poking holes in the dominant and seemingly common sense narrative. 

Aside from the grander narrative and the point they're trying to make, the book is fascinating. We meet neolithic peoples, we meet the societies of pre-columbian Americas, we take a fresh look at Mesopotamia. And while we literally uncover Mohenjo Daro, Teotihuacan, Kortik Tepe and the Mound and Mississippian cultures of North America. This leads to a lot of intriguing speculation on the part of D&D, which at times leads one to be dismissive of their conclusions and agenda, but then I ask why? What narrative am I living within? And if you're going to look at things objectively, why can't they be different. 

Take, for instance, the Agricultural Revolution. Our current framework breaks up human history into epochs of technological progress. The Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age. The Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, Prince and the Revolution, etc. 

Basically, what D&D show is that the "Agricultural Revolution" took place over 5,000 years. It wasn't something that happened over night. It wasn't like Stoopo the Neolith discovered a seed of wheat and said, "This enables me to engage in back breaking labor working for the man, as well as mess up my diet with simple carbs, gluten and tooth decay as an added bonus - let us now leave our happy hunter-forager lives." It was a gradual process, over many millennia, with stops and starts. People would garden a little and then settle down - or even live seasonally. Same with the first monumental buildings and the first cities. The first monuments weren't always constructed by slave labor to facilitate a dead emperor's transition to the next life, nor were the first cities always hierarchical. Some early cities, such as Teotihuacan - were governed by a council. In fact, after battling Cortez and his crew and on the eve of victory, they held a council and debated whether or not join with the Spaniards and overthrow the neighboring kingdom of Tenochtitlan and the tyrant Moctezuma. We know how that turned out. 

There are neolithic monuments - such as at Poverty point in Louisiana - that seem to have been collectively as seasonal ceremonial centers.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the intriguing sites they explore and the questions raised about societies and poeples that left no written record.  

So the book is worth reading, simply for the interest of the archeological particulars. I find pre-literature cultures so intriguing. 

Secondly, there are some definitions of power and freedom that they use, which help us see the world around us more clearly. Looking at the way hierarchical governments rose and fell through history, they are based on three methods of coercion. 1) Violence. Within a stated boundary I (I being a "Big Man" Tyrant or Hereditary King or Aristocracy) have the power to injure or kill because of rules I made up and/or with impunity. 2) Control based on secrets and privileged information, ie bureaucracy. 3) Charismatic politics based on competitions. So, all repressive states have some measure of these three elements - or maybe, like today's regimes, are a combination of the three. 

The second memorable triple definition is of Freedom. What are the three freedoms? 1) The from to move and go where I want. 2) The freedom to disobey. 3) the freedom to socialize with whom I wish, and to gather in a group. A slave in any age, from Rome to the Sudan to South Carolina, has none of these freedoms. Today, with us all, these freedoms are mitigated. 

Another definition or concept that I've found helpful and intriguing is the idea of schismogenesis, which states that neighboring cultures will take contrary positions simply to enhance their differentness. They example they delve into is the Native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest - hierarchical, slave owning, based on ostentatious displays of wealthy and sense-gratification, and the cultures to the south of the Siskyous and inland, which were less hierarchical, and based on the values of frugality and self-restraint. Now I see the phenomena of schismogenesis everywhere - in my daughters, (one loud and assertive, the other quiet and withdrawn, both with a stubbornly healthy sense of self) and of course, in the present fucked up state of the 2 Party system, with so much of our political identity being based on "Otherness" or at least "I'm NOT them." So these concepts of power, freedom and how we define ourselves in terms of others are though-provoking and illuminating. 

Two other big building blocks in their basic underlying argument that "things doesn't have to be this way." 

People treat the current state of affairs as inevitable. Well maybe, and maybe not. With our current state of affairs, we can be excused for thinking there really is no other way, but that is necessarily reductive of the human spirit and our ability to think clearly and work as a group. D&D point out that unfortunately, we have no other planets to compare against ourselves to so we're kind of stuck with thought experiments, and looking at other times. And as we look around the world and back in time, it brings us to America - in particular, the five nations of the Iroquoi. Here was a culture that they theorize from the existing archaeological findings, in particular of the Mississippian Culture and the urban center at Cahokia near modern day East St. Louis in Illinois, that knew about top-down, hierarchical government and had rejected it for a life based on intuition and spirit, connected to the earth and sky, where decisions were made collectively by an informed council. This could take time - (for those LOTR fans, cue the council of the Ents) - but it was a way they had chosen. The Iroquois not only had a different way of doing things, there's evidence that their critique of Western Culture and their celebration in fact jump-started the Enlightenment. All we really needed was tobacco, coffee and a simple observation: "Why do you treat your own people so badly and feel you have to give obeisance to a single human you call king or his cronies?" 

So we are this way but maybe we didn't have to be. So again, why? Contrasting Iroquoi Law, the the forms of power and punishmennt with the roots of Roman Law, we find a possible answer. Freedom, as defined by Roman Law, is based on personal property. "I get to do what I want with this thing." D&D argue that this law, and the over 2000 years of the jurisprudence and precedent that follow, are based on the rights of the Citizen, in other words, the Male Head of the Household, Pater, to do whatever he wants with the people and things in his household, ie, his wives, children, slaves and belongings. It was just as much a way to protect freedoms as to take it away - particularly from women and slaves. Even as we are given the right to "own" and rape, punish and kill and otherwise dispose of others, others find that their personal freedoms are abridged. So thus was born this strange and unnecessary connection between domestic care and control, love and providing and ownership. 

And on to the questions and the conclusions. 

D&D began the project asking "What are the origins of inequality" and the corollary, "What are the origins of the State?" 

Regarding the first, perhaps instead of asking, "What are the origins of social inequality?" as if it were inevitable, we should be looking at ourselves through the lens of history and asking: "Why did we get stuck?" Cycles of history have come and gone. We can change. Part of being human is the ability to change our destiny, either by fight or flight. To talk together as a group and decide what's best. Maybe here I can yield the floor to D&D, and quote from their summarizing chapter, brilliantly entitled: Conclusion. 

From page 519. 

If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the 'origins of social inequality'), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it? 

From page 523-4. (long)

Social theorists have a tendency to write about the past as if everything that happened could have been predicted beforehand. This is someone dishonest, since we're all aware that when we actually try to predict the future we almost invariably get it wrong - and this is just as true of social theorists as anybody else. Nonetheless, it's hard to resist the temptation to write and think as if the current state of the world, in the early 21st century, is the inevitable outcome of the last 10,000 years of history, while in reality, of course, we have little or no idea what the world will be like even in 2075, let alone 2150. 

Who knows? Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this as yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies - say bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighborhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction - will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to look at say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on the road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken? 

Last paragraph of the book, page 525-6.  

We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some 'original' form of human society; that's its nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that 'civilization' and 'complexity' always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state. We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths. 
​

​

 Whenever I'm out of town I try to hit an independent bookstore and find a favorite 3rd Wave Independent Coffee shop. This serves two functions. One, is that I get something to read and somewhere to read it. Secondly, it basically helps me get my bearings around town and geolocate the more culturally palatable neighborhoods. The journey is just as important as the destination, to excrete my first platitude of the day.  

We have three kids in college, spread out across the South- and Midwest. Ally at Rice in Houston. Will is in Boulder at Colorado. And Virgil in their first semester at Washington University, studying Art at the Sam Fox School of Art & Design. So I've had opportunities to check places out and honestly there's nothing I love more. 

Surprisingly, St. Louis - or at last the neighborhood we we were staying in which is Wash U and Forest Park adjacent - is very enjoyable and has everything I need. And what I/we need is. 1) a place to run. 2) coffee 3) grubbin' vegetarian/vegan food. 4) some semblance of hipster/progressive culture, with a bookstore as one of the focii.

When we visit St. Louis we've stayed on Pershing which is a street of aging Apartment houses just a block off of Forest Park. As urban Parks go, Forest Park is impressive. It's got a golf course, Zoo, French-influence landscaped areas around the St. Louis Museum of Art and the Missouri Museum of History, ballfields, ponds and streams and miles of trails. It's 1/3 bigger than Central Park and running the outside loop clocks in at about 6 and 1/2 miles.  

And right at the corner of Skinker and Forest Parkway, katty-corner is Kaldi's Coffee. These folks really have the quality control dialed in, particularly because they are a local chain with a number of shops. A coffee shop is best judged by their espresso and their cortado (also called a Gibraltar) and both are excellent here. The espresso is dark and full without bitterness and a full crema. The drinks are skillfully and thoughtfully made. I like a coffee shop where they take their time (without fumbling) and don't rush. At this particular location they pace themselves and pay attention to each drink. They also have food and a little bit of Wash U swag. It answers the old Chiat/Day question of how big can you get without getting bad? in the following way: With a number of stores through the City and a regional direct and in-store distribution, still about as good as it gets. 

And finally, to books. As you know, the endangered independent bookstore was suffering an extinction level event, but the number has stabilized. In St. Louis, the literary survivor would be Left Bank Books in the Central West End. We visited on the afternoon of Saturday, October 30. I was looking for books on the Royal Society's Shortlist for the 2021 Science Book Prize but this particular smallish bookstore had no science section, so I wandered around a bit and found Motherless Brooklyn - a signed copy no less. 

It's amazing what you can get for $5.50 these days. People will pay 3 million at auction for some of a jackass' tweet, and I can get an actual book signed by a genuine genius of an author for the price of a quad cappuccino -- both of which have more value to me than any NFT. "But I digress." The book is set in 1980's Brooklyn, I think. Modern. It's about some kids that grow up in and orphanage who are sort of adopted as the muscle and gang of a small time wise guy. The wise guy gets killed and the lead character - smart, tough, has many of the traits of a classic gumshoes except he has Tourettes syndrome, sets to work unravelling the plot and all the connections. 

If the book bumped its head, got knocked out and had a dream, that dream is the movie. It's an Ed Norton project, and well done. He transposes the story to 1950's and gives it sort of the classic gumshoe-HarlemUptown vibe. Completely new story. Our hero still has Tourettes, but Ed Norton does a good job of not going "full retard" and giving the character charm and motivation. In some ways, the logic just tracks better if the verbal backflips of being inside Lionel Essrog's head aren't there to entertain and amaze. So you can experience both, and it only adds to the love. 

On the themes of Mothers, etc. Heading out tomorrow morning to see my mother. She's starting to lose a little cohesion - perhaps her Hippocampus, the seat of memory, is affected, but she is coming closer and closer to living in an eternal present. I can't say I'm looking forward to being on a plane, or being away from my wife, but I'm doing it. Bye for now.  

I know; cool name but who? 

Mungo Park was an explorer, the first white man to set foot in central Africa. He walked from village to village, shedding gifts, clothes, health and companions until he had nothing but the filthy threadbare clothes on his back - and sometimes not even that. He walked approximately 3000 miles through unmapped territory to somehow miraculously return to the coast of western Africa and then to London and then his home in Scotland. While at home in Scotland he practice medicine as a country doctor, in got married and had a family, befriended Sir Walter Scott, and penned an account of his travels that brought him some measure of fame and captured the imagination of the British public. 

And mostly all the while he pined for the adventures that almost killed him. There's something about facing every day that makes man feel most alive and so Mungo Park applied to the British Government to go back and trace the full extent of the Niger River at the head of an expedition. For a number of reasons, this journey has ill-fated and after being decimated by sickness and treachery, Mungo Park has at last betrayed, attacked and drowned near modern day Bussa, Nigeria in 1805. 

The beginning of the narrative starts off a bit slow as he's going from village to village and it's hard to keep the names straight. One of the initial things that struck me , though is that even though there has been no European cultural penetration further than the coast and the Portuguese, French and British slave traders, Islam has already spead deeply into the Interior of the African Continent. 

Some observations:

The Moors, or the Islamic desert nomads of the north, do not come off well. They are churlish, ignorant, heartless, self-serving, double-crossing and cruel to the Africans and the one Christian they meet. Mungo Park is kept captive by them for a number of months, never sure of his fate from day to day. He escapes only through his ability to think on his feet and little kindnesses, mostly from the Queen. \

The different villages he travels through are ruled by Chieftains or "Dootys" and wider areas by Kings. He has a translator with him at first but later he's on his own - he knows enough Mandingo to communicated but that's only one language - the regions he walks through is diverse and varied. Sometimes he is treated like a celebrity, sometimes he treated as oddity or as an infidel - when he's with the Moors at one point they tie up a hog by his tent which constantly squeals and keeps him awake. He is told that if he's hungry he can eat dress and eat the pig, which is of course an unclean animal according to the Islamic Law. 

Another thing which is eye-opening is just how prevalent the slave trade. I'd always had this image in my head of white slave catchers out in the jungle chasing down peaceful,, defenseless villagers who they captured, put in chains and sent them on a ship to South Carolina. What I learned from reading this book is that slavery was a part of the culture there. You were either born a slave, you were enslaved after your village or Kingdom lost a war or you were enslaved when you or your family fell into debt or destitution. Then you either stayed put, or were traded to another village or taken to the coast. Some statistics:  "Slave trade was also well established along the West African coast. According to some estimates, there were 1,473,000 slaves shipped out from the Bight of Benin between the years 1600 and 1800, with over 1.2 million of these slaves being dispatched in the 18th century alone.1" Another quote from the same source, "The transatlantic trade in particular accounted for the forced migration of perhaps 3.5 million people between the 1650s and the 1860s, while a steady stream of slaves flowed north across the Sahara for a millennium, ending at the beginning of the twentieth century. Within Nigeria, slavery was widespread, with social implications that are still evident today. The Sokoto Caliphate, for example, had more slaves than any other modern country, except the United States in 1860.2"

Most of the European troops and explorers are killed by fever, disease and dysentery. At one point, Mungo takes 5-6 weeks to recover. The rest are killed by betrayal. 

As for the narrative itself, it's straightforward and crisp. He kept detailed notes in his hat which he always loses along with his life and the rest of his clothes at one point. Again, he starts by going village to village; as he gets further north he gets encounters the Niger and then the desert - this is where he's held captive. At this point, he decides to turn back. He does not know whether the Niger drains into the Congo, crosses to the other side of Africa - little does he know that it sweeps out a wide arc and doubles back on itself and drains back into the Atlantic across a delta that's half as long as the island of England itself. After he makes his escape, he encounters a friendly Village Chieftain who takes him in and then he travels back to the coast with a slave caravan - in fact making friends with many of the slaves. His take: The slave trade would have less actual impact on slavery as an institution than well-intentioned people think. Finally it's common now to paint imperialism with a damning brush and historically speaking, "opening up regions to trade" is justifiably equated with exploitation. But I would say that the British were idealistic in their own way. They were the first to abolish slavery in their protectorates and the quit the trade; they did want to find if they could help the African find other ways of subsisting and part of that was by entering into mutually beneficial trade agreements. The Christian Missionaries did believe that they were carrying a civilizing influence, and the Christ they believed in was a definite moral step up from what was going on - especially in comparison with how Islam was being practiced. 

But maybe the Africans were right - they looked at the Europeans with their superior killing technology, muskets cannons and boats and understood - once these guys had a foothold, it was only a matter of time. So why not kill rob and kill them now. 

Park's second expedition reminds me a lot of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. They start too late, the rainy season begins, and they members of the expedition - numbering in the 40s to begin with, is picked off in handfuls by disease, madness and violence until there are only 4-5 left in a canoe going down the Niger. Park is betrayed and then attacked where the river narrows to high stone cliffs- bombarded by rocks and projectiles, his canoe is upset and he drowns.

After everything he went through, it's a horribly fitting death. Of course, after narrowly escaping the first time, he should never have gone back - but who would have guessed that the extra soldiers and other members of the expedition, plus the materiel itself would be a burden rather than protection. 

A lucky fine, mind- opening - thanks to George Eliot for the reference in Middlemarch. 

​

I'm working on a new insomnia drug. I mean, I'm not working on the drug itself, but I'm working on the promotional launch campaign. We'll premiere the TV commercial sometimes next year - probably in June. That seems like a long time away, but with all these meetings and having to prepare the pre-production materials for approval and then to enlist vendor-partners to produce the campaign, it will keep us occupied. At any rate, this has given me an opportunity to think more about stress and depression and how that is intertwined with sleep issues, and also learn and reflect a bit on brain chemistry.

There are a number of types of over, behind and under the counter medications that people use to help themselves fall asleep. Many of them have a broadly sedating effect and just help us relax. But this new medication - if you're going to believe the press - precisely targets the wake signals in your brain that are keeping you awake, so that you can fall asleep more easily and naturally and one's natural sleep architecture isn't disrupted. This is a departure from old-school medications, which basically just knock you out and leave you feeling like you need something stronger than a cup of coffee to get up the next day. (See the Judy Garland story for reference.) 

I mean, seriously what class of drugs - besides painkillers - has a worse track record than those we take to help us sleep? Ever since the cavemen first looked up at the stars and said, "I wonder if there's any one out there ... who also can't sleep ..." people having been grabbing plants, drinks and pills to help them doze off. Alcohol, weed, Valium, and lately of course the craze for Ambien, with it's stories of creepy sleepwalking etc. So while I'm a pretty holistic medicine kinda guy, and I do believe that most health issues can be addressed by less bad food and moving your body more, I do think that this new kind of more-dialed-in, safer, non-addictive, non-psychotropic type of sleep aid is a huge step in the right direction.

It remains to be seen if people will like taking it, and how they will react if they do not immediately feel "knocked out" - it's my instinct that people equate effectiveness with how a pill makes you feel -- in other words, if I can't feel it, is it working? 

I've had the opportunity to watch the preferred messaging evolve over the last year or so. My gut instinct is that people will feel better about having Insomnia, if treat it like a condition and sort of let them off the hook in terms of personal responsibility. "You have insomnia. It's a condition. It's not your fault - it's part of your neurological makeup. What you need is something to calm down, suppress your wake signals, and then you'll be fine." 

The more traditional way to approach this of course, is that I can't sleep because I'm worried about ______________ fill in the blank. Kids. Money. She looked at me, what he said that night. Losing my job, not getting the job. Etc. 

There are of course myriad other tools to deal with sleeplessness. Cognitive Behavior Therapy is of course the first recommend, but the last one people turn to. After they've had the warm milk and lavender and turned off the blue light, etc etc. 

Without passing judgment for a moment, let's look at some analogs. 

Alcoholism, for instance. Drinking too much was of course seen as a weakness of will, but was given disease status at some point. It certainly kills a lot of people and the addict/alcoholic body and brain has been scientifically proven to be different than your average temperate drinker. 

How about depression? People that are long term depressives don't have the same seratonin, dopamine and norepinephrine levels that are usually dished out to humans. And then of course these conditions, all of them, can be co-morbid and intertwined so maybe one causes or exacerbates another, or on the other hand, maybe you treat the alcoholism and the depression and insomnia goes away. Or, once you're able to sleep, the depression and compulsive drug use go away. 

So last night I was talking to a close family member and they shared how they been prescribed sertraline hydrochloride, a generic form of Zoloft, because of general anxiety associated with an overfull life, and body chemistry changes due to midlife changes. You can really tell the difference since she's been working again with a therapist - they sound much less dark and overwhelmed. In her words, I can't run, or meditate this away. 

One of my kids is dealing with some of the same issues right now. They've had two visits recently to the ER because of anxiety attacks. 

And we all share the same DNA, body chemistry, which has made me shall we say, ponder these things afresh. 

I'll share some of my experience. 

Two years ago, I was deep down a dark well with no idea how to climb out - and no real urge to, honestly.

Trotting out the pseudo-diognosting language, here: Suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety and to be more human about it, just deep self-loathing and general world-weariness to the point of not giving a rabid rodents ass. It got so bad that I was delusional - I think - in a mental and sensory way, and legitimately did not know real from imagined, or true from false. I was obsessed absolutely obsessed with visions of monks on fire. I constantly imagined dousing myself with gasoline and lighting a match. Another dominant image was simply opening up a vein and bleeding out. As my blood left me I could feel all the anxiety and pressure leaving too; it was so relaxing like slipping into a bath. I would audibly "ahhh ..." with the thought. At other times, I had the near constant sensation of knives plunging into me, over and over again. Quite literally my neurological skin had been ripped off. I started feeling other's people movements as if they were inside my own body and their moods as if they were my own. If I saw a street person smoking, I would feel their sickness and feel the smoke hurting my lungs. If someone sneezed or stood up rapidly or was physically manifesting craziness on the streets of Manhattan, or anger, impatience or physical discomfort in my home or at work, I felt that too. There was no separation between me and others. I could not protect myself. I did some searches online of articles, books and resources and discovered a condition called Mirror Touch Synesthesia. I asked long time meditators that I know if they had similar experiences. I reached out to the meditation center I attend and a person I really respect likened it to stigmata and told me that I needed to stop going deep and consolidate my practice. (As a side-note, this person never followed up - really crazy stuff, honestly. Hey, did you kill yourself? Stop having the crazy stuff happening? How's the wife and kids? Happy New Year!  Don't forget to honor our founder's birthday with a generous, tax deductable gift) I honestly don't know if the meditation had anything to do with it, or if it was a combination of depression, new city, new job, body chemistry changing as I aged, plus sensitivity from years of (half-assed) meditation practice. etc. Maybe all of it. At any rate, as I pushed through this period, I came to identify closer with what people traditionally call an empath. My general understanding is that we all have mirror neurons, for one reason or another, mine are at times, more sensitive. Along with the sound sensitivity thing, and my lack of linearity // whatever. I'm different. Every one's different. That's what makes us the same.  

At any rate, I had no idea what was going on. It was like someone else had taken over my body. The phrase "losing your mind" is so commonplace, that we don't consider it's actual meaning as a phrase or root significance, but that's exactly what it felt like - my mind, which is my tool I work with, my buddy, the?"Me" who I have conversations with and observe the world around and read books and bat around ideas, etc etc my mind had broken its leash or whatever tethers it to reality and taken off and I had no idea where to look. 

Along with a mind that simply wouldn't behave and kept seeing and saying things that could be true or maybe not or distorted or who knows, I had physical sensations that were out of control - extreme off-the-charts sound sensitivity (misophonia), nausea when confront with sick street-people, uptight people at work, an understandable upset wife, teenagers; I became two separate people inside, each with complete and inclusive non-intersecting belief systems. Both made sense. One was dark and the other, I guess the "True Me" richer and more variegated in feeling, more open, fun, positive and healthy. And I would toggle without warning between the two. It was literally like being the Hulk, excepted without super strength or really any redeeming qualities as tall. I could remember what one did, but each did not seem real to the other. What I mean by that, is that when I was "Dark" I couldn't ever imagine being Light again, and if I was Light, I couldn't ever imagine going down again. "That will never happen." "I'm fine now." 

And then something would set me off and I would be the Other. 

I was seeing a therapist - which is a whole 'nother ball of wax, and tough on it's own, because I can't sit in proximity with someone for any length of time without "reading" them and becoming them at some point.

At any rate, this therapist sent me to a Dr. - someone I believe is a very accomplished Columbia educated Clinical Psychologist. And after patiently listening to me for an hour and a half tell her honestly what I was thinking in a pleasantly clinical Q & A format, she recommended that I check myself into an in-patient facility and go on Lithium. I shouldn't have been shocked but I was. Maybe it was dark me that had talked for 90 minutes or whatever, two sessions worth, and then Light me said "Wha?" I think I said something like, "That sounds like a pretty severe diagnosis for someone who's having a bad day, and or just hates their job." And I walked out there and said I'd think about it. 

She called my therapist. She called my wife. They got the big warning. Odds were I wasn't going to make it. People like me never get better without help. Over time, they get worse. 

[There's fucking construction noise going on outside; feel like my skull is being sawed into.]

And I saw my future stretched out in front of me like a huge U curve. I would take the required time off from work, they are legally obligated to not tell my job what condition I was suffering from but there would be gossip., I would go into treatment, talk to other people in group therapy, have my feelings evened out by a drug that takes the edges off, I would them come back to work, put the pieces of my life back together; put on weight, be eternally under the microscope of clinicians, doctors and therapists. They would share responsibility for my well-being. I would no longer be on my own. I would have help. A lot of it. As much as middle class success could buy. In other words, I would complete the project I'd embarked upon. I would have my nervous breakdown, fully and clinically complete, and but I would not kill myself but I would come back. And then I had a moment of clarity - what if I just cut across the U and just went straight to now. What if I took killing myself off the table. The goal was to be at work, not on drugs and functioning. Maybe I could just pretend to be normal - and in the meantime, utilize more tools - and so I dug into finding new ways to be of service. Attempted to pretend to believe in a purpose for myself and life. Made new friends and reconnected with the ones I already had. Leaned into the mediition. Accepted the existence of my dark side and just stopped stopped trying to reason with it, analyze it, figure it out, get down to causes and conditions, understand the why. I stopped trying to placate it, or even listen to it. I put it back in it's box and went about my business. And slowly ever so slowly I walked out of the woods. Nothing has been more real in my life than this internal battle. 

As I walked I realized that there were things I liked about being crazy that I had become so used to that I didn't really even note them as extraordinary. One, was that when I started swinging out of the darkness and back into the light, it was a fucking rush. It was like doing drugs and I liked it. Secondly, my sex drive was obsessive and off the charts. Basically, my body chemistry was just super wacked, and like a good little drug addict, I was protecting the high. It was thrilling actually, and much like accounts of mystical experiences I've heard and read. I would feel myself become hollow or diaphanous and the wind of existence blew through me; I ceased being me and would transcendently blend with nature and all people and feel a sense of ecstatic Oneness. 

So I walked away from that BS too. The lows were in no way worth the meager rewards of the highs. 

In a way, I'm really lucky that the pandemic hit - it allowed me to be isolated and heal and not be triggers by reading people or overwhelmed by irritating noises I can't control - which, I know it sounds silly, but trust me, that was a big part of it. 

In addition, I discovered yoga. Along with a proper diet, my body chemistry has evened out and I'm not bushwacked or overwhelmed by dark thoughts or the other personality as much. Mornings are still rough. I've studied and earned an advanced degree in manipulating my own body chemistry utilizing only coffee, cacao, water, ibufrofen, Meloxicam and food with it's various combinations of nutrients. Protein, sugar, and carbs are seemingly the main mood drivers. 

I no longer wish to be "psychic" in any way. To be clear, I've never felt like I could read people's minds. Rather, I can't protect myself from their moods and physical presentation. But it's not a special thing. It's hell. 

I no longer wish for sweeping "spiritual experiences" -- you can keep it, friend. I just want to be even-Steven.  

And I do still wonder though -- if a less extreme medical answer had been offered, or if maybe I had appropriately reached out at the beginning, had a better support system, and caught my condition at an early stage -- I could have saved myself and more importantly a lot of other people a lot of suffering and trouble. At this point, I've given up grandiose ideas of being or doing good, really. I just want to do no harm - to myself or others. Be a good father, husband, colleague, employee and most of all be a good friend. 

On the one hand I could say damn, whew! Glad that's over. On the other side, the depressing side, (and I try not to go there) a sad little dark voice says "Yeah, you're better now but look at you, you old fuck, you threw your fucking life away. You've hurt yourself and so many with your stubbornness and inability to ask for help - your inability to communicated anything of depth, and never hardly any strong feeling at all without anger. 

This is the Llewyn Davis moment, right. 

Not to be defensive, but I will say in summary: In the same way that there are some people who never get over their alcoholism, they don't like meetings, they can't get the spiritual shit, it just doesn't work for them, there are certain ways that I relate to myself and the world and the people in it that make me, shal we say "resistant to treatment" by either therapy and drugs.

1) Therapy. As mentioned, any significant time I spend with anyone, over time, becomes about them, and not me. I'm a sponge, a chameleon and in a weird way for someone who seemingly has such a strong personality, I do not have strong or stable sense of self. I am my environment.

2) Medication. Everything has side effects. I'm very body aware and I know how my body feels right now and I know how to deal with it. It's familiar. Oh, and for a 56 year old man, I'm really quite vain. I don't want to take anything that makes me less sharp, makes me put on weight, makes my mouth dry, backfires and makes me even more depressed, keeps me up at night, makes me sleep during the day. And so on. Don't like side-effects. And, in addition to that, it's a genuine effing possibility that maybe, just perhaps, I'm conjecturing here people, but just MAYBE being a fucking moody edgy depressive is so much a part of this mind/body mechanism that others call Max, that I don't want to give that up. Like an old jacket, it's my fucking jacket, holes and all. And I'll wear it anywhere, anyhow I want. I like me and get off on me. I've put a lot into this jacket and maybe it's not what's exactly appropriate to wear circa 2021 but I say, you know what? I've got a sense that at the bottom of it all, the problem isn't me. The reason my sibling is anxious, the reason my daughter can't sleep, the reason I'm a crazy aging ex-drug addict manic depressive isn't because there's something wrong with me - there's something wrong with the world. People should be allowed to be who they are. It's society that needs to change, not my brain. 

As an addendum, how do I deal with insomnia? I listen to tapes of my meditation teacher. Eknath Easwaran might be the most well-documented mystic of modern times, in terms of audio and video tapes of his talks. Because he speaks from such a deep place, his words and sheer presence has a soporific effect. I'm not unaware of the humor of this, and for the heretical nature that this observation might engender among the dwindling true believers. But in my case, I choose to see it as a positive. At night I listen to Eknath Easwaran -- or EE as we affectionately refer to him. If I'm awake, then I'm taking in wisdom and nourishment for the soul. If I fall asleep, it's with the voice and words of an illumined man in my ears. On nights when I'm up alot, Easwaran voice, words, my mantram and the words of the inspired passages that I use in meditation are my constant companions. And most of the time, nowadays, the dumb things that happen at work don't have a chance. 

Tracey & I are starting to develop a tradition - Lake Placid for the fall. Hiked up Moose Mountain today. It should really be called moss and mushroom mountain. I've never seen so many fallen trees in my life. Because it's an SOA trail it wasn't as maintained - but at least we made the mountain to ourselves.