Hot and cold.

In this, the Summer of the Apocalypse, it's hard to believe things are going so well. Sure, I'm frazzled and irascible, but those are the temporary states that interrupt an otherwise much happier existence than I've been used to.

Things are changing, and maybe it's the rapidity of the change that is causing me to fall behind. Just as I wrap my mind around a new event, but before I can understand it emotionally, a new crisis arises.

I gave up on music over the winter, devoting a month or two in early Spring to learning, teaching myself, a new set of languages--umbrella'ed under web development.

It started with Ruby on Rails, coming as a recommendation of a friend as I was looking to build a rideshare website. Dream big and jump in feet first but recognize the futility forthwith.

After a couple months and couple of iterations, I realized that my little rideshare website was a gimpy little punk who could never compete with such slicked-back entrepreneurs. I was content to give the people a ride first and charge later, but when you start with a profit model, you can attract investors and real professionals.

But I was smitten and blind to the flaws in my scheme up until the point that I had learned enough to work on other projects.

I realized that there's more money and less risk in working on other projects; if I get good enough, I can branch off on my own later.

I embarked on this new lifestyle within weeks of getting together with a lady who is still centrally peripheral to my life picture.

She used to live with me and, according to her, was crushing hard on me then despite its inappropriateness. I surely thought she was cute and flirted her up, but didn't think it was anything serious until it was.

And now she makes me happy whenever we're together and sad whenever we're apart.

As we near doomsday, the latter is becoming the dominant reality and my moods are swinging more and more wildly. It's a rollercoaster. Of love.

And on top of it, my things are breaking, dying, or leaving me.

My laptop, my beloved MacBook Pro--don't laugh--died a silent death in the middle of the night on the eve of July 4th. I was awoken in a drunken stupor by my roommates coming home and found that my computer had been transformed from an aluminum spaceship to the depths of my imagination and the web to a lump of inert silicon, a paperweight.

This computer had been my companion when I hibernated away a winter in Michigan and had been a great too for both music and web development. And it was I who killed it.

It had been really hot and our a/c was struggling to keep the apartment at about 85. So I put it on an ice pack from the fridge. No big deal.

But then, after a few days of doing this, I stopped putting the magazine in between the ice pack and the aluminum body and the condensation must have shorted it out.

Apple wanted 1200 to fix it, MicroCenter 1100. So I freaked out and bought a Lenovo ThinkPad and installed Linux on it.

So now I'm a *real* developer but can't do much with music.

Today, on the enlongening list of things that are weigh on my mind and soul, I took the Mac in with a 300-dollar logic board that I got from Ebay and am hoping they'll be able to make it work. So far, it's only 70 bucks; could be a bit more if that doesn't fix it.

In other news, my car got stolen. I filed a police report but haven't notified the insurance. I'll live car-free for a while and see how that goes. 

It makes small things more stressful--like going on roadtrips around the midwest--but in general, I think it will make things easier, less stressful.

Good thing there's all these rideshare websites! Including craigstlist, ridejoy, and zimride.

Irony. Karma. Fate. Whatever.

I'll keep surviving in between states of thriving. For now, I'll just fan myself in air-conditioned coffee shops and move as little as possible.

Waiting Game

Growing up, we would play games like Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and The Game of Life—at which I was mysteriously adept at becoming the lawyer—but I still think Kill Dr. Lucky was one of the best.

And cards. We would play cards too, like retirees killing time.

Now I'm playing one of those real-life games that is impossible to win and yet impossible to throw a tantrum, flip the board in the air and storm home.

Waiting.

The past few days I've stayed shuttered in the house with occasional excursions to teach some piano. It's cold; I've been under the weather; there's nothing to force me out into the world.

And while I've gotten a lot done at home—making some phat beats and hip-happening grooves—there's always the gmail inbox twinkling at me in the distance, begging me to check for anything important.

Whether it's a new piano student, a romantic interest, a potential performance gig, or just a new Facebook friend, the compounding of unrequited communication is an experiment in anti-matter containment, each new void expanding the black hole below.

And yet I can't stop. I keep throwing boomerangs off the cliff never to be seen again. Only some do I get to see washed up on the shore, their potential energy wasted, overcome by gravity and the infinite mist.

Jon Stories

There was this guy I grew up with who used to tell one-line stories with no punchline.

We all know the kind and have all told them; at one point, it became the thing to add "and then I found 5 dollars" at the end.

I used to find myself telling similarly pointless stories—can we even call them stories?—and quickly put an end to it once my friends started saying that instead of "Jon Stories" we should call them "Evan Strories."

I learned my lesson.

But sometimes these days, after a long day of sitting and contemplating, my capacity for speech feels rusted—the juices aren't flowing. Pointless stories are usually the first to come out.

But I'm so conditioned against it that I keep them in, looking around for something else. Nothing comes.

You have to let it all come out before you get to the good stuff. So is life.

co-evolution

highlights from a wide-ranging and interesting conversation, laid on the table without pretense.

* Philosophers are after the Truth [capital T], but they, like composers, are merely the articulators of a moment, making the Zeitgeist palpable/lisible/audible, orating from the mountaintop their own personal truth. The successful truths find resonance with the people of the time (or the time just after).

That is, Nietzsche wasn't so much calling for the death of God as much as proclaiming it. The messenger not the executioner.

* We live in a predominantly capitalist pseudo-democracy for a good reason: competition, survival of the fittest. Societies evolve like species. Religions, too. Myriad economic systems, myriad insignificant religions, have attempted to win over the hearts of people, but only a few have succeeded. Christianity succeeded in the West *because* it declared Jesus was the one and only son of God. While that rings false to me in the 21st century, it is perhaps the one decision that allowed me to hear about him at all.

Capitalism was just one possible system—of the 10,000 we tried—but was not so much chosen as it was proven to be effective. The reason why it won out is a big question. It's not the fairest system, it's probably not even the most efficient system, but it is dominating right now.

Maybe societies succeed or fail not because of what they give people but based on what people give them. Society creates its own needs, people fill them. Ultimately, when people have a role in society, when they are giving back, they feel a part of it.

* People created societies based on their fear of the unknown in order to stabilize food availability and weather. Thus, we needed to dominate nature to provide stability. Domination is always inherent, unavoidable.

We all need a different mix of certainty and uncertainty. I'm an uncertainty freak and so don't feel compelled to relinquish options in the name of stability. As such I neither join nor create many organizations. [Somehow, being on a bike team is the only one that makes sense.] But, still, I depend on organizations that others have created to give a modicum of stability to our chaotic lives.

Bigger organizations are more stable. More stability means less individual freedom. How do we balance these? We don't. We let the market decide. We let the powerful—the organization leaders—get away with more and more until the unfairness becomes excessive, then we stage protests and occupy shit.

We need organizations, but when there are organizations who have been organized to organized other organizations, it gets a little too meta for real life.

We seem to be living in the most stable time for the most number of people ever in history. There's a lot of evil still in the world, but we need to acknowledge how far we've come lest we pale at the sight of how far is left to go.

The Shape of the Sword

Last night before bed, I read The Shape of the Sword by Borges.

I have it in a book, legitimately bought from a bookstore.

As far as a plot archetype, it's more of a Keyser Söze story than anything. It's a short story, hard to really develop the characters.

It's also a story within a story, so it's hard to tell who the main character is.

If anything, it's the Outlaw Myth: the hero has stumbled and fallen and is using his one virtue to find redemption. Except there is no redemption nor any attempt to obtain it.

Turns out, you can read it online.

It's a story almost devoid of plot, entirely based on fleshing out a single character and then twisting the plot. It's fine for a short story, but for a feature-length movie, a little thin.

Would make a good short, maybe.

bongiorno

Finally, it's on Netflix streaming—but not for long.

Breaking Away.

Yes, one of the few bike racing movies, one that I should probably own (if I still believed in owning CDs and DVDs) that was shown in Grant Park earlier this year to kick off bike-to-work week.

I was loathe to attribute it to an archetype, as if they were even avoidable. A real story about real characters, the movie is a far cry from Shutter Island, a plot device wrapped in clichés.

It's about 4 recently graduated high school friends who have nothing to show for their first summer out. No jobs, no aspirations, only feelings of inadequacy for being townies in a college town. Sons of stonecutters, quarrymen, they're called cutters. And you can see the word impale itself in their flesh each time it's leveled at them—like a knife.

Dave stands out. Having won an Italian bike, he's been obsessed with bikes and Italy, speaking either Italian or broken English with an affected accent. He's blissed out living in his delusion while his friends and father are downtrodden realists, even pessimists.

Dave meets a girl in this state who believes him to be an Italian exchange student, presumably studying at the University. Double lie.

But he's so happy, albeit due explicitly to his idealism and naïveté.

He reminds me of myself for a few months in the Fall of '07.

And naïve idealism is precisely what makes his fall so hard. The Italians come to town for a race; Dave participates, spends the first half of the race catching up to them; he tries to hang with them, riding with them, speaking Italian; they [take offense to this?] stick a pipe in his spokes and crash him out of the race. [Were they earnestly worried about losing to him?]

In Dave's case, his idealism was shattered, his flesh bruised. He stops speaking Italian, even to his girl [who dumps him], and he suddenly resembles any one of his dejected friends. His father finally recognizes him, content that he's finally acting "normal" again. Or just real?

His father had been highly put out by the Italian act, and though he probably didn't realize, maybe deep down he was just concerned that his son's idealized delusion would turn around to cause him pain. Was he just being (subconsciously) protective or just miffed that his son could be so namby-pamby happy?

Then there's the big race. The Little 500. It goes as you might expect, and we feel the requisite joy at the end.

As for an archetype, I had forgotten about the "Rags to Riches" type, one that includes a "Coming of Age" type. Each of the 4 high school friends develops as the story progresses, leaving behind their insecurities and stepping boldly into new terrain. And the hero, the main character Dave, experiences the "False Ending" in which the bad guys win and it looks bleak. But that makes the triumph at the end all the greater.

Win.

bettering morning coffee

There are some friends who you have friend-dates with, and then there are those to whose house you bring a bike pump to fill their tires and eat some bread. And then maybe watch them do their hair and put their makeup on.

It's nice when they live close by.

And sometimes you can trigger deep truths from within that erupt unexpectedly; sometimes you learn things about coffee.

The friend in question used to work at a swank coffee shop in Brooklyn—Oslo—who, to my taste buds roasts the best coffee in the world. Try Freya.

[Shameless attempt at promotional support? Or simply earnest?]

One new hot thing in the world of coffee is Chemex: a glass carafe with a filter for the beans on top. Sounds too simple to be good, but it's the new big thing. And apparently there's a right way and a righter way to pour.

The trick, apparently, is to do an initial pour that soaks the beans and releases the bitter aromas. Then it's time for a long slow pour in a spiral, starting from the outside.

I tried the first trick on our standard drip coffee maker, and it worked.

It requires you making some hot water first, but pour it over the beans and let them steam for a few seconds before starting the pot. Turns cheap Trader Joe's coffee into acid-free B+ coffee.