« Posts under note to self

being and identity and reality

April 11, 2014 / posted in art, dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, Theory, Universal non-all, universal nothing / No Comments

I think much of politics stems from identity construction. Most discussions about identity are approached from the question of the Other — include them or teach them or change them. But really, any position of otherness must be mediated by what the Self is. The self mediating the self is the “invisible” point of reference that creates this initial distortion.

Post race isn’t exactly the same as post identity. Even if it’s a class distinction or, say, identifying as a “punk” which means “I’m real” then others who are not punk are “sell outs.”. Identity works that way.

So being American. Being a man. Being your age. Your personal history your children’s future your parent’s past your politics your sexuality your (in)unique soul. These are still pretty much identity construction that traps us as being a type and others as not being us. Except for genuine interaction, which basically needs both sides of the interaction to shed the image of itself, the Other is always a mirror that reflects back to us our negative that is not-me.

These groups of similar mes that see me as being us organizes groups, and super-groups. This organizationing(s) “hows” how we talk to one another and share resources/work. But each group, and group of groups also describe it’s own outside. You have to be outside the outside, to really step away. This organization/description/structure is not accidentally, how things are supposed to be. Based, on the outside of itself, it has to be this way, as defined by the outside that is not itself defining itself. So, each grouping also describes it’s own outside or “rebellion”. Being a punk is inscribed at the heart of being a sell-out. So it really seems impossible to step out of this reality.

But I guess that really doesn’t matter. Most people just want to fit in somewhere and be themselves. Lol, be who their identity tells them they are. :-)

what’s wrong with baseball? Absolutely Nothing.

August 7, 2012 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, utility / No Comments

went to a baseball game. a few days ago.

dodgers vs the cubs. i went to a game before when i was 12 but it was without framing, as a school trip. overall, i dont remember anything, so i consider this to be my first baseball game

the initial striking was how immersive being in the crowd was.

usually when i saw baseball games, it was in a movie or a tv show. and so, baseball was a backdrop against a larger plot. at first i kept feeling like there was a larger story i was missing; that my attention needed to be elsewhere.

of course there was nothing like that.

a bunch of random things happened, with the jumbotron, with things like air guitar, dancing, kissing. the audience basically entertained themselves through the jumbotron while the players did whatever they did… guess baseball is a slower game so they needed that. but really, the emotional energy in the crowd was nearly overwhelming. i found myself recoiling when they did the wave, or when random shit happened… the audience was totally in it.

i realized then, something very unlike what my 19 year old self would realize, i think, if he were there.

there is nothing horrible at all about baseball games. Absolutely Nothing ™.

so this is why sports fans are sports fans: you have the near immersal of what it means to be in a group, in a community… with the colors and the cheering and the singular mindedness of the crowd. this rabble focus is what so many 19th century philosophers and political thinkers were afraid of; the mob. this is the heart of democracy and fascism rolled all into one. (south park got something right! rabblerabblerabblerabble)

i found myself kind of sickened by it and at the same time, wanting to be part of it… despite the fact that it was so inane, all the actions and the spectacles… arbitrary. random.

what was so jarring in this had alot to do with the advertisements that snuck in. this is our world; where bank of america’s logo was on the jumbotron all the time, and state farm’s logo was on all the tickets… despite this being dodgerland. dodger dogs, dodger water, dodger gear… the other brands, subway and bank of america and state farm… there, almost like part of the infrastructure…. support beams we see, sitting on the bleachers, but we don’t really see. branding to support branding.

not bad perhaps, since everything takes funding… but i think this kind of experience made me feel, wow, this is really leaning dangerously close to the beginning of social engineering… democracy works by appealing to the masses, so complex ideas and policies always need to be distilled to their simplest form for dissemination and emotional reaction. in much the same way, capitalism — marketing of experiences like dinner, or ziplines or sports events also need to be focused to be pleasurable in their specific ways that they are. everything is distilled, made simpler. focused

i see our lives as becoming fuller and fuller, until there’s very little room for us to move without having some business or some experience waiting for us to come in and sit there… that its easier to go to a dating mixer than to the bar, or its easier to do all your banking and credit cards and payments with one financial profile (linked across several or even just one financial institution)… or your medical records will be stored across a national database for instant access. no more having to go through the same proceedural exams once you switch small time dentists or opticians. everything made easy. want disney? go to the disneystore. go to disneyland. want sandwiches? google sandwiches and go to a sandwich shop. have sandwiches 24/7. want philosophy? go to the philosophy factory and download any number of works, that might have taken a PHD 25 years to find and read… you can have it all on your kindle.

this kind of hyper-realism…
this availability of different cultural affects:
apparently tonight william shatner was in the audience somewhere for they did a star trek tribute… during the fireworks display they played was to the music of star trek… movies and tv shows. when they were blowing off fireworks and i was watching young and old take out their cell phones to take pictures and record it… this event was wondrous… a real crowd pleaser. why were they trying so hard?

this notion of enchantment, which was missing from the desperation that arose out of 9/11… has found itself reborn today in momentary displays of immersive experience… ok, sure, there’s nothing really bad about going to see a baseball game and its following fireworks… (except maybe your team losing). but this is the kind of pure, unanalytical, uncritical embracing of patriotism, team spirit, community, crowd-oneness that people are missing… we all are in this together and for a moment, despite being competitors in driving, in jobs, in relationships, in living space with all these angelos, we can all pretend that we belong together and that everything fits in a secular humanism devoid of poverty, suffering and discrimination.

this kind of singularity reminds me of a conversation with some hipsters about books a few nights earlier. rather than lament that no one ever read anymore, we started talking about how people do read, but in different media. i tried to steer the conversation into “the novel started off as a distraction for victorian women on their summer trips (something to do when sitting in the carriage or on a boat)… and ends today as just another source of entertainment (like the long drawnout serial tv dramas like lost or 24)… if we are upset that no one reads anymore, we are probably missing the fact that without the novel as a penultimate art form, no one really processes data in a long drawn out way, for deeper analysis… you don’t get this immediate engagement with tv serials, movies, video games or performance… and following that, do we need the kind of thought that goes into something like moby dick or war and peace?”

no one had any answer that moment. but i think that if we start having our entertainment as immersive singular experiences that exist in “dodgerland” or “when you turn on your xbox and select any video game” … that fragmented disconnected disjointed (ir)relevancy, means that we won’t be able to examine this content without understanding the larger frame its presented in… (since each content will have its own specific logic, like an anime with a ton of characters who behave weirdly but fit together). in other words analysis will be limited to less about what something is, than how it fits in — less what it says than how it functions when placed in the context of a larger whole… in a metaphysical way what “time” it presents in, as it defines its own time and is defined into a time. in a sense, we will have to leave the why to programmers, marketing departments, designers and engineers who create the box, package the content, as they understand how it fits in financially and socially, why people come to it, how they use it, what they are looking for… the only way to engage has to be on a deeper level of abstraction. otherwise, you will a puppet in the system. even while philosophizing, you run around, a rat in a maze of market forces. you are collectively shuffled into traffic, follow the defined paths beaten by urban engineers to maximize efficiency of travel, regulated by invisible giants for a specific purpose… the result of which, is poor design that juxtaposes and fails in most dimensions (lost in traffic, stores isolated and starving, stuck in traffic, accidents, even death); or good design that maximizes its output (easy flow, plenty parking, encouraging you to feel good about buy things you dont need, to a highway that dumps you onto your neighborhood with easy access home to bed).

i think the majority of systems are designed to input-output, they are haecceity oriented; transform one material into another for the purpose of quiddity. it might be information of one type, into another, but the result is nearly always a modularity that interlocks with other modularities… be it a car on the road with other cars, or one web page that functions on most any browser. you can be a unique, but the big system knows you entirely; plays you like a fiddle and when its done with you, you’ll don that solider uniform. your condition may be weird but the health care system has a form for you! its all about the processing. not as an industrial society that used to can fish or make fords on an assembly line; we do this to ourselves now. the rationalization of process invades our subjectivity and cleans it out. even in scifi dystopias of post-armageddon, we still have robot mass murders, insane, inhuman machines that have a system to wipe out the human element.

rationalizations of process and process oriented management (of people, as employees or as customers) is probably the one far reaching mindset that came out of the 20th century…. its also the biggest, most useful and most damning box that we have built for ourselves. as capitalists, we have developed money, at least as students of economy, into a raw unit of social value. in the process of using money as an objective measure to determine the viability and value of pursuing endeavors, we’ve also had to objectify processes so as to track money… so we can further measure the potentiality of any and every course and each level and each intersection, be it in government or business.

as mice in such processes, we are bombarded by a variety of paperwork, forms, meetings, appointments… junctions which administrators and bearucrats alike shuffle us into different hallways, websites, telephone transfers, offices… we are transformed from one client into the next client, and our goals are often sidelined by the process we must endure to reach our goals. the only reprieve from this process must be immersive entertainment, new worlds that we can partake as fully as possibly… with their own logic and their own rules… to be fresh and enchanting, to allow new and better candies… which ironically, sublimates this model of rationalization… single player video games are the most obvious, since there’s a path (or paths), a storyframe the player must masochistically follow to reach the endline. like sade flogging our subjectivity into the perfect worthy superhero who only he can reach the end (and you must be he if you were there for this all). in baseball and other distractions, we have the model which is presented as a series of courses, time for the jumbotron, time for the commercial break, time for the cliffhanger at the end of the season… the better the structure is hidden, the better disney reminds us we aren’t standing in line for hours, the more immersive the experience, the more hidden the process, the more successful the distraction, the purer the aesthetic and the more separate that highpoint emotion is from everything else (to be repeated?).

so when stacking processes, the model of the individual as a free standing spiritual being has to give way to a multi-valent subjectivity… a raw nothingness that is waiting to be transformed into client, or employee, tracked along a series of rationalized tiers (level 1 admin, level 2 senior engineer, platinum card member)… on the producer side we have a series of machinic trees that eat employees and shuffle customers and product like blind jugglers. on the consumer side people are demographized into a crowd of impersonal hunger for particular experiences (a particular sporting team, snowboarding or surfing, the regular motley of a demographic of restaurant, a group tour)… very different from the very personal subjectivity of the “everyman” individual that nearly every main character written since tom jones was approaching the end of the 20th century… (this past naturalistic subjectivity was most visible in mary shelley’s frankenstien, a subjectivity in a non-subject body, the post-human frankenstien!)…

what we are doing is no longer a matter of self improvement, for there is nearly no self. we are regulated into narratives trapped in bodies, with too many properties to count! i am every kind of number to any institution. to find yourself, to look for that center that william wordsworth had when he wrote “Lines written a few miles above Tin Abbey” is impossible today. wordsworth could be whole writing as an upper class poet, lazying in the shade with his sister, but we can only be EAT PRAY LOVE, a series of disconnected, disjointed experiences that are marginalized by the objective processes that dominate our landscape of process oriented institutions., that package experience, package us so many slices of individually wrapped cheese. this post-self is an XML file, a tree crowded with attributes, children and nodes, namespaces needing to populated and defined, attributes that connect only to one or two situations… we are maps that defeat definition, maps that can be read from any dimension but are every shifting and changing in tenor dependent on vector, content and value. you could become any fan at any moment; soak in the media light and follow any event; you can jointly comment on yahoo news, or huffington post or reddit. thats because we are one piece. as individuals on the street we have no connection but our connection is deeper than occupying space. together we create a mindless, headless bastion moving godlessly and clumsily, an orgy of demographics, unified and unpredictable, gobbling up the planet, turning the earth inside out as we stack her guts along as highways, guardrails, airplanes, cell phones, and strip malls, event as we stack her guts on us as an exoskeleton of devices to extend ourselves in invisible social dimensions, to join as a single forge of entertainment and profit maximization.

each layer is different; at each step up the tree or across a branch, we have a different logic, a different department. vast stretches of sociality are the same; paper work, stamps, requisition and cross-benefit analysis, but many areas are radically different; and they may bump into one another like galaxies whose gravitational influence cross-congregate and (dis)assemble like rap and rock or 4chan and minecraft or the colbert report and highschool… but an interesting elucidation for another post.

so yes, this is what i went though while watching the baseball game. dodgers vs cubs. dodgers won, 6 to 1.

aesthetics for temporal cognition

June 13, 2012 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, note to self, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

have the nagging feeling that life is slipping me by even though i am productive, in the every day sense, that my actions have consequences for the ppl around me, even to people i have not met.

the sense that i do not have a life, that i do not matter, even though i kind of have a life and even without the sense of community nor with the closeknit friendships ive always had; i still go out several times a week.

this feeling must be based off the faulty illusion that we can “get it”, having achieved something, or experienced something, having it to keep forever. when in fact, even objects, which are the least objective of all, shift constantly, in imperceptible angles, adding up the way the butterfly wings kill entire weather patterns, though, the metaphor is more poetic than actual since complex systems can be expressed in tipping points graphically but not that is not equivalent to being instigated solely by such tiny singularities.

most of all though, what we have is memory. bergson in matter and memory hit the nail on the head — that ontology isnt so much about an experience but a hall of mirrors — experientially echoing in infinite recursion, each recall degrading in imperceptibly, adding up the way butterfly wings shift wind patterns, though, the insect is more poetic than aural, more whimsical than solid, more illusionary than alive… much like that cat of mr. schrodinger’s

i dont think my push to be alive!(tm) could be more actual, although it certainly could be more dramatic. there can’t be more hours in the day. and to be honest i kind of do hate going out. i also love to sleep. look forward to it throughout the day, only to stay up late at night like now.

one of the realisations that LSD gave emily dickinson was that the infinite singularity of the ALL could be found even in a closed space, in the non-all of her room in Amherst. yes, even in Amherst could butterfly wings penetrate walls, and having felt that insect from halfway around the world, she found she could witness it in all things. in the early church calls of the morning or the rocket symphony of a good and tender wine or the heavy walking beats of the bee gees. look at her poetry– YOU KNOW SHE SAW THE MARK OF BUTTERFLIES IN HYPHENS AND ELLIPSES TRAILING OFF THE PAGE IN RHAPSODIC SPLENDOR

so perhaps i need to get out more, or perhaps not. at this point, one life would interfere with another, and together they would not enrich one another. i think at this plateau, they offer the same experience, so i should just choose one and concentrate on that.

but they really dont —

i am mistaking syntagma for paradigms. it’s my mistake, and a common one. formal equivalence is not the same as ontological difference…. that difference being identity, and that kind of paradigmatic difference is what distinguishes a particular woman as soul mate rather than as just another stranger.

of course that’s the sadness about formal reductionisms, that classification at the level of meta promotes the illusion that we can be a soul mate to each and any, every and all– when in fact, to be soul mate is a completely different thing, from one soul to the next.

and of course, our human limitation will not allow us to swallow the whole ocean with our tiny little cups. in pouring more & more & MORE &MORE!, we lose what we have. that’s clear from chuang tzu, perhaps why emily stayed in her room, so as to not lose wings (even if she was only seeing her own pattern strewn across all her furniture and things).

so we seek butterflies out through formal equivalence, rather than gaining a unique deployment with each instance. perhaps this is a facet of a short-cut in cognition, to build patterns and build experience from within familiar patterns. yet we’ve each come across in ourselves and in others, a recognition that experience can be defined solely by patterns we see, when we rely on our syntagasms rather than on the uniqueness of each moment.

yet similiarly to grasp each moment as a uniqueness lends itself to another reductionism, that this can be grasped and is a thing to itself, like the last thing in itself… and this produces another syntagmasm, a meta map for experience that contains each and every, a freshness– so that we insist on finding a novelty in each moment, forcing a short sightedness. we forget to see the entire jet stream and only see butterflys flapping. not so bad, but then why walk with your head down, each foot swinging out. and walk into a pole? or wall? or another charles?

perhaps i am kidding myself. that there is a direction there, and that we can dictate how we surf. but if your walking feet don’t hypnotize then is it possible to see the moon as seperate from the finger pointing at it? bruce lee seemed to think so, and he had great balance though he did die young.

i am rejected, am rebuked, forced back, into the same position i was before, when i started writing this damned thing. yet now feels slightly different, degraded, altered, imperceptibly by me? by time? by metabolism? hallelujah! progress? or is this just another remix for the new year?

heidigger wrote that death encapsulates meaning, a life. that right before one died, when one was dying, then one could be most complete. and having an end point, knowing it’s lurking there, lets us wrap ourselves in meaning, and bring finality to what we do/did, a beauty that when standing on the hill, we can grasp, a beauty which might be lost if we lived for too many 10,000 years. perhaps making bruce a hero too, than if he passed on in bed, an old man filled with regret, living in the past.

so if he was right, with this “a life” we can have meaning, but meaning then, can only be individual, a prior-ity given to prioritize against all other possibilities, potentialities and signifieds… each and every, any and all vectors. that if individual then that precludes the possibility of universal meaning, even if meaning can be shared by the group, by societies, it cannot exist without “a life” and cannot persist without death. bruce’s fingering the moon is the moon to bruce, not to us. then how can the universe not end? how can it not be, unless its meaning was completely inhuman, beyond human and not-human ever at all?

which it obviously is, the way an ant colony understands one things, and ice cubes grasp another, completely foreign actualization.

that we should ride, like a gigantic purple moon over a crazy ocean made of foaming milk and styrofoam, that walt witman with his opium face should preside over an archway of marble halls in deafening revolution be how we find our place — like a daisy on a battlefield — this is spectacular, and betrays our ant colony mentality. but perhaps this is not a weakness at all; that our heads should be bowed when walking. but a strength, a persistence, that happiness is good health and a bad memory, so said the famous addict ingrid bergman, in her shadowy eyes — that one of the so called greatest movies could be just a torrid affair between an older man and a younger woman. that there isnt anything sublime about love, or our role in society, our conflict with the iron will of others…. like a badly painted wall we thinly veil our intentions and let our patterns tell us how to feel.

and can we hope or fear that and each passing moment might penetrate our blindless like a strangely seen roman empire superimposed on los angeles so tormenting horselover fat because only he can step out of that pattern and witness pinkly winking lights, children who fortell of the future, living among tapes, wires, and recorders and dying before the end of the world to the horror of those who hang onto prophecy but freeing us for perspicacity of having a second chance, that death is each moment and in our grasp a creation for each, that even when we hang onto a crystal ball, then can we desire its silence to free us from delphi, free us from expectations, from our patterns, from ourselves…

capitalism as tourism

May 1, 2012 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, note to self, Theory / No Comments

there’s something to be said about people who, for whatever reason, have the basic necessities taken care of. i, of course, am one of those people. it’s doubtful that i will ever starve. i’m not rich, but i do have a cushion, of sorts. and there are plenty of people who are like, in a way. i don’t mean the very rich, or trust-fund babies, or young people with great careers. i also mean people who live off their parents and do nothing for themselves, who may be highly intelligent or even well educated, but for whom life is one big video game fest. or whatever.

this problem, if it is in fact one, has been around for ages, for as long as there have been wealthy or bourgeois. but with capitalism it’s even more pronounced. when you consider that most of us being human, have the same taste, for bacon or fatty foods, or good beverage… most of people in the sum of human history have struggled for the basic necessity — never getting to taste oyster. it’s hard to get oyster. so unless you have a connection to someone, or you yourself have that skill, you’ll never get to experience it. much like a good piano performance or whatever. but with capitalism you can be better than most people at something completely useless. like bean counting. and with the right business structure, you can fit into a machine that needs expert bean counting. so now you have a job. and with money, you can transform your better than average, otherwise useless skill into something extraordinary. now you can have all the oysters you want. or all the beautiful music you have no skill to play.

this video, the above video is kind of the opposite. but it fits too; heres someone who can become more of an expert at something relatively useless. if he had to get a job, it might be getting bird’s nests… or living in the arctic to climb cliffwalls to get bird’s eggs to feed his family. but it’s not even that. with the market place you can indulge in whatever desire you want, and really hone in and focus on it.

i think there is a dialectic in development, that prevails across anything that requires skill. like darts, or chess or horseback riding… playing the tuba. it’s like how children find a picture awesome, because they’ve never seen something so shiney before. but when they get older, shiney doesn’t so much matter. it’s now about composition or mass. if you can get enough taste, you begin to appreciate tension in a picture, something that is off balance, that was before, a little disturbing because it’s not perfect. eventually what is art isn’t the topographically ideal symmetry (all buildings are cubes), but buildings which suggest that ideal symmetry without being it, and then buildings which exaggerate that function to the point at which it almost doesn’t work — but they pull it off.

its alot like the marquis de sade with his art — you can worship the ideal body like some marble heart, you can flail a body until it is really just a body and becomes the marble heart — you can stretch the body so it hangs on a thread of life, and in turn stretch that consciousness until it’s a pure consciousness on its own horizon. i mean, what is what you love isn’t it, when you meet someone, when you two are together on your own horizon.

i guess there’s no accounting for taste. but it happens so many different ways in so many different directions. especially when it comes down to connoisseurship. when the art becomes central, and everything else wraps around it. that central disharmony is an elevation of a gradient so that all the white beads are to one side of a membrane that holds them there. against entropy. i suppose when smoking a cigar, there’s a way to do it without burning too much. or drinking your manhattan, there’s a balance of bourbon to vermouth depending on the specific flavors (i like wild turkey 101, so that’s difficult to balance). addiction is the finest of gradients, the centralisation of specific disharmony. i guess this rock climber needs to collect his off beats, so he can dispel them in a fury of climbing.

that kind of collection is on the one hand, admirable. the attitude he speaks of, of going at it with positive energy day to day… to do the task. that’s life isn’t it? what architect or designer or film director or chef or even waitress or file clerk or call center rep can’t relate to that?

but having conquered one climb and celebrating before going to the next — that’s a token given right to chess puzzles, to sheet music, to composition of novels, to picking up girls, to fucking video games. and no one admires an obsessive video game player. is there an art to fiddling with controls? yes. it’s not easy and in the old 4 bit or even 8 bit games, there’s a finesse of skill in timing and execution that you don’t often get in today’s intensive graphics shooters.

but even having gone there, what about the mindless action of early 8-bit textured 3D rendered 2D worlds, like DOOM?

but everyone constructs their own horizon. we all have our own values and hooks and traves. we make our own house with our own definitions, and store our own fancies. character, which many of us have at least, topographically, is the result of internal and external strife. literally — we are like stars. stars want to explode because of fusion, but also want to implode because of gravity. our character is the boiling of our surface due to external and internal stimuli. character is how we deal with our blindspots, how we deal with our intensities. those of us who harness our own specific intensities and sculpt our own obsessions still have our own horizon — but it becomes more obviously focused. raymond roussel wrote locus solus in the same byzantine labyrinthian excess as the marquis de sade wrote justine or 100 days of sodomy. only rather than a crass sexual game, we have a objectification, raised to the meta. a garden of disharmony built on cultural excess. think of samuel beckett as the super-james joyce — the pulling through of narrative as a THING, to sculpt out that ill-defined kernel called narrative and make it into its own living and breathing surface. i am speaking of the indulgencies of post-industrial capitalism each expressed as a film, a genre, a brand name. each with its own internal world brand, which is disconnected from the last. schizophrenia with deleuze and guattari is a conceptualized way of noting half worlds in disconnect, interacting with a multi-valience of bursting out logics. this is that schizophrenia, but even more so, an eating of its own internal excess to be an excess. the lacanian moebius strip best explains how the inside is also the outside — and so with this caterpillaring of self as a climber, or as any connoisseur we have the bending of fundamental distopias into a collective consciousness called self. neurotic and bundled as a person, we don’t seek to become at peace in the utopian hippie sense, one with the world, but we seek to be consumers, one with our digestion.

ultimately though, the need to digest different kinds of ornate-tacies is limited to forms which fit our central disharmony. he seeks a new climb which he can then chew on with his fingers and does, his weight as he swings the planet around his gravitational center. i am the center of the world. as a financial otaku one’s digestive system collects financial tools as unique shapes in the cilia, embedded in several stomaches, as monies that imprint shadows in the interior lining as options or leverages. its at the bar that you pick your poison and at the university with a list of colleges that you do the same.

in difference and repetition deleuze highlights how thought is another form of metabolism. flowers contemplate the variance of sunlight with their circadianisms as consumers in supermarkets contemplate products with their digestion and their social affluences.

in the end though, you might as well travel to japan to experience their politeness and their ramen, or go to arches national park in utah for their red rock formations. try shabu shabu in taiwan with real pork blood, you know the kind actual taiwanese eat, with their native mushrooms. or sit at a fancy whiskey bar trying different scotches from the thousands of islands and peninsula that decorate the topography of scotland. look at different rothkos in a book, or read balzac and then compare him voltaire or proust. be an arm chair traveller, watch andrew zimmern eat things from other parts of the world. you’re still tasting exotic landscapes. you’re still sampling different pussies — different only through age, and diet, and something that can only be individual. funny how when you think of phallic signifiers, pussy becomes another cock. we’re all sticking things in our mouths and contemplating, sniffing, seeing.

in the end though, all this excess. all this sightseeing, all this sniffling of new butts. just try it, and leave, feeling like somehow the journey has changed you. you are 1up on the dialectical ladder, one more climb richer. one more scotch wiser. and you get that, on your own horizon, you stamp another sopwith camel on the side of your red tri-fokker. when really, you’re just feeling things out with your intestines, tasting exotic packaged sausages and ultimately making exotic shits. wearing our your digestive system for the brief blaze of your lifetime, that much more knowledgable about the wall papers youve landed on. so it becomes a thing you can show off about on twitter or vimeo.

spend 20 years traveling all across italy for the different wineries.

don’t fool yourself. truth is, you’re just another tourist. only because you don’t wear mickey mouse hats and snapshots of tall skyscrappers, you carry some dignity with you, like some neo-electronica hippie. so much wiser for living now than thirty decades ago. crowd in all the hotspots you saw on yelp and make a nice collection of shot glasses.

nothing worst than a tourist than an enlightened tourist.

on ‘letting your meat decide’

September 3, 2011 / posted in manifesto, note to self / No Comments

finding meaning is a horrible thing to do.

better recommended is lapping after things like a dog, gottadododo have have have, reacting to things, barking madly or jumping after something just because you feel like it.

everyone looks for meaning in some way, as it can be awful oppressive not to have meaning. meaning gives direction. so any direction will do. but direction is there for just part of you.

meaning is the justification for us to do the things we want to do anyway, and then feel good about it.

actively looking for meaning is much like saying there isnt anything good in what’s directly in front of me.

“in order for me to accept it(the thing in front of me) i need to turn it into something else,” that’s what looking for meaning in things does.

How I am ME(aningless).

April 11, 2011 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, universal nothing / No Comments

I have been called a nihilist before.

That might be true, depending on your point of view. Personally, I don’t think it’s a meaningful description… so while most of what I write on here is ‘the big picture’ to the point where people do not exist, I am writing here now to bring it back to where I stand in all this.

Metaphysically, I also subscribe to the notion of a metaphysical void in which we cannot know or even begin to organize ‘what is out there’. Furthermore, unlike many human beings I do not believe that what I do is important to the universe. I don’t think that my life matters to the universe, nor that human beings as a whole matter. I also don’t think that the ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ that I have in my head has any bearing whatsoever on any kind of universal synthesis. Sure, I hold political views, I have a sense of morals and justice, but in the face of the cosmos that’s quite irrelevant.

So you might take it that I don’t mistake my/our human existence to have any meaning per se. We are as it were, mostly observers, often participants but following no script. I do not make the mistake of mistaking my sense for any kind of cosmological signification — in the sense of metaphor, truth, ruling, principle, or universality.

I had been told a Mormon who was a very good friend at the time that this kind of world-view was untenable, depressing and burdensome. I do after all, believe in taking responsibility for my actions… even their unintended consequences as much as possible. But in as much as I rely on me, I also rely on the others around me. Family, friends, society at large… we are all in this together and if things are too much; no problem. We can take it one moment at a time. It’s just that there’s no going back… for anything.

So what keeps me going? (one moment at a time…) As a personal note I believe that what I do makes the world a better place. (You can read all about how we help businesses comply with the requirements for disability access.) I also believe in social entrepreneurship — and I strongly believe that government should support people, rather than being a tool used for profit. I believe in supporting those who I love and cherish — although this isn’t without its conditions — I expect people around me to also try to be good and upstanding people as well (perhaps a bit old fashioned but whatever). I also believe in fair dealings and trying to be honest and open about as much as possible.

In my daily routines, what keeps me going is the accumulation of meaningful activity, either through successful business dealings (in which businesses and institutions believe in our corporate vision) or through my own personal growth. I seek to understand more of how to navigate the universal void around me — even through there are no steady foundations as to what is truth.

Yes, there is meaning in my life. I live a very meaningful life. I believe in love, and helping and doing good, although how each of these plays out is particular to me. (I don’t think people love, or help, or do good in the same ways.)

So in case you can’t tell, yes, I am relatively young — a part of the first generation in the history of humankind to be part of a decentralized and mobile work force. We can still get jobs in huge corporations but more than ever while regulations on business have been steadily raised in the last 20 years to a dizzying point — the barriers to entry on services and marketing have been steadily eroded.

So this in part may explain where I stand. I’m terribly introspective for a young 30 something. But I also don’t have a huge cloud over me telling me to get married, buy a house, or how to work in my everyday life. Well, yes I do, but I also have enough freedom to make my own way. This in part, explains a huge part of who I am and why I am philosophically; the two mutually support one another. I’m not a junior adjunct professor with a set semesterly schedule dreaming of being a bigshot in any kind of social circle. But I’m also not a junior C.P.A. wanting to decide the future of… whatever junior C.P.A.s dream of. My future is quite uncertain as is the company I am helping build.

I am meaningless. Open. The biggest weights on me are taxes, monthly bills and my own lack of knowledge or confidence.

I suppose in part, this is what it’s like to be young. To feel like I can do the things I set out to do, and to feel as though I can rely on nothing but myself.

Quite an exciting time to be alive.

rule #1 of business (and life)

March 8, 2011 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, rules / No Comments

Do not try to change people’s behaviors.

(Don’t base your business or inter-personal relationships on trying to get people to change).

Meaning in the Face of Annihilation

February 22, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, universal nothing / No Comments

A few days ago, I was showing houses to an old friend who is now a client. It was raining and we had passed by a smaller duplex. The pictures on the MLS aren’t the same as seeing the context of the property with your own eyes. After seeing it, he decided he didn’t want to gos in and disturb the people in there. There are better deals around. We were talking about life in general — catching up as it were — since we hadn’t really talked in a long time. In showing houses, you inevitably turn towards the topic of the future. Let’s call this future-talk.

Future-talk is odd, it’s not often grounded in the present even though we talk about the future by way of the things we do during the present. But sometimes it is, and you can see that doesn’t just contain hopes and dreams that people have for the future. The future often also contains a justification of the present (current actions, current statuses &c). The present then, acts like a bridge that links the past and the future… even though it’s really disjunct (the present belongs to neither past nor future). And yet, looking for a home does this past-present-future connection quite well. People who want to buy a home, who have money are serious. It’s not chump change to drop close to half a million… It’s something to want a place to call your own, to START A FAMILY

What people want in a home is about as important as who they are, and what their priorities are. Buying a house, even as an investment, represents a whole-lotta-commitment, (in a Led Zeppelin kind of way) and as old friends we were genuinely interested in what the other was doing. This is the best kind of relationship building anyway, and the best sales people do it well. They are interested and understand their client — at least they can appear to be to the client. And that’s what’s important, to orient yourself. Not just what the inside of the house looks like (which is where most of us see the house anyway)… but also the outside, the kind of neighborhood, the people, the schools, the local businesses, if we can see our parents coming over (or not), or friends… in American Literature, the home is a very important character. It’s kind of like the over-shadow, even if the home is also the town… where someone runs from, or runs to… And in that way it acts much like how God acts for people’s lives. It orients them, it becomes an attractor (or repellent)…

So fast forward a bunch of particulars, when we got back into my car, he asked me if I believed in God.

Now I don’t know what he thinks, and I didn’t ask — but I told him, yes I believe I do. Although if most people ask me if I do, I usually say No because if I say Yes, then I appear to be very misleading. The fact is, what I am thinking of in my head probably in no way resembles what they are thinking of when they mention God..

This needs elaboration so I said very directly, I don’t really believe in the supremacy of a particular entity, per se, at least not one that is separate or dis-contiguous from everything else. I also don’t believe that I am (or that human beings are) central to the workings of the universe or that my actions (or that human actions) have any centrality to what’s actually going on. The universe is indifferent.

My friend then said, Yes, that’s really not in agreement with most people.

I also added I don’t believe that the meaning in my head has any bearing whatsoever on the universe at all. Meaning makes no difference to anyone except myself and vis versa.

A good short article on the uncentrality of Das Sein can be read by Paul Graham. He wrote an essay called See Randomness. I realize now, after I’ve put it in here, that the article itself exists in a vacuum much unlike future-talk and houses but very much like the present. In other words, this article does not attempt to bridge any kind of relationship with a point of view that we are in fact central to the universe, or that the meaning we take for granted is inscripted in the very core of the universe. Rather Graham argues for consideration of alternate understandings of events. He grounds his appeal for personal distance on an evolutionary foundation — that our ‘identity’ of a cohesive, rational self is an indeterminate fiction — that we should not take central our own needs and desires when orienting the ‘meaning’ of the things that happen around us. He would agree with me then, that meaning is the way each of us navigates what would otherwise be ‘randomness’. This meaning is not a universal principle in which our suffering or joy has any bearing in the cogs of the cosmic machine. Our suffering or joy is, rather neutral, much like how chemical reactions are neutral.

Gilles Deleuze in Practical Philosophy wrote very elegantly on this topic. I read his book twice to understand how he dismantles notions of ontology and instead recombines (and yet includes them) from a ground floor up so that they retain their parts, their sums, essences, attributions and conjugations. The first reading only served to confuse me, as the orientation wasn’t around a metaphyics of presence even while he preserves ‘essence’ as a central mode of anchoring meaning. The difference lies in the supposition that essence is constructed as “a relation of reciprocity” even while “Essence — Necessarily constitutes the essence of a thing …, a thing can neither be nor be conceived without, and vise versa, what can neither be conceived without the thing” (64). See how Deleuze has his cake and eats it too? Essence is the thing and the thing, essence. Likewise, what overrides the interactions of what we would understand both in a physical and a mental way is abstracted as a neturality of the interplay of relations — the exposition of Spinozan Ethics — without consciousness as being at all primary. In fact, it’s closer to epiphenomenalism if anything, although what Deleuze does does not push a metaphysics of presence of anything, nor does it sustain that heavy mutuality of dualism…

When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. This is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature. But as conscious beings, we ever apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence. [. . .] In short, the conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemn us to have only inadequate ideas, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated from their real causes. That is why it is scarcely possible to think that little children are happy, or that the first man was perfect: ignorant of causes and natures, reduced to the consciousness of events, condemned to undergo effects, they are slaves of everything, anxious and unhappy, in proportion to their imperfection. (19)

I believe that to most people who would orient themselves (or at least humanity) in the universe, and understand that there is an intrinsic place for them, for an I to wait and stand in luxury, as the children of the universe — either in this life or the next. I suspect that many of us feel (even if we know otherwise) that we are some how important — or that we are somehow deserving of all good things. So many of us, after Deleuze’s reading may feel that this point of view is horrible burden. Without that grounding of I or even God, there is no reason for anyone to behave or be good. Without God, many would insist that we get ultimate freedom but you also get ultimate responsibility. The universe won’t take care to preserve you, or transmogrify you based on karma… It is as though, without a direct core to the center of the universe, we should all eat each other and be terrified that others can do to us as they will.

Many thinkers and writers have written that exposure to the Scared Other, Big Other, the Eagle are all terrifying experiences that would destroy small others like ourselves. To experience God, as it were, is to become annihilated. I don’t believe this to be the case though. Yitz Jacob who ponders the mystic musings in the Jewish tradition has a particularly applicable story here about one’s relation with the Sacred Other on Heaven and on Earth. The point of the story then, I think, has to do with being able to relate to HaShem, which is easy in Heaven but not so much on Earth. While being stifled on a “Heaven that sees all” makes much sense to me, the radical view that our essentiality is not at all cohesive (that we disintegrate) when faced with the Cohesion of the Almighty jumps too far. Now, Jacob does not claim we disintegrate in his blog post, but he does note that when in Heaven, everything is visible — by this, I took it to mean that HaShem is visible too. And if God is apparent then it also becomes very apparent what we should do. This doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t exist in Heaven, but it does mean that we lose our free will.

I am not so sure that is the case. After all, should not the Cohesion of the Almighty must in fact include the cohesion of all our little partial essentialities as well? So it’s not so much that without God we get everything. Rather, it’s with God that everything is allowed.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov explores this topic through Ivan Karamazov — this is related to Ivan’s struggle. The brunt of it is that only with God can we have anything — only with God is everything allowed. The naked weight is that God is necessary — He does define for us what is allowed, but only because without God we would be an indistinguishable mass from everything else. Ivan, ever so rational, insists on the sheer the perversity of human beings that the Devil is made from Man’s image even though a God may or may not exist. I don’t know who Dostoevsky found inspirational enough to create a character like Ivan from, but I do feel that Ivan is under-developed. Ivan’s main source of torture is that he isn’t sure if there is a God or not — he seems to think there isn’t actually a God because of the vast cruelties that people play on one another — because bad people get away with so much! Ivan is getting two things confused though. Ivan continues to serve in a religious institution, so not believing in God is a terrible burden for him. Nonetheless Ivan sees the reasoning for expressing a belief in God — unity and singularity in the physical sense, not withstanding, but also for human society. People need God. People need to be put into their place — his poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ uses the tools of the Devil to do the work of God. And it’s through the Devil that the goodness of God can become apparent… that we then can see that we do have a choice. God becomes then, a field that anchors it all, Devil, God, everything. This field contains everything actual and anything possible — while containing an inscripted navigation as to what is good and right for people.

So to go back to Deleuze, what is right and good for people as a society is what mutually increases their power — what allows them to coexist in harmony. It is of no small coincidence then, that this relationship is much like the Cohesion of the Almighty. On the one hand, the big picture is necessary — for us to be one, but to ride upon the Law and live it to its fullest extent would force us to lose our ability to have freedom. To use Jacob’s parable, the Earth is curved so we can’t tell what’s all around us — so we can do what we like, in a limited scope — even if it is to make mistakes. It’s only in the firmament where we can see all around, and experience the full blunt of it. Keeping the big picture in mind is difficult — as material creatures we are made to get what we can now, enjoy ourselves and satisfy immediate urges. Why wait? We don’t know what will happen to us next! So we end up with conflicting behavior that satisfies one aspect of our person but not another or we short ourselves in the long run for short term gain… and where does meaning fit into this?

Meaning fits into everything as the justifications, explanations, short-circuits in our daily lives that smoothen over the otherwise random assortment of information that would bombard us, distract us, vex us or otherwise provoke perhaps too much uncertainty in our lives. If we were terribly uncertain, it’s doubtful we would ever have children, or ever buy a house, or ever do anything. If we didn’t think we could finish what we wanted to do then most of us would probably never do it. I believe meaning is the tactical moves that assure us coherency in our personal internal lives.

In other words, meaning isn’t the inner workings of physics or math, or biology. The knowledge of science explores actual relations, insofar as we can test them. But that’s not meaningful. Rocks are not meaningful. Plants are not meaningful. Being alive is not meaningful. Being alive is biological. Evolution is not meaningful. The movie A Serious Man, one of my favorite movies, explores this issue. Larry Gopnik understands the math that he teaches in his class but he does not understand the story behind Schrödinger’s cat. He is always caught up in a series of diversions, wondering what the ‘truth’ behind any event is. Knowing or not knowing the truth is not important — the Coen brothers continually sink us into ambiguity, delay our reception of what anyone actually means or the actual intent of any character’s action. Gopnik then gets caught up in how that ‘truth’ of anything is both hidden and not at all meaningful. He can’t ever decide what he wants because he thinks he needs to know ‘what the intent of everything’ must be before he can figure out what he should want. It drives him to the brink, where he comes speechless, and only stares ahead.

This is very much the serious philosopher’s problem is. We think that the universe should somehow have a place for us, that what we want should somehow be apparent to us, written for us in the stars, in our surroundings, in life. We may come some day to understand how life works, how to stop death, how to create beauty and art — these things may become possible through science. But that kind of knowledge isn’t meaningful because it won’t tell us how to live or deal with all things personal.

This means then, that meaning is not universal. Meaningfulness is for US… each of us… independent of one another. It makes sense then, that our mental worlds are coexistent but also incompossible — that a gull of incommensurable, indefinite and indeterminate difference separates one mind from another … and that we aren’t privy to one another’s minds… even if we are all ‘made the same way’. We aren’t made to read each other’s minds. It would be bad for us if everyone else could read our mind… because we would be manipulated and abused. Our individual survival would be uncertain… yet ironically, as humans we are incredibly social and we DO need each other. Together we are strong. Under an Almighty, we are all the more Mighty. As a society, we do need those ‘universal’ inscriptions that having a God would define for us. It’s just that, while there is always a Big Other in any human culture who judges each of us small others (even if it is a reciprocity such as the Asian notion of ‘face’) only the Judeo-Christian-Islam traditions so directly gave Him a Voice, or should I say, the Word. And it seems that traditions in this tradition, such as Protestants, so individuated this Word so that it wasn’t a complex system like Confucianism or the Hindi-castes, but rather it was tied to a single soul, for each of us, waiting for us to become ripe, to gain awareness of it.

And that’s where I can’t follow. Personally, that’s too much like a road written in the firmament (although to some it isn’t…). To project such a path seems to me to prompt a kind of Lacanian hysteria — much like Star Trek — we would zip around the universe looking for something but not knowing what. On the one hand then, Protestants, especially Puritans, have a very dour outlook. They are serious. And now, we get to the most deadly of future-talks. After all, everything, all responsibility for their own relationship with God rests on their shoulders. What about their past? Their present? Their future? It’s all written in the sky. Without that relationship with God, there can only be nothing. But now that I wrote this, I don’t think that responsibility rests only with Puritans… In any group, understanding how responsibility is divided is important; be it on an individual, a family or a collective of some sort, any group needs its members to be responsive in a way that is coherent. I suppose though, by separating any kind of Word from meaning means I am writing this entry as a philosophical dead-end. There is neither impetus nor universal appeal because this kind of meaning is too individual. (It is, after all, one philosopher can hardly talk to another!) Nonetheless, what I have put here works for me (at least now)… although it is written mostly as a universal statement about human kind.

Perhaps ironically, as such a ‘universal’ statement, it must encapsulate an unnavigable void and include other minds… even though this statement most likely, is not meaningful for you.

Yet at the same time, it becomes a very special thing, when a home speaks to you about your future.

What ever happened to Deleuze?

January 20, 2011 / posted in note to self / No Comments

The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with Kant’s thoughts on things.

This is a little disappointing to me…

On Effort and Success

January 12, 2011 / posted in Business, note to self / 2 Comments

Under some small convincing (and it was small) a dear friend of mine convinced me that I should email Ramit Sethi and see if he could not help me with my 2011 new years goals.

To set the record straight, I don’t have resolutions. Resolutions are stupid. Resolutions have the unspoken implication that we have been doing something wrong all along and that we need to reform. Sometimes in majorly dramatic ways. And human beings are not that great at suddenly changing habits. Habits are what make us who we are; since we can’t think or react to everything with our full attention. Habits are what allow a virtuoso pianist to excel with seemingly impossible pieces but it’s also what causes any other pianist to fail (the hundreds and thousands of times they try to tackle that same piece).

Plus the majority of resolutions are vague. Vagueness does not lend itself to developing a plan or a metric on how to achieve something. And the achieving of that something is what we want to do. So be concrete and have a plan.

So instead of resolutions I have goals. Goals are great. I do have them. One of them is to get out of debt. I am in debt because 2010 has been a bad year for me, financially. I spent too much money trying to patch a dying relationship, for much of 2010 and while I was doing that I also neglected my work and my business. As a result I didn’t exactly make very much. In theory I should have even still, made out okay, but like I said I spent too much. And it’s not like the money is the issue; it’s what I did with the money… trying to find new things for us to do together… But more on that some other time.

Back to Ramit Sethi. In case you don’t know who he is, he is you should check this out: Ramit Sethi I haven’t read all of his things or perused the amazing amount of content online surrounding him but I have a great deal of respect for what he’s done. Since he asked for each of us to include as much detail as possible, I took about two hours in the course of working on other things at work to craft a careful email. I tried not to include too much detail. But since the business I have is a particularly odd one, I felt I needed to explain some of the background involved. If he gave a suggestion that I had already tried that would be useless. So I tried to give as much detail as I thought he might need.

I had an idea of what he would say though. So I have included the dialogue below.

In case you are wondering, I’ve given much thought about whether to post or not…. I decided why not. It’s not offensive. And there’s something to be learned from it. I could learn from this. So here goes:

I said:

Hello Ramit,

My cousin, who reads your blog, has convinced me to write this email and explore this opportunity. First off, just a little background — I have read and enjoyed your book I Will Teach You to be Rich and I have watched quite a few of your videos on youtube. I find what you have to say to be interesting and I have an idea of what you might say in response to this email — but of course I have no idea what you will actually say.

I would like to sign up for your earn1k.com but I do not have 1k as I am currently in debt due to trying to finance a failed relationship. I am attempting to get my personal finances in order but as of yet have not made enough to get out of debt.

The biggest goal I have for 2011 involves a company I run with a partner of mine called Yours Truly Accessibility. We would like for this company to be profitable. My goal for 2011 is to get YTA into the green. Currently it is in the red (because of taxes) but was in the black for much of 2010. If anything, we need to work on our marketing. Can you give some suggestions as to what we should or should not look further into? But before you can address that, I think I need to give you some background on our unique company.

Company Background
This is a small company that offers consultation to businesses for compliance with State and Federal laws for disability access. Basically any place that is open to the public and accepts public funds needs to comply otherwise they could be sued for an act of discrimination under the Federal and California Civil Code. With this comes a maximum of $4,000.00 of damages per instance. Given the complexity of the California Building Code (CBC) and the Federal Civil Code (Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 and 2010, Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines 2004, Architectural Barriers Act 1968, and so on) businesses need experienced professionals who are experts in this very narrow field in order to successfully navigate these compliance laws. Most businesses, and architects do not realize this until they are sued. Overwhelmingly architects will claim they don’t need us because they are already experts. But they do need us, and in conversation I can catch many of them saying things that are just untrue. I don’t want to offend any of them, but it seems that their license gets in the way of their ability to acknowledge what they do or do not know. Attorneys, of course, love us.

Without getting too detailed, there are several external factors that structure our niche:
Neither the legal profession nor the construction and design industry covers this field. The CBC is under the purview of architects and contractors but they know nothing about the Civil Code. The California Civil Code and the Federal Civil Code are legal areas but the determination of compliance is measured in the building code, something attorneys know nothing about.
Local enforcement agencies like the county and city building department are state entities and do not have jurisdiction or responsibility to enforce Federal Civil Code. At various points the CBC portion of access conflicts with the ADA.
While this area is beginning to become more noticed by many struggling architects and contractors, they still lack the experience — the many years and thousands of sites that I have inspected, consulted in and been an expert witness for. Most of this experience was done under a different company, so I do not have working relations with those schools, cities and businesses.

Marketing
I think this is enough background here. We do have working relations with a Disabled Rights Non-profit but our main marketing approach is to network with the existing business community through local Chambers of Commerce and bar associations. Our greatest sources for referrals are attorneys. In order to be a better resource for attorneys and businesses, we started to give MCLE seminars and free informative ADA seminars to Chambers of Commerce starting in 2009. We also have maintained a blog on accessibility and have done some youtube videos in which we give out general tips.

We have had some success through these avenues, it takes such a long time to contact the people in charge and have them host it. We don’t want to host the seminar ourselves because of the cost involved. Going through existing organizations with existing members would guarantee us a better turn-out.

As of yet, there isn’t much competition as most businesses do not know that we even exist. Most businesses are apathetic unless the business owners become frightened of being sued or are already sued. Ideally, we would like businesses to hire us before they are sued as after they are sued they still need to hire us anyway (and pay for the lawsuit and/or the settlement). I don’t think the goal to becoming profitable is to charge more. If we were busy that would be fine, but as it is, businesses are not forthcoming because accessibility is viewed as damage control. Providing access is important but it’s not urgent. Many businesses take the unethical attitude that “yes, we are not in compliance but we are going to wait to be sued before we do anything.” Furthermore, small businesses have very tight margins. They require a great deal of time and hand-holding. I would rather not run a company where we do work once and then forgo future service, but I also don’t want the mom and pop shops to keep calling about every little issue several months after we’ve done work for them. Perhaps we need to find a third purely marketing individual?

What we have started to do this year was to call every single Chamber of Commerce we could find, and offer them a free ADA seminar to be set at a date of their choosing for 2011. As this is a recent endeavor, we have yet to see how well Chambers respond. At first talk, most Chambers seem apathetic. A few Chambers are angry and don’t want our help. The Chambers most eager for us to give a talk to their members are ones in which many of their members have been sued. If Chambers host us for a talk, they will inevitably look better to their members (as trying to help)… and it’s not like they can turn to anyone else to speak, as there isn’t anyone else in Los Angeles that can offer the level of expertise that we do. I do intend to aggressively follow up with every Chamber until they give me a resounding “NO”. Beyond performing public speaking engagements and following up with the Chambers which would like for us to help them, is there any other kind of avenue that you think we should be pursuing?

I realize this is fairly long — but I did want it to be brief. There are some long term goals we want to implement and are in the process of implementing but those are at least a year or half a year off. In the meanwhile, short term survival is really very important. Should you need any more information, please let me know.

I thank you for your time and your open invitation.
Looking forward to your correspondence

Best Regards

—
Alex Lee

His reply was almost instantaneous. I drove home and when I got home he had already replied. He said:

Sorry, this is really long. Do you have 1 question for me?

I had a sinking feeling, but thought I should do as he said. (After all, it is insanely long). I said:

How can I market our inspections to businesses better?

He replied with:

i cover this in my Earn1k course (earn1k.com)

you can also get jay abraham’s book, getting more out of all you’ve got

All in all, a disappointing exchange. Maybe he’s swamped with emails, I can get that. And I see what he’s doing. By asking for questions he’s doing research on his readership. He’s taking notes on where he can help the most people, and find out how to satisfy his readers. That’s cool, but in answering him, I gave him a genuine response that took a bit of effort. Or maybe I misunderstood his request for a question and asked the wrong kind of question.

Now, I understand you can’t get anything for free but here is the deal: He’s done plenty of work building up his clientile, his readership. He’s put in hours and hours of thought. He’s helped plenty of people. He’s been on TV. I’m sure he must feel that he has plenty of cred. I mean, credit. He’s built up his reputation. But in asking for 1k he’s changed the nature of the game. Asking for $10 for a book is one thing, but 1k is alot of money. If anything he should value my 1k more than I do, which means giving a little bit more to earn that trust so that I part with it. If he feels that he’s earned it, then well, from this entry it’s obvious that he hasn’t earned it from me (although I am sure he’s earned it may times over for other people).

After all, I have no idea what his earn1k program would do or if it’s scammy. It feels scammy. But I am not willing to take that risk at all. Now I am even less willing to take it.

I do wish him well, and he is young and smart. I am sure if the earn1k program doesn’t take off, he’ll find some way to recover. But conversely I do have a feeling it will take off… though there are no secrets to success. Just mindfulness and hardwork.

A different good friend of mine made the observation ‘ppl don’t win the lottery twice. people seem to think that if they got it once that they can easily get it again.’ Now of course Ramit has worked hard for what he’s got. He’s put in ALOT of man hours. But a large part of that involves meeting the right people, talking and learning from the right people, and learning the right lessons at the right time. You can be sure that for ever Ramit Sethi who is a successful blogger and writer there are tons more who work just as hard but don’t have nearly the same success for whatever reason. It may be time and place, it may be the influence of those around them. It may be them. Who knows, if we knew what the secret of success is, we would all be successful.

I understand the concept of success relies strongly on the concept of failure. (But not necessarily)… And those are all just concepts. Is it possible for everyone to be successful? In theory yes. Ramit in his book I Teach You to be Rich defines success not as money but as being able to do what you love. Part of that means allocating your resources (time and money) to the things that you love and not to the things that you don’t… but also to pay good attention to set up structures and habits for the things you don’t love so you can maintain those necessary ‘boring activities’ going (my words not necessarily his) so that we can continue to maintain our relative lifestyles.

I agree whole heartedly with that. I also liked his book so much I bought two copies and gave both out as Christmas presents for the end of 2010.

So that’s it. I am up to 1033 words at the time of this writing (atleast in this edit), and still going. And no, this is my blog ‘space’ and I will ramble as much as I like. Should I narrow this post down to one sentence?

NEVER TAKE YOUR SUCCESS AS A SIGN THAT YOU’VE MADE IT. DON’T COMPROMISE, PUT FORTH YOUR BEST EFFORT, AS ALWAYS.

The game changes with each plateau we hit, and the hill gets steeper. We have to build on our past success not ride on it. Anyway, this entry is mainly for my own notes. I am sure that I will need to be reminded over and over of the above, as time goes on… Unfortunately, sometimes when we (as individuals and as a people) get that taste of blissful happiness, we can forget to be our good selves and just get plain fucking stupid, and greedy. All relationships included, even the ones we don’t have.

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