Josh Haas's Web Log

I don’t want to write a journal here, but I alo can’t completely divorce my opinions from who I am. Most of what people say and think is bullshit derived from the imperative to protect their identity, and I’m no different. Context on what that identity is lets you see a thought for what it’s worth, or isn’t, as the case may be. So here’s an update on what I’m up to.

My short term goal is to launch KeywordSmart with my partner Jody: it’s a software product for people who need to keyword (ie, tag) images in order to make them searchable. The target demographic for this is, for the most part, professional photographers who sell their images on stock photo sites. We want to launch this product and build it into a company, and see where it goes: we know there’s a pain point that needs solving, and we have something in mind to solve it, and at the end of the day, that’s what a business is, so we’re going to try it and see what happens.

Longer term, what I want to do is write, specifically a book on philosophy and values. My thesis is that people are humans — special, worthy of praise, etc. whatever — insofar as they see themselves as responsible for who they are and how they react to the world around them. I believe that this thought — “I am responsible” — is a self-fulfilling prophecy: insofar as you don’t believe it, your actions are explainable in terms of external forces such as your heredity and environment; insofar as you do believe it, you become capable of increasingly spontaneous action, transcendent behavior that seems to defy explanation outside of spiritual vocabulary. Seeing oneself as free, responsible, the author of one’s own actions is a constant battle, and victory in that battle underlies all great human accomplishments, while failure leads to entropy, regret and oblivion.

Why philosophy? Isn’t it just asking over-intellectualized questions with no real fruitfulness? Who cares about abstract notions when there are things to experience, people to love, things to create and build? Honestly, part of the reason I want to write this book is so I can stop thinking about it and do just that. There’s a cliche about living life like each day is your last, and the cliche probably comes from the real experience that people who’ve faced death can see what really matters to them. To me, philosophy is about the death of the self — not physical death, exactly, but the death of constructed identity, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we exist and what we’re doing. The great paradox is that these stories are both pernicious and necessary. They are pernicious because they get in the way of taking life as it is: they impose false constraints and illusory future visions that stop us from seeing what is right in front of our eyes. They’re necessary, though, because a sense of self is what allows us to take action — without a sense of who we are, we become paralyzed lumps, fleeing fear and seeking empty pleasure. The solution to the paradox is to ask “why” and keep asking until everything false about the self dies, and we’re left with who we really are.

Maybe you can get to that same place without asking the questions. I think it may be too late for that, though: as a culture, we’ve gone past the point of no return in terms of opening the doors to questioning. We’ve already asked “why” to all the traditional sources of identity such as culture, religion, and ideology. Once you open the door to wondering, I think it may be a one-way road: either you make it to the bottom of the rabbit hole, or you get permanently lost along the way. At any rate, I’m the kind of person who experiences the world in abstract terms, so whether or not there are other solutions available to other people, I need to go all the way and see what lies at the end of the path.

So that’s me right now. I’m working on a technology startup to help professional photographers sell their images online, and I’m trying to reinvent philosophy to provide a coherent narrative about what it means to be a person in a world where we can doubt everything. I honestly don’t know if these goals make any sense at all, but all my regrets I have at this point in my life are on the side of failing to act: not doing anything and being swept along by the pain / pleasure impulses, avoiding hard things and looking to food and entertainment for distractions. I’m near the end of my own patience for myself, and the funny thing is that self-respect doesn’t seem to require sanity, it just seems to require action. So: I’m going to write code, and I’m going to write philosophy, and I’ll see what happens.

This is probably a little more timely than I really intend it be, this being the rapture and all, but I want to talk about faith. We have a culture where faith is associated with religion; it’s a two-for-one sale. Atheists don’t have faith. Theists do. And then there’s the murky middle, the “spiritual but not religious” masses who don’t really buy the whole religion thing but want to keep one foot in the door of higher meaning.

This post is for the people in the room who want to buy only half of the package deal.

People are delicate, pathetic things. A strong wind, an errant car, or even a rogue microorganisms can wipe us out like a foot crushing an ant, and those lucky enough to survive external threats to their existence eventually fall apart from the inside out. We all stand next to complete disolution, and for the most part just try to distract ourselves until we get so senile that we die without worrying about it too much.

From time to time, events force us to confront the fact we live in a world outside our control, that we are small and it is big. Sometimes a new episode of Jersey Shore isn’t enough to distract us. At those times, when we confront this face on, the two reactions are horror or awe: raw, nihilistic despair that we live in a meaningless world where absolutely everything we care about and work towards will die, or a heightened sense of aliveness and appreciation of the preciousness of each ounce of our limited span.

Let’s call the quality that allows awe and dispels horror “faith.” It is the feeling that the universe will meet us halfway; that though our existence is pathetic, we have our small part to play and if we play it well there is joy for us in it. Or in other words, that we live in a universe that we can look at and say, “this is good”, even as we watch kids die in car accidents and genocide in Africa and our smarmy coworkers get promoted ahead of us.

I think true faith is something experienced, not believed. We all have lots of beliefs, most of which are bullshit. A belief is just a theory that we haven’t gotten around to disproving yet. Staking our hope on a belief always leads to cognitive dissonance, because the human mind seeks truth and always knows at a deep level when we’re clinging to something that we hope is true but have no evidence for. Experience, on the other hand, is direct perception; you don’t believe that you’re feeling happy, you know it, because that’s what happy is.

Religion can breed true faith by calling attention to the abyss and providing community support in facing it courageously. But it also breeds a lot of false faith, by propagating hearsay claims: we live in a good universe because there is a God out there who will reward or punish us. These consquences are hearsay because, in most versions of the story, you have to be dead first before you get to experience the fun firsthand. Hearsay creates belief, but it can’t create experience. I think a lot of religious fanaticism is underlied by a deep insecurity, a subconscious acknowledgement of the foundational weakness of the position, where the response is to attack anyone who dares question our hopeful narrative. (I say “our” because everyone does this from time to time — we all have beliefs that we are fundamentalists about).

So I don’t think religious faith — the good kind — can be related to God as the provisioner of moral consequences. Rather, I think where belief in God and faith can overlap is when God is used as a metaphor for our perception of the universe. The faithful sees the universe as personal: love, not emptiness, underlies the cosmos; the abyss is illusionary and life has meaning.

But one metaphor can be discarded for another. You don’t have to believe any external fact about the world to experience the universe as fundamentally good. In fact, I would argue that dropping the talk of God can even make our perceptions of this clearer.

Unfortunately, the predominate discourse in our society is that science — generally viewed as the other option for understanding our reality — tells us that we live in an amoral universe. We’re just collections of elementary particles or vibrations of very tiny strings, evolved by natural processes into beings that, for various survival-driven reasons, display moral sentiments as the occasion warrants.

That’s almost right: science is in fact amoral. But science is amoral because the scientific method works on the world viewed from a third person, objective perspective; value judgments occur from a first person perspective. Science says nothing about the moral content of our existence; it doesn’t speak the language. I think a lot of people would say that it really comes down to us whether or not we see the universe as fundamentally good or bad, empty or meaningful. My personal opinion (which I’ll try to write about later) is that the nature of human consciousness itself makes life meaningful. Either way, though, the point is that experiencing the universe as fundamentally good is something that you can do regardless of what you believe re: metaphysics, Gods, spaghetti monsters, etc. So I’d like to reclaim faith as something that everyone can do, not just the (officially) faithful.

So after I wrote about what I would teach if I was substitute teacher for a day, I realized that it doesn’t have to be hypothetical. I build web applications, and this is a pretty good candidate for a simple web application to walk people through the process.

Here’s what I’m thinking: you sign up with an account, and submit things that suck, both for you personally (my apartment is too small), and broader issues that you care about (the park next door is all littered). You can keep them private, or share them anonymously or publicly. You can then enter suggested action steps for your own problems or for other people’s. The site tracks over time what happens with each of the problems, and gives you feedback and points or whatever for solving them.

This is a mockup of how I’m visualizing the submission form (I just registered the domain nomoresuck.com):

(Warning: building mockups in MS Paint is extremely hazardous and should only be attempted by trained web professionals).

Thoughts? Advice? Would you use this?

In my last post, I asked the question, what would you do if you got to be a substitute teacher in a middle or high school for a few days, and got to teach whatever you wanted? What’s the most important, most impactful thing that would make a difference in the lives of your students?

I guess it’s only fair that I take a stab at answering it. (I still want to hear other people’s answers… if I hear any good ones I’ll post them in a follow up). It’s a little scary to imagine myself responsible for making a difference in the lives of a roomful of kids, but here goes…

For me, I think the number one most important lesson is the power of taking responsibility for your own life. There’s two parts to this lesson: 1. nothing is going to change unless you say “I am going to make it change”. 2. You’re not on your own — once you take responsibility for making something change, it’s fair game to bring in others to help.

Those two beliefs are basically acts of faith. You can go through life not believing them, and maybe things will turn out okay, but you’ll be at best a passive spectator in your own life. When I think about the kind of person I want to be, and the kind of person I want to share the world with, this is where it all starts.

Standing up in a classroom and talking about this idea is worthless, though. This is the kind of thing that has to be shown, not told. I don’t know if this would work, but what I would try is walking the class through the steps one by one for things in their own lives:

1. Identify that there are things I want changed. This can be really hard, because it’s easy to get used to problems and become blind to them. The strategy to deal with that is to put aside the thought of solving the problems until I’m done identifiying them — keep it purely hypothetical.

Lesson plan: Have the students take out a piece of paper, and write a list of problems that they are having with their lives. This could be anything from getting bad grades in math class, to not being as popular as they would like to be, to being worried because their mom was diagnosed with cancer, to hating their hour-long bus commute to school, or anything else.

2. Figure out what I want. It can be hard to be honest with myself about what I really want in a situation! Also, I need to balance realism with ambition: I need to set my aspirations high, but not so high that it really does become impossible.

Lesson plan: Have each student write down, next to each problem, two things. First, what they would do if they had a magic wand to fix the problem. Become a math genius. Become the most popular kid in school. Have their mom recover. Switch to a different school. Second, one thing that would make the situation substantially better even if they couldn’t make it go away. Get good grades in a different class. Make a few new friends. Make their mom feel better and less afraid. Find something fun to do on the bus ride each day.

3. Commit to taking responsibility to make the change. This is the hard, critically important step. The thing to note here is that there is always a cost to getting what I want (‘be careful what you wish for’) and if I am not willing to pay the cost, I am not going to succeed in making the change.

Lesson plan: Have the students imagine that they have just waved their magic wand. Write down anything scary or unpleasant about the new situation. Will other kids think they’re I’m a nerd if I get good grades in math class? If I’m the most popular kid in school, will I be under a lot of pressure to keep that popularity up? Then have them ask themselves, is it worth it? If the answer is no, cross the problem off their list. If yes…

4. Generate ideas. The question here is “What is one small action I could take today that would move me closer to improving the situation?” Or, “If James Bond / Superman / Sherlock Holmes / Barack Obama / The Man with the Iron Mask was in my shoes, what one action would they take today?”

5. Ask for help. It’s often much easier to see the solutions for someone else’s problem than it is for my own.

Lesson plan: Have students write down one of their problems along with what they want on an index card. Label it with a code that is anonymous to everyone else but that they’ll remember. Redistribute cards, brainstorm solutions for the problems on the card that you get, then mix the cards up again and have people retrieve their cards.

6. Execute! The homework assignment is to do as many small actions as you can. The class discussion the next day is, were you able to? What went well and what went badly? What did we learn? Then the homework for the following day is, try again….

One of my biggest personal pet peeves is that the American education system is basically useless in terms of preparing students for life.

One of the cliches about the value of a liberal arts college education is that it’s supposed to teach you to “learn how to think”, as opposed to the rote memorization of knowledge. Okay, so my first problem with that: what is the twelve years of education leading up to college supposed to teach? How to hold your pen? And then my second problem is that once you actually get to college, you’re taught how to think a little bit, but as measured by volume, that’s only a tiny fraction of the contents.

There are various cynical theories about how public schools are basically glorified daycare centers to keep children out of the way of adults. Whether or not that’s true, the net result is that the primary things schools teach are: a) a level of basic literacy in language, mathematics, science, and culture that’s woefully un-competitive with the rest of the world, b) how to anticipate what authority figures want, and c) how to sit still, shut up, and raise your hand when you have something to say.

Seth Godin recently wrote a really great blog post that sums up a major trend: the era where you could guarantee yourself a comfortable economic future by coloring within the lines is basically over. The rise of the internet is wiping out a lot of career paths, and the new opportunities that are opening up are ones that require creativity and entrepreneurialism, attributes that are completely un-correlated with getting a 2400 on your SATs. (This is probably related to why a lot of top graduates from Ivy League schools take jobs in finance: investment banking is one of the rare lucrative pockets of the economy where this trend hasn’t taken over yet).

Speaking personally, the thing that’s gotten me the most job opportunities — my ability to develop software — is something that I learned almost entirely outside the classroom. I did learn valuable things in school (how to write, for instance), but on an hour-for-hour basis, when I look at the time I spent in class and doing assignments, and when I look at the lessons I’ve learned that I consider important, the whole thing has been criminally wasteful.

There’s a lot of innovation going on in the education space — the charter school movement, for instance — but I’m worried that most of it is oriented at doing a better job against our current goals: getting more kids into better colleges with higher test scores. What I really think we should be doing is changing the yardstick. What we need are graduates who know how to think for themselves, set and achieve goals, and engage with the changing world flexibly and creatively. Happy, healthy, and sane would be good too. Right now those are all peripheral to what education focuses on, which is tragic.

I have a question for everyone: if you got to be a substitute teacher in a middle or high school for a few days, and got to teach whatever you wanted, what would you teach? What one lesson is the most important thing you could convey? I’ll share what I would do over the next few days…

Just released and gave a presentation on jComponent, a library I’m developing.  I’ll write a longer post later explaining the thinking behind it in more depth, but for now, here’s the slides and the github link.

The event I presented at was hack ‘n tell, which is pretty awesome — if you are in the NY area you should come check out the next one.  My favorite presentation today was a demonstration that CSS 3 + html is actually turing complete (via building an implementation of Rule 110) — you have to turn the crank by hand (via pressing tab and space), but it computes!

I want a nice way of keeping track of who I haven’t talked to for a while, so I don’t fall out of touch with people.  Should be pretty easy, with all our contact information online.

Somewhat surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find anything I liked.  The closest I came was https://gist.com/, which is a cool tool to see all your contacts from all your social networks in one place.  But it didn’t have the one feature I really want — the ability to sort by the last time I contacted a person divided by the rough frequency at which I’d like to stay in touch with them.

So, I hacked together this: http://www.joshhaas.com/contact/.  It’s primitive, but it also does exactly what I’m looking for.  If anyone knows of a professionally-maintained tool that can do what my thing does, please let me know!

I built it using google’s contact data API, using the javascript library that they provide for accessing it.  I was disappointed in the quality of the library; the javascript version is lagging behind the most current version of the API, and there isn’t solid and accurate reference documentation.  Does anyone know what the deal is with this?  Is Google abandoning the javascript library?  That would be too bad, because Google’s data protocol is complicated enough that writing raw http/xml handling code would be very painful!

Open problem: I can’t host it on Google App Engine because authentication breaks.  I assume it has something to do with the fact that the data API recognizes GAE referrer URLs, and maybe something to do with me using an older version of the API (1.0 instead of 3, because the javascript library doesn’t work with later versions).  Haven’t figured out a workaround yet, so I’m hosting it on slightly slower shared hosting for now.

After seeing the movie, I’m very interested to hear what the reaction is.

Part of it is going to center around sorting out the facts of the matter.  It’s hard to tell just from watching it how much of the movie was an excellent simplification of complex issues, and how much was an over-simplification.  The rebuttals are starting to come in and it’s going to get messy.  My personal guess is that the story the movie tells is accurate at a mile-high view and much messier near the ground, which in part explains how something like this can happen in the first place.  In the middle of it, it’s a lot harder to see.

One of those mile-high truths is that the finance sector, by and large, doesn’t have a strong moral compass, stretching from the CEOs down to the analysts.  It’s particularly bad in finance because there’s so much opportunity, but in my personal experience it is very easy to graduate from a top university without learning a thing about ethics and morals, which leads to a bunch of bright young people entering the real world without any societal inoculation against that kind of corruption.

I got lucky — I was raised by parents who weren’t complete moral degenerates, and then my tenure in finance was spent working for a firm whose business model is to profit off of long-term integrity.  One of the things I learned there, actually, is that integrity is practical — it’s not a matter of real world gains vs nebulous ethical consequences, it’s a matter of short-term gains vs long-term suffering.  But I’m not sure how many people entering the workforce have been taught to see it that way.

What I really want to see is some form of secular moral education.  Traditional moral education has been pretty much systematically eradicated from the educational system, for some good reasons: it tended to be dogmatic, close-minded, and logically dependent on unprovable suppositions (i.e., the truth of the bible).  But there’s a gap where it used to be, and I think the intellectual tools exist to fill the gap with something that makes sense.  I.e., some kind of open-minded, dialogue-based, rational discourse about really what it means to be an effective, ethical member of society.

To be clear, I don’t want more pop-philosophy lectures about pushing a fat person in front of a train.  For this to be at all useful, getting an ‘A’ can’t be dependent on things like an intellectual understanding of Rawls’ theories, or an agreement with group / teacher sentiment.  Rather, it needs to reward genuine, open-minded, personal wrestling with real issues.   It’s hard, but I think we can do this.  I believe that as a secular, rational society, there are things we can still agree on in terms of integrity and other values to form the curriculum.  And in terms of creatively teaching it, I think there are possibilities.

[This is a half-written story. Not quite sure how I want to finish it. If you have thoughts, let me know.]

Claire huddled in her chair, pulling her blanket around her, to shut off both the cold and the screaming next door. An itching in her throat made her spit a few drops of saliva onto her rumpled nightgown. In the bed next to her, Henry moaned gently in his sleep. It was 4 am, and Claire compulsively scratched her arm where the doctors had injected her with the serum yesterday. Could she feel it working inside her or was it just her imagination? She shivered, not completely sure herself whether it was from the cold, the anticipation, or an unaccountable fear.

Claire had consented to the treatment, her aging muscles barely cooperating with pen as it scritched her name on the forms, but it was really just a formality: recent judicial decisions had mandated treatment for those too far gone to decide in their own rights, and no one in the homes consciously decided to forgo it. Claire watched the news, on the days the nurses left the little TV set she could see from her bed to the right station, and she knew that there were others out there who, admidst some political controversy, voluntarily rejected their right to life, but they seemed to live in a different world. A world where affluent relatives tearfully surrounding their bedsides, as gentle breezes blew through the open windows of their bedrooms. True, the breezes carried the distant echo of protestor’s shouts, but even those blended in with the peaceful spring air that lulled the beds’ occupants towards a permanent nap. Claire shook herself, turning off her imagination before before loneliness and pain could shut her down. In the real world it was fall outside.

The next few days passed by with Claire drifting in and out of consciousness, her dreamy musings interrupted only by the occasional cups of mushed vegetables and medical jello the nurses brought at random intervals. She ate, more to keep her mind occupied than for anything else, and waited.

She awoke one morning with the unusually firm conviction that it was Tuesday. Yawning, she stretched her bones a little and tried to account for the strange sensation she felt in her head. It was only until after the other residents had woken up that she placed it: the absence of a headache. She closed her eyes quickly, shaking her head back and forth until the flash of strange emotion faded away. Heart still pounding faster than usual, she took to her Sudoku with concentration, going through puzzle after puzzle without losing steam. She ate an extra large helping of the white-meat entree that night.

On Wed, a volunteer for the Elderly Rehabilitation Association came by with an info kit and some forms to fill out. Claire pretended to be more out of it than she was to avoid conversation, and pushed the kit aside, not wanting to think about it. Later, two nurses helped her out of her bed and rolled her down the hall to the examination room, where a harried visiting doctor shined a light in her eyes, probed her arm muscles, tested her saliva, and then made some curt notes before sending her on her way. On the way back to her room, she passed the next old person being wheeled to their examination, and, perking her head up, she noticed an unusual buzz of activity: more wailing, more muttering, some nurses moving around with an unusual briskness while others seemed to be slumping despondantly. Even the most dimly conscious of the eldery stirred more than usual as if they could tell through their haze that something was in the air. Raised voices on the telephone went back and forth in an indistinct argument, and it looked like someone had cleaned the usually musty linoleoum floors and counters, although the folders and pieces of medical equipment were unusually scattered. Claire returned to her room and watched some TV.

By Fri morning, Claire could no longer ignore the fact that she was feeling better than she had in years. Throughout the day, the nurses, who had obviously just been trained on this themselves, came by to assist her with various leg and arm excercises, almost completely atrophied muscles slowly and painfully waking up. Although the skin on her arms was still blotched and saggy, it seemed to be pinker instead of its usual sallow yellow, and next to her, Henry surprised her by uttering a complete sentence, something about the television show that was playing in the background. Although it had been months since the last time Claire joined the communal activities in the group room, today she had the nurses wheel her over, and as she haltingly interacted with her fellow residents she picked up an undercurrent that — bizarrely out of context as it seemed — could only be described as excitement.

When she took her first halting steps into the sunlight — real, honest-to-god sunlight — Claire felt a buzzing numbness over her entire body. Her heart, beating at a rate that would have killed her a week ago, hyperventilated with a rush of sensations that shifted too quickly for her to give names to. She walked slowly forward, a step at a time, not sure where she was going or why, dimly clutching onto the phone number and address she’d removed from the ERA info kit.

[Not sure where to go from here. I’m kinda toying having her get hit by a car in a minute and ending the story, but that feels a little cheap. What I really want to do is zoom out and look at this whole thing from a much bigger panaromic view, really explore some of the interesting consequences, but I’m not quite sure how to do that.]

So lately I’ve been feeling a pretty strong desire to write.  The funny thing is, it seems to be combined with an equally strong lack of anything to say.  I don’t think that’s due to an innate lack of inspiration… rather, I think there’s some quite decent writing in me buried under multiple layers of crap.

Insert some mumbled academic point about perfectionism here… what I mean to say is that the only way through to the other side is to just get all the crap out of my system.  It’s a rarefied form of pure agony to sit in front of a blank screen and type garbage, but the upside is that it’s probably good exercise for your fingers, not quite (but almost) up there with piano.

Anyway, since the only way to really be sure you’ve exorcised a demon is if the entire neighborhood witnesses it returning to hell, here are a few chunks of crap I came up with:

1:

Setting the scene: The Charles river. You’re standing on the bridge, concrete and cars going by behind you. Got your headphones on, “I am an American” pumping in your ears. An impossible football throw away, another bridge, stone and mortar, arcs.

The cast: Me, myself, and I. And an iPod.

The plot: Going for a jog. In another month it will be sweaty hot — as is the air barely accepts the heat I’m dissipating.

Not in the scene: a girl, 20 years old, standing by the window of her dorm, on a cell. You don’t know who she’s talking to, but it isn’t someone on campus.

“fours are up!” I call, diving to the ground.

2:

Pink panda bear pansies . Purple petunias eating cheese. Nazi monkey fish liver pirates. Rumplestilkin baby sneeze. These and these I stir together — these and these I stir apart; wander weather wilters better; blink twice and I’ll break your heart.

3:

Mr. Lipstaticker lived on a drive at the end of a long road at the end of a long, windy town. Good day! Good day! He’d say, and walk, mockingly, on by, while all the children stared and cried.

4:

Single, she stood by the window, waiting. Her name was Annie. Out the window, she saw a car drive by. In it — not the guy she is waiting for. She sighs. Stands, and paces across the room, only to turn back at the sound of an engine — no, a stranger’s headlights cresting the hill. Could he have been seriously hurt? Would that be worse?

5:

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaateeeevver. That’s what she said. Well, not to his face, anyway — not yet — but with her friends, getting drinks on a quiet saturday night, she would bitch about his cheapness, about his looks, about the neighbor’s grunts heard through the flimsy walls of the apartment they shared together.

6:

Once upon a time, there was a boy. I’d like to think he was the silent hero type, but actually he was really more the silent awkward — so out of touch with reality he could barely tell the difference between videogames and life. Well, except that he liked videogames.

We find him sitting in his room, the summer before going to college, staring at his computer and typing an entry on his webpage — I think this preceded blogs, or if it didn’t, he hadn’t heard of them. (Well, there was Xanga, but that was just for the nerdy Asians). He’s upset, because he’s been trying to clean up his room to get ready for college, which looms in front of him like a giant blank– nothing, nothing at all, like the thing in the Neverending Story where the world is falling apart and when you look at it there’s nothing to put your eyes on. What he can see is that every book that goes into the box is himself dying a little bit. He can still taste Italy at the back of his mind, and the bitter-sweet finale of high school leaves him with a strange… love? He feels lost, left out of some vast cosmic secret, shown a glimpse that the world is much bigger than he can ever wrap his arms around.

And then — he’s there. The pure pause of exhilerating strangeness the night before — an unfamiliar dusky landscape that he’ll soon imprint so deep in his brain he’ll never again be apart from it — and then the morning, sleepless, excited, so bright in the light of the fading summer. Move in — taking boxes up stairs, the smell of poster gum in heat. He doesn’t remember his parents leaving.

There’s a peculiar shift when your life changes, as your mind adjusts itself to the complete lack of the familiar. Soon enough you can stop seeing things again, because knowledge reasserts itself, but there’s a gap between the stasis of one reality and the fixedness of the next. It persists, in little cracks and edges, for maybe about six months.

What I really want to do is find those cracks again, plunge in, break it open, live, live, live! Always keep running, always keep moving, never let the familiar imprison you. What would it be like to always be traveling?

And there must be something at stake. People. If you don’t care about people, what is there to care about?

I love you, friend. I love you, I love Harvard, I love my brother, the Charles, my memories of Ashland and the Wisconsin arboretum and devil’s den in the rain. I love you, awkward moment — frozen space of new (if unpleasant) possibilities. When will the rains come? What will wash away the veil of the ordinary from this world? How do we free ourselves from the mundane? What is the path? What is the key? Why do the books and games and stories and songs that point the way become our very prisons? Help, damn it, help bust free of the chains of our own weakness and fear and heartlessness. Put things at stake! PUT THINGS AT STAKE! Without it, life is lost — cheapened, by being preserved. A strawberry stale in the fridge (not the beautiful loss of the dandelion dried on the windowsill). Please, oh lord, oh god — the other that is the reality — the gap between where we are and where we want to be: the silence that swallows speech: the shadow, the hollow men, the brainless smug intellectualism that makes you think you understand when you understand nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Alas, the world has died, and we but trod upon the grave of its remnants, the filthy fucking grave, the empty pit. Why do we take the pills? Why do we drink the wine? Gorge ourselves upon bloated sawdust? What promises were made, that we seek to redeem in this way?

That’s what I want to write. I want my words to pierce the veil in thought, to draw the love, to break the grasp, silent, sodden, deadening — that the world has on you. I want to feel and I want everyone who reads me to feel, to feel miserably, to feel terribly, to feel like they’ve been torn and in their tatters can rise again as real people. God damn all silent hypocrisy. God damn the system. Where is the words that will make it dissolve? What is the book? Where is the reading? Can music free? Can the food that feeds you be the food that kills you? What I do know is that there is nothing I know that is not in the knowing of it the deepest poison.

Words. Damned, pitiful words. What are they, against the overwhelming stasis of the mind? Merely feeders, at best, syncophants that pitch… pitch, on to the flame. And at worse, incohate babble. Useless drivel. Empty times new roman font on a white background, size 12.

7:

What I’m trying to say.

I’m not quite sure how to say it yet. I’ll throw out a few words, and see how far they take me. I want to make the point — be it through essay, stories, poems, songs, I dunno the wherefore or therewhat — that 99.95 of the fucking time we spend our lives not actually living in reality but trapped in a mental bubble. All evil comes from the fundamental confusion of thoughts with that which thoughts reference. I can say it, but even as the words leave my mouth they become empty symbols, the map and not reality. Don’t eat the fucking menu! Don’t, for the love of god, eat the fucking menu! I want you to hop in your car, drive down the street, go into the restaurant, barge into the kitchen, and lick the chicken grease off the fucking counters — just DO not EAT the FUCKING menu!!!!!! Please.

It’s for you, not for me.

I mean it.

I love you.