David Foster Wallace is dead at 46, apparently by his own hand. This makes me incredibly sad. I can’t claim to have been a huge fan — I’ve still never read Infinite Jest,rent a car bulgaria even though a friend in the program gave me a copy more than a year ago — but I loved his essays, which radiated both intelligence and humility, and I’m pretty sure I’ve unconsciously emulated his tone more than once.

I never assume that suicides would have been better off alive; that’s not for me to say. My heart breaks at the thought of his wife finding him, but there was only one person who could have said for sure whether he could have found another way, and that person is gone forever.

“Never complain, never explain.”

My sponsor says, “Five years is when you figure out all the stuff you didn’t let go of the first time.”

Joe Banks says, “There are certain doors you have to go through alone.”

John Keats says, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

Back to work.

At some point during the ’60s, Sammy Davis Jr. supposedly cried, “I’ve spent my whole life becoming white and now suddenly black is beautiful!”

The Clintons are to aspirational politics what Sammy Davis Jr. was to blackness. They sold out hope long ago because they saw it as an impediment to progress, and they weren’t completely wrong. Given the era in which they came up, theirs might well have been the best approach.

Everyone realizes that Obama represents a threat to their way of doing things, and therefore to their power. What’s less obvious is that he’s also a threat to their narrative about themselves. If he can really succeed at a national level without completely selling out his own authentic instincts, that makes them lesser creatures for poker caribestip pokerjugar card studplay 7 card studtorneos de poquerpoker texas holdem gratis,poker texas holdem,poker texas holdem onlinejuegos de poquer gratispoker del juegojuegos polli pokerjuego poker texascaribbean poker onlinejugadas texas holdemcartas de poker gratisjugar poquer webjuego de poker en españolpai gow poker paginas webjuego poker gratuitojuegos eroticos pokerapuesta onlineruleta online,juegos online la ruleta,ruleta de la suerte onlinejuegos azar lineacasino madridgames free downloadjuegos flash casinojugar apostar paginas webjuego gratis onlinecasino ruleta gratiscasinos alquilerjuegos segurosganar dinero casinoamerican rouletteganar dinero paginas internetjuego casino lineajuego seguro pagina internetganar premio portal internetjugar video pokerjugar cartas lineajuego casino portales internetcasino internacional portales webcasinos virtuales paginas internetcasino internacional onlinecasinos paginas webbaccarat en lineapremio gordojugar interactivo paginas webpremio paginas webcasino o netbest online casinosjugar gratis portales webapuestas en internet having done so — not in the judgment of others, but in the darkness of their own hearts.

A historian might point out that they, like Sammy, were subject to the culture of the time, but that doesn’t really remove the sting of watching someone achieve the same worldly goals you did while remaining unbent.

Like a lot of African-American performers in the ’60s, Davis briefly wore an Afro, the most obvious symbol of black pride, but he dropped it almost immmediately. It looked like pandering on him, and I’m willing to bet he found it uncomfortable. I fancy that he missed the showman’s palette of straighteners, relaxers, pomades, and perfumes he had come to associate with his public persona.

Because the Clintons were gifted and determined people, their transformation was complete. They can never go back and recover their authentic selves.

It’s hard for me to muster any sympathy for them, but I’m at an age where I’ve begun to appreciate the poignancy of looking back over what you’ve done and honestly assessing it. I don’t know if they’re still capable of honest assessment of anything. But if they are, they’re looking at Obama and seeing their unlived lives. And I feel their pain.

I stayed up till three this morning playing Scrabulous with Roy (we were separated by only ten points at the end, so I guess we’re well matched) and occasionally spraying gasoline on the Austin Improv thread about the UCB show, which provided me with an instructive moment.

Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to get nasty in chatrooms. (That’s nasty in the sense of rude and vituperative, not in the sense of asking if there are any teenage girls on the thread.) I’ve gotten a lot better, which is not saying much, but at least I no longer write things that I know will be hurtful.

So there I was, tapping out my little self-satisified sermons about What the Real Problem Is, proud of how I was shedding light on the subject without attacking anyone. I was covered, ethically speaking. Possibly even helping others. Just another concerned netizen, dousing an overheated discussion with a bracing pail of the cold water of logic.

Well . . . horseshit. Calming influences have even less effect on the net than they do in real life — having spent many years as the asshole who refuses to drop it, I know whereof I speak — and furthermore, it’s just plain arrogant for me to assume that I’m above the fray. My intentions are good, but so are everyone else’s, which doesn’t prevent them (and me) from expressing ourselves in ways that are practically designed to get people’s backs up.

Which happened again at the end of the night, when someone took something I’d written and described it in comically exaggerated (and therefore inaccurate) terms.

I guess my petard needed hoisting. Making fun of something someone said by comically exaggerating (and therefore misrepresenting) it is a favorite technique of mine, and no matter how much I try to expunge it, it creeps back in when I’m writing — it’s entertaining, dammit! — so it was appropriate that I got hit with it just as I was trying to disengage.

The irony is that yesterday I’d been studying the Five Precepts of Buddhism and realized that whereas the deal-killer for me used to be Number Five, refraining from intoxicants, nowadays my biggest problems are with Number Four, refraining from incorrect speech. (It’s not that I didn’t have a problem with incorrect speech previously; I was just drinking too much to notice.) Incorrect speech can be defined as that which is untrue, abusive, divisive, or idle.

It’s that last one that gets me. Because while my online chatter (generally) falls short of ill will, it’s not really necessary either. I’m sure that at some point something I’ve posted to an online forum has been useful or entertaining to someone. My writing is not completely without value.

And yet as a percentage of my total contributions, that subset is minuscule. And I have to ask myself: Is this the best use of my time?

That’s what a lot of my moral life comes down to these days, as I shuck off years of behavior based on shame and guilt and misperception and embrace my remaining days with increasing urgency: Is this the best use of my time?

More often than it used to be, the answer is yes. Because no is really starting to scare me.

Elgar’s first cello concerto is the kind of music I would like to hear swelling in the background whenever I have to make a difficult decision, because it would make doing the right thing poignant and dramatic rather than just a pain in the ass.

I’m hesitant to jinx it, but I’m doing sitting practice in the morning more regularly than I have for a really long time. I have no idea why I’m suddenly doing it after literally years of browbeating myself for not doing it, but so far so good. 

Just as the starting bell struck this morning, I became aware of a lot of movement just outside my window. My house backs up onto a parking lot used by the businesses next door (and not by me), so I’m used to a good deal of activity happening mere feet away from me even when I’m in, say, my own bedroom: tradespeople tromping around, car doors slamming, inventory and trash being carted in and out. 

What I was hearing definitely wasn’t human, though. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, especially when a nocturnal animal is making roughly the same creeping progress through your dead leaves that a psychotic killer would if he were intent on ratcheting you up to maximum terror before offing you, but in this case it was obviously the frenetic, random-seeming movement of an animal. It sounded like a big one, based on how many leaves were moving at once. 

If you’ve never tried to meditate, you will not be impressed by this at all: I didn’t get up to look. I wanted to, believe me, especially since a couple of nights ago I had confronted what looked like two 30-pound raccoons in that same back lot and was very curious to see if for some reason they were out during the day. (Raccoons are the worst to confront, because they’re not scared of you. They sort of make a token gesture of retreat and then look back at you like what’s your fucking problem? At which point you realize that you really didn’t have a Plan B and just sort of assumed that your species status would carry the day. It doesn’t.)

Being proud of not getting up and going to the window would run somewhat counter to why I want to meditate in the first place. But it might at least suggest some progress being made, since I can very easily remember a time when I would have not only gotten up but fully justified it. (”Well, I have an obligation to see what’s going on back there! Harrumph!”)

Instead I sat for the full thirty minutes, completely distracted the whole time, and only got up and looked when I was done. 

It was grackles. A lot of them. 

Speaking of which, I think we need a specific word for a group of grackles, so I’m opening the floor to nominations. Mine are screed, plunder, and insurgency.

Somewhat related to the previous post: one of the ways in which improv has blown my mind is that it’s showed me new ways to think about music. I really didn’t think that was going to happen anymore. It’s not that I thought I was never going to be surprised or delighted by music again, but I figured my templates for dealing with it were pretty much set.

I am not a jazz guy. I like it and appreciate it but for the most part have not been much moved by it, and since music is for me primarily an emotional experience, if I don’t feel it I don’t get it. 

A couple of weeks ago, inspired by watching Bird, I downloaded the Massey Hall concert. For non-jazz fans: this is a live recording of a quintet consisting of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. It’s difficult to convey the accumulated weight of those names, but suffice to say this is the all-star jazz team of all time. 

So I’m listening to it like I usually do jazz, which is to say a little distantly, and “Night in Tunisia” is playing, and at the end there’s a moment where they go back into the main theme of the song, and I had this flash of them as improvisers. I wasn’t thinking about the music as an abstract entity, I was thinking about five people on stage paying close attention to what everyone else is doing and playing, and jazz suddenly made sense to me. Thank you, improv!

I’m starting to remember why I don’t blog. If I hadn’t posted that last entry for God and everybody else to see, I wouldn’t now have to confront Marc’s irritatingly well-written rebuttal. But I did, and I do, so I will now attempt to trim some of my less-well-considered comments with the cold steel of the Majcher reason-razor.

I was of course wrong that you can’t prove a negative. But at the risk of pissing off the propellerheads even further, God is a special case. We can say that there’s not a dragon in my hand because we have access to the entire area encompassed by my hand. But saying that God doesn’t exist anywhere requires complete simultaneous awareness of everywhere, and if you had that . . . you’d be God, disproving your own theory.

I should have been much more specific about the reference to Occam’s Razor. I agree completely that anyone who thinks that gravity is proof of the existence of God just because science hasn’t figured it out yet is grasping at straws. (I further agree that attempting to “prove” theological assumptions using scientific principles is both bad science and bad theology.)

No, what I was referring to is those situations in which (a) there’s no good scientific explanation and (b) there’s a fairly straightforward and coherent explanation that happens to depend on the existence of God. But because these situations are typically experienced internally rather than externally, they’re completely subject to the interpretation of the person experiencing them.

I know a guy who, though not a scientist, is as hard-headed a superrationalist as anybody. He told me about a seance he was a part of in which the group decided to try to invoke a specific person, and since they were in a cabin in the Hill Country, they hit on a Scotch-Irish farmer from the 1800s. My friend told me how the table that everyone had their hands on tumped over on its side and rolled across the room, all hands clearly visible the entire time. He saw this and remains convinced that nobody in the group was making it happen.

“Wow, so you actually called up a ghost,” I said.

“NO!” he shouted. THERE WAS NO GHOST! We accessed some kind of paranormal energy, but THERE WAS NO GHOST!”

So he was willing to acknowledge that during a seance a table had rolled itself across the room unaided, because he saw it with his own eyes. But when it was suggested that in ironically attempting to contact a spirit, he’d actually contacted a spirit, he denied it completely. Because he didn’t have “proof,” and because he doesn’t believe in ghosts.

I mean, come on.

What chaps me about scientific fundamentalists is not that they dispute the existence of God. It’s that they’re so bloody smug about it, as though they’re tossing their judgments down from some uninvolved height of objectivity. Occasionally, as in the case of my ghost-dissing friend, the practical limits of “objectivity” become clear. But for the most part science snobs act like they’re moving through life completely uncorrupted by illogical thinking. Please.

I’m in the middle of rereading William James’ The Will to Believe, but if I remember it rightly his argument is that wanting to know the truth and not wanting to be wrong are two different things, and that it’s possible that you sometimes have to risk being wrong in order to get to the truth. In other words, you might have to make a leap of faith. This seems to line up (again, if I remember rightly) with Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that scientific advances, far from being built on what came before, are actually paradigm shifts that require a radical break with existing orthodoxy.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason science and spirituality get crosswise with each other is that they’re coming from completely different places. Science is based on verifiable observation and reproducible results. Spirituality springs from an internal experience that is neither verifiable nor reproducible.

Need I point out that you ignore either of these viewpoints at your peril? Everyone reading this probably agrees that flying in the face of empirical scientific evidence is a bad idea, but the science jihadists don’t get that if you’re only going to accept scientifically valid information, you’re going to have to ignore about 99 percent of your own experience . . . including those intuitive leaps that move science forward. Ultimately, your own experience is all you have. Why you wanna put Baby in the corner like that?

The trouble starts when either one goes wandering off from its home turf. Spirituality hardens into organized religion, and suddenly internal experience is less important than defending the faith. The scientific method hardens into scientific orthodoxy, and suddenly openmindedness is less important than . . . defending the faith. In both cases, humble inquiry metastasizes into rigid belief.

Which is, I suppose, what we do as human beings. My current theory is that most of the trouble in the world comes from people thinking that their personal experience is the benchmark for humanity. I don’t see that problem going away anytime soon, no matter who’s winning the culture wars.

I stand by my assertion that atheism and belief in God are both acts of faith and have much more to do with the internal landscape of the person in question than with any external reality. However, I think I’ve been selling atheism short with my misunderstanding of the scientific method.

My reasoning was that since you can’t prove a negative, atheism is a less tenable position than belief. That is, I might conceivably prove once and for all that God exists. I can never prove definitively that God doesn’t exist; all I can offer is an absence of proof.

But any scientific hypothesis has to be disprovable, meaning that the tables get turned. If I believe in God, the only way you can disprove me is by proving that God doesn’t exist, which is impossible. But if I don’t believe in God, you can theoretically disprove me by providing evidence of God. Ergo, disbelief is theoretically more open to scientific refutal than belief.

Of course, my experience is that atheists will defy common sense and Occam’s Razor a million and one times in their desperate attempt to find some explanation other than God for any number of phenomena, but I admit my methodological mistake.