Monthly Archives: October 2018

Ok, let me go on the record (once again BTW), with the declaration that you are, by far, the best thing that ever happened to me.

I’m honestly not sure I deserve you, but I’m fucking grateful for the 34 years we’ve had together. It’s hard to say in hindsight, but I think it’s a safe bet to acknowledge that I was headed no where good in a hurry when I met you. You just made everything better. 

So Happy Birthday baby – life dealt me a good hand when I found you.

Let’s be clear: our body (and mind) like being under stress.

It’s how we grow and adapt. Exercise (physical stress) changes our morphology – it literally changes the way we look. Learning (cognitive stress) changes our minds – it rewires our brain, creating new neuronal connections.

So the last thing you want is to live with no stress.

Of course you do want it to be manageable, everyone has their limit and you don’t want it to break you. The thing is, your limit is far past what you think you are capable of, and reaching it is going to be painful. Most people will stop well before they get there, so your chance of pushing yourself too hard is pretty slim.

I’m writing this at the gym, a place I don’t want to be. I am painfully pushing myself, something I don’t want to do. But I do it for the payoff and because I know there are no shortcuts. I have done this for 35 years and it never gets easier, but the rewards are undeniable.

Make no mistake, without stress we can never fully realize our potential. So the next time you think something is too hard, understand that’s the whole point.

No stress = no pain = no growth.

Whenever you are having a shitty day, try doing something nice for someone else, as an alternative to being led by your reactive emotions and behaving like an asshole.

The day might remain shitty, but your outlook will immediately improve.

And your largesse will have made someone else feel better as well.

Easy win win.

In light of a theme that seems to run through a few of my recent posts, I was struck today when reading this quote from page 204 of J.D. Vance’s excellent book “Hillbilly Elegy.” It’s relevance is clearly universal, but here it is used as a singular realization he had while attending Yale law school.

He was referring to the lies he told the other students about his upbringing, inventing them to hide the shame of his background of poverty and “hillbilly culture.” I’m thinking also of my close friend who was raised in an orphanage, yet didn’t actually tell me that for almost ten years, sticking instead to fabricated family he had made up to hide the “shame” of being an orphan. I use quotation marks because, of course, there was no shame at all in his circumstance, beyond that which he had imposed on himself.

Shame is crippling, yet it is largely something we impose on ourselves. It begs the question: What would happen if we were able to live and function without it?

Which immediately brings to mind another book I am reading, “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain. This book, which was written 18 years ago while Anthony was still working as a chef, is so nakedly unashamed it is breathtaking. He had no idea at the time of publication what effect it might have on his career, indeed, in the forward he wonders if he will still be able to work after it’s publication.

In it he chronicles in great detail his character flaws, weaknesses, shortcomings, and limitations as a professional chef. He is quite open about his wasted decades of substance abuse, all of the people he let down, and his general failings as a human being. His honesty is so raw you can’t help but be impressed by his humanity.

And what effect did this utter lack of shame have?

It led to to the most acclaimed and universally admired success he had ever experienced. His brutal nakedness and lack of shame led directly to achievement beyond which he could ever have imagined.

Food for thought.

Part 1: “No I’m not – you are!”

The classic example here is what sadly passes for modern political “discourse.” Here, one party accuses the other of engaging in the same nefarious behavior that they themselves are knee deep in. For example, one individual shouts “you’re lying” to their opponent whenever they are caught in a lie. This can go on ad nauseum, indeed, it has become the standard operating procedure for talking heads in the media. As if no one could possibly see through this bullshit.

Part 2: “I’m about to be revealed!”

Ok, time to use some objectionable epithets for the purpose of illustration. Men, BTW, are the worst at this. Let’s say one swaggering simpleton, in a fit of blustering machismo, yells at another “Faggot.” What this really means is that the accuser is petrified of his own preoccupation with homosexual behavior. Unfortunately, this can lead to some real violence, as one closeted dimwit attempts to beat his own “gayness” out of the other one. Like I said, men can be fucking idiots. News flash – real men could care less about another mans sexual preference. They are more concerned with character.

Part 3: “Ouch – that hurts!”

This is best described with the following scenario. Say someone refers to you as a “loser.” It only hurts if you think you might actually be a loser, otherwise it’s just some asshole spouting off. In other words, the only epithets that hurt are the ones that ring true – in which case you should probably pay attention when something upsets you. It might give you a clue as to how you think about yourself.

All three of these examples are powered by a fear of vulnerability, as if there was shame in owning who you are, weaknesses and failures included.

Welcome to being a flawed human – the sooner you can let go of your shame the quicker you can get on with self-actualization.

I used to be the kind of person who strictly compartmentalized my life, probably to an unhealthy degree. I think it was a misguided attempt to protect myself, or maybe it was a way to carefully create an image of who I wanted to project myself to be at any given time (which I guess was also a way to protect myself). Whatever it was – it was total bullshit, based out of fear like most bullshit is.

Fear of rejection and failure, from a person who very much felt like a failure – or rather someone who thought they were inevitably doomed to fail. Again, this was utter bullshit – but in my defense, I really didn’t know any better. I was trying to create something out of what I thought was nothing, and struggling mightily to do so.

Although I now know what nonsense this is, I still wrestle with remnants of this kind of dysfunctional thinking. It’s funny how long it can take to change. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.

I find as I get older the walls of these boxes begin to break down, and I realize they never meant anything in the first place. They were a trap I had built for myself, what I thought would somehow protect me ended up hurting me instead. What I thought needed to be kept a secret really meant nothing at all.

So now I am trying to unify parts of my life I always kept separate. I guess this blog was a tentative step in that direction.

So far, the sky hasn’t fallen and the sun continues to rise.

Let’s see where this goes.

It turns out that things are a bit further along than I thought. I knew we were on the cusp of some paradigm shifting developments, but I wasn’t fully aware of the real world applications that are already here.

Let me be clear – the development of general AI is already well underway, and it will either be our greatest human achievement, elevating every aspect of our existence, or we will have created our own existential threat.

The big question is: When it arrives, what will this unstoppable god-like super intelligence decide to do with us? Up until the point at which AI surpasses us, we will have ruled our world simply because we were the smartest occupants. What happens when we aren’t?

I don’t know how I missed this astonishing article “The Great AI Awakening” written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus and published in the New York Times on December 14th, 2016. It reads like a science fiction thriller, except it’s a true account of something that is very much real. And it’s two years old…

It’s the story of neural nets and how Google used them to improve Google translate, and if you think that sounds boring you would be very, very mistaken. One doesn’t have to even be that bright to extrapolate the implications. They are both truly frightening and blindingly exciting, and they’re all around us. It’s already happening and we don’t even see it.

Lewis-Kraus reports on the Google Brain project:

“First a human mind learns to recognize a ball and rests easily with the accomplishment for a moment, but sooner or later, it wants to ask for the ball. And then it wades into language…

…The first step in that direction was the cat paper, which made Brain famous.

What the cat paper demonstrated was that a neural network with more than a billion “synaptic” connections — a hundred times larger than any publicized neural network to that point, yet still many orders of magnitude smaller than our brains — could observe raw, unlabeled data and pick out for itself a high-order human concept. The Brain researchers had shown the network millions of still frames from YouTube videos, and out of the welter of the pure sensorium the network had isolated a stable pattern any toddler or chipmunk would recognize without a moment’s hesitation as the face of a cat. The machine had not been programmed with the foreknowledge of a cat; it reached directly into the world and seized the idea for itself. (The researchers discovered this with the neural-network equivalent of something like an M.R.I., which showed them that a ghostly cat face caused the artificial neurons to “vote” with the greatest collective enthusiasm.) Most machine learning to that point had been limited by the quantities of labeled data. The cat paper showed that machines could also deal with raw unlabeled data, perhaps even data of which humans had no established foreknowledge. This seemed like a major advance not only in cat-recognition studies but also in overall artificial intelligence.”

If you think life will always just keep rolling along, you are in for some very rude shocks. It’s possible that biological intelligence was just a loading program for the next step in evolution.

You know, the one where biology is no longer necessary.

I think we all know what our instinct is when we encounter noise – we want to turn it the fuck off!

Well, noise exists in other domains besides sound. Washington for instance. Just like too much auditory noise at a high level over a prolonged period of time will damage your ears, I would argue that too much political noise will do the same to your mind and sense of humanity.

Anytime I see someone standing in front of an American flag I’ve already tuned out. Done. Show’s over.

But let me be perfectly clear: I am neither proud of this nor would I recommend it to others. If everyone felt like this, nothing would ever change.

But, for me, it’s the right thing to do. I’m a 62 year old who survived what might easily have been a lethal brush with cancer. I recognize that I have a limited amount of time left and I am choosing not to waste it on things I can’t change.

I will always vote, but that’s where my involvement with politics ends. What this country wants doesn’t align with my personal code of ethics, and since I can’t change that, I’m bowing out.

I’m leaving this mess for the young people of this country (and anyone else who cares enough and has the time to get involved) to figure out. I’m just going to try and treat the people around me with respect and compassion and get on with my life.

I’ve turned this noise off, and it feels good.

Ten days ago I got dog number eight in my life. Number seven died six months ago and, like all those before him, broke my fucking heart.

Number eight is the first adult I’ve adopted (she’s approximately one year), and she’s only the second female. This one is a shelter rescue from the south, so very little is known about her previous life.

I’m in the very beginning stages of introducing and acclimating her to her new home and people, and while walking her today I had a bit of an epiphany.

There is no such thing as “dog” training, rather, it’s all training. Every moment you are with the animal you are training it to be the dog you want.

See, with each dog, if you’re paying attention and trying, you learn more about their needs and what makes them tick. You begin to understand what makes them happy and balanced. Of course, unsurprisingly, you often learn by making mistakes – but fortunately dogs can be very forgiving.

This one seems exceptionally bright and she watches my every move, you can almost see her trying to figure out what I want her to do. I’ve learned that training a dog is not so much about setting aside time for learning commands, it’s about leadership skills and consistency.

In other words, it’s about how you live your life and who you are all of the time.

Isn’t this how life works with other people as well?

Go to your local gym to “buy a membership,” but take off all of your clothes first. Bathing is optional.

When EMS shows up they will be happy to take you there.

We’ll be waiting!