I’m listening.

Directly after seeing the movie last night, I found myself, embarrassingly but oh-so-appropriately, uh…dumbstruck. Stupid, mute things dropped out of my mouth like, “wow” and “intense”.

Like, wow. Intense, man.

Waking up this morning, I realize I’ve dreamed all night about this movie, and in particular, about Ada, but Ada in modern life. I am with her daughter (and grown son?) as the daughter learns to turn on a light switch for the first time but it ends up being a breaker and doing nothing. Watching the daughter, I think about how her mother’s sudden fame (in my dream) as the mute woman who becomes verbal only to speak absolutely nothing of importance, will ruin her life.

Cha-ching.

As I lay there in my bed after this dream, staring at a HomeGoods macrame wall hanging, I realize my mind is moving only in symbols. Not only in symbols within the movie, but in symbols within my life. It’s like I can suddenly fly over my life and see only the symbolism of everything in it.

Suddenly I am no longer mute.

My brain begins to unspool scenes from the movie and to interpret what’s there. I’m not going to go full movie critic here, I just want to mention a few things that reminded me of the important stuff. For sure I will get things wrong, I will miss details, but, as I hope will be true in my own life, I will not miss the point. (It should be noted that I will miss things because I did not watch this movie through the removed eye of the critic; I absorbed it viscerally.)

And this is exactly it.

So.

A movie is a story, and if it’s a worthwhile story, it is also an array of interlocking symbols—hieroglyphics through which, if we can decode them, reveal to us something about our origins, or at least about the origins of real things in our lives. It is as if normally we cannot see our lives wholly and directly as they are, because this kind of seeing is primarily conceptual, though not entirely. Seeing our lives is about seeing patterns. It’s not just being aware of the loom, the fibers shuttling over and under, in and out; it’s about discerning the through-lines, the design of the tapestry. We must fly overhead, sometimes, to see it. A movie, and art in general, is a bird who takes us on her back so that we may see the forest for the trees.

So let’s do it. Let’s do forest (and because we’re doing forest, I’m going to assume you are familiar with the movie already). Prepare for…a messy, swooping ride.

The Piano is about Ada, a mute pianist with a mysterious past and her young daughter, Flora. In the end it is about society and our choices; it is also about freedom and our own hearts. Ada’s narrating voice, which we are told by her is not her actual voice but the voice of her mind, is a woman’s voice speaking in a childlike way—herself as a 6 year old child, when she stopped speaking.

Ada has already rebelled, retreating into herself and refusing to speak as (my interpretation) a recrimination against the civilizing forces she must on other levels endure. Eventually she must choose to succumb to or completely reject these forces. But it is not only Ada, but also Flora (a child full of life—her name meaning flower), who must also choose her path. Just as in the second water crossing, where we witness Ada choosing to succumb but then finally reject death/civilizing forces, in another earlier pivotal scene, we view from overhead Flora literally start down one path, change her mind and take another one—one that will betray her mother and result in Ada’s brutalization and mutilation. Like her mother, she will ultimately choose love and freedom and find a way to exist as her true self in an often brutal world.

The Piano is about Life, and about the restricting, amputating and ultimately destructive forces of civilization. It is also about the tenacity of Life and Love, and the fact that both will often prevail because of their inherent tendency to do so, like a plant working its way up through concrete.

A few thematic symbols in the film:

Death: Stewart, the civilized man Ada is married off to lives in a jungle, but has burned every tree around his home, which subsequently creates a smoking mud pit where he lives. Other symbols: fences, ownership, restrictive clothing, the reverend…

Life: the jungle, the Māori, animals, Ada’s music (as opposed to Nessie’s) “like a mood that passes into you”, nakedness, plants, the beach, Nature in general.

Liminal Images/Characters/Keys: George Baines (white man who lives among the Māori, understands and speaks both English and the tribe’s language), Nessie (not overcome by civilization but mostly) piano keys, water.

Ada is initially required by George to earn back each key on the piano that is already hers. As Ada is married to Stewart, he now owns her and the piano, but George buys the piano from Stewart (hoping to surreptitiously buy access to Ada). Ada enters into an agreement by which she will earn the piano back, key by key, by physically revealing herself to George, who eventually returns her piano to her—her keys—rejecting transactional access to Ada and essentially acknowledging her inherent state of freedom. Stewart acknowledges no such thing, and continues to fence her in, literally barring her from leaving the house before chopping off her finger.

In another scene we are shown an inscription on the side of a piano key: “A” next to a heart with an arrow. I assume this may have been inscribed by Flora’s father, but in any case it is Ada’s initial, and Ada’s piano, and it is her key out of the bondage of her silence. Her key out of the prison of her marriage is yet another piano key —which she inscribes herself: “Dear George, you have my heart. Ada McGrath”. Eventually, Stewart allows George to take Ada and Flora away, where they all live a free, verbal and apparently happy life together. This is also the point, I believe, where Ada enters my dream, moves into some kind of drafty whitewashed condo and overshadows her daughter.

Anyway.

The theme of keys is echoed not only in the piano keys representing a bridge to Life, but also appears in the Bluebeard play the village puts on (and which is rehearsed in Stewart’s home where Nessie reluctantly appears to have her fingers hacked off with an ax in a foreshadowing of this precise event actually occurring with Ada). In the play, a sinister Bluebeard, played by the reverend behind a curtain, threatens the life of Nessie who plays his young wife. Bluebeard offers Nessie a key to a room which she is forbidden to enter (which she disobeys) and which contains his former wives, murdered. In parallel, Ada removes the piano key, disobeys her husband and orders Flora to take the piano key with her message inscribed on it to George (which, though he cannot read, is the one who reads her). Her civilized owner/husband, on the other hand, subsequently chops off her finger—promising he will chop off more if she continues to disobey.

During the play, at the moment Bluebeard (with his creepy skeletal hand) offers Nessie the key, the “noble savages” (I’m just referring to the archetype, not the Māori themselves) storm the stage to rescue her—not understanding the concept of a theater production. They live in the Real, and do not understand the fake.

So.

Essentially, what interests me here is that the civilizing force often restricts, amputates and destroys Life. This interests me because it is dawning on me that this is a major theme in my own life. It is what my books are about, it is why I eat the way I do, why my house looks the way it does. It has its bloody finger in my wardrobe, the way I spend my time, my reading (currently, Summerhill School), my parenting and everything else.

Let’s pan out.

We must choose Life. I must choose Life. We must turn away from the screens, resist the marketing trying to get us to give up our aliveness, to live in their world of death so they can sell us their products and we can be dependent on them. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Ada, after pitching her beloved piano (her voice) over the side of the canoe, eventually (after initially choosing death and going deep into the subconscious) chooses Life. Surprised herself, she comes up for air. She must find her own voice, she must live, not through her daughter’s interpreting her hand signs for others or under the restricting and literally amputating force of a man who owns her. She must cross the water with the “savages”, jettison her proxy, and be born anew.

As must we.

The reason we must board the back of the bird is because we cannot see beyond our noses. We must view our lives from above and see that the civilizing forces—the things we think keep us safe—are often actually amputating forces. They are ultimately destructive and separating us from Life.

I see this in “medicine”, I see it in vaccines—that old-timey holy lie still being sold by the modern-day charlatans, merely new masks on the old snake oil salesmen. I see it in what women “should” look and act like. Still. I see it in the Feminine Mystique—not the book but the lie itself and the parts of it we still believe. I see it in rubber soles that separate us from the earth. In packaged processed foods our bodies don’t recognize. In CAFOs. In pet stores. I see it in all of the simulacra and simulation that become our daily lives.

To reject the transactional, turn away from restriction, amputation and the living death in the life we’re being sold, pick up the key and escape the prison—is everything. It’s a choice we all must make—to dump the proxies, find our own voices and live.

But what does it mean? How do we do it? I think it’s at least in part (as best we can and as often as we can in this altered world) this: speak what you feel, what you know to be true—first to yourself, and then to everyone else. Live in your body—eat when you’re hungry, rest when you’re tired, feel that pain in your chest you’ve been avoiding all your life. Eat real food that grows from the earth (grow your own if you can, or at least as much as you can), breathe clean air, drink clean water, be willing to see what’s there, participate with the messy, the ugly, the overgrown, opaque, useless. Participate. Don’t be for sale. Don’t try to optimize everything. Think for yourself. Stop trying so hard. Color outside the lines for once. Don’t package. Don’t Instashit your life. Get out of your head. If you find there are people and places and situations in which and with whom you can do something close to just being, do that.

I know Baudrillard offers no solution, maybe because “solution” is just another concept, another marketing scheme. If they can get us to believe the marketing scheme, to live in the concept, they can sell us the thing. And if they can sell us the thing and make us think we need it, they can make us their slaves. But maybe Campion, with The Piano, does offer something: Pick up the damned key. Pull up the fencepost. Get out of the mud—and for God’s sake, go deep and choose you; choose Life. She oddly seems to suggest that following your heart and choosing freedom leads to…joy. I oddly suggest that she might just be right. I’m not sure that we know for certain who we are or who we will be underneath the hoop skirts, beyond the barbed wire, when we actually leave the burned out nightmare of the “civilized” and cross over to reenter the Real. Most people just keep losing fingers and are too scared to find out. But I like all my fingers. And hell, I’m already in the canoe. There’s an empty seat right here—come sit with me.

For awhile, I cannot seem to breathe but in small, shallow, ragged gasps, white light glinting off the black of wet rocks, seaweed strewn along the shore. The straps of a worn yellow swimsuit chafe my brown shoulders. I sit listening, listening to the waves, to the wind, to the squall of light-craft shore birds shuttling low across the sky.

Once, I spotted a dying seagull on the sand. Rounding a small peninsula, I saw her, moving her beak helplessly, soft where she should have been taught. I sat with her, looking out to sea, as she quietly slipped from her feathers.

The spirit of a place, a being, a book, a moment, may shear such a swath; the salt wind I once escaped whistles past my ears now. Funny how it seems to whip up out of nowhere, wrapping me in its sharpness, grinding me down, slowly, rock into sand.

Far from the beach, I listen for the flap of old canvas and watch for sandpipers following the waves, piercing the glass shore, long-legged and quick. I wait for the slanting sun, for salt-wind on warmed skin, searching for small shells, for tar-colored sea slugs, savoring the crunch and hot burn of sand on the soles of my feet. I meander along the shore, hair blowing behind me, leaving impressions in the sand. Cormorants skulk on boxy cliffs above and I am drowning, drowning in it all.

image credit chris f

Today is a day of reckoning.

Subsumed by a life, by this year of wreckage, survival, of summoning once again the phoenix to create something alive out of scraps, out of mostly air, for my daughter and myself, today is the day I arrive. I nod at the symbology, the synchronicities, the reflections, and I am grateful for all of it, for every second. But today I look past all the circumstances, all the way through into the depths of my own heart.

Hi.

Last night I finished watching the John Robbins documentary, Love Over Money.

And I remembered who I was.

I remembered that what matters to me, that what and how I love is not of small consequence. That that love is who I am.

And so.

Surrounded by all the beauty and confusion and tragedy and joy and anger and frustration and pain and fulfillment and clutter and activities and love in my life, I clear a path to my writing desk. I plug in. I sit down. I tune in. I drop out. And I begin.

I begin picking through the brambles, sensing the way forward. Following my nose, my intuition, my heart, all my senses alive, alert, responsive. Strewn all around me lie clues, evidence: books, genres, subjects, equipment, animals, plants, gardens, Life. Notebooks, notes, desks, philosophers, writers, friends, beings. Dreams, visions, footfalls, traces. Notecards, systems, plans, diagrams, sketches.

Love.

I follow; I’m tracking, spooring, turning over rocks, sniffing at the ground and peering under overhangs and into caverns.

And I begin to make out the first outlines of something. All the clues, the corkboards alive with photos, yarn strings connecting to other pictures, the scraps of papers, snatches of prose, the poetry—are leading me somewhere.

Ah, yes.

Here.

Here it is.

Underneath everything.

The woods. The wild.

And in the distance, a cabin.

There are paths leading away from the lovely solitude of this little cabin. Do they take me on adventures, into expansiveness and further depth I will integrate back at the cabin? Are they in alignment with my heart? Or are they charming excursions that mostly take my time, my attention, my energy from where I long to sit with the trees, from what I desire to consider, ponder, discuss, read, integrate, destroy, create? Will they take me from the path that has called deeply to me for as long as I can remember?

I must choose wisely.

Though I think I do at times, I don’t really regret anything in my life. I have lived and am living a life of love, of caring, of chosen responsibilities, of promises. A full life, but one without much time alone in that cabin in the woods. With miles to go, before I sleep.

Miles to go, before I sleep…

This is the poem that resurfaces, always, in my life: Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. But pattering on bare feet like a quiet house mouse this morning to find and reread it, I realize this is not exactly the same poem I think it is; that I have in fact fused this poem with another in the same book—I search for the other and find it easily, the page opened so many times that it reveals itself without any effort at all: Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.

How could I, all these decades, all these readings, have somehow thought these were a single poem? I begin to re-read this second poem, and slowly, so slowly, start to uncover the treasure within the fusion of the two—the overgrown path, stone by stone, revealing itself. But before I can fully discover it, another poem falls out of the yellowed pages onto the floor. The book, a gift from my first husband (boyfriend at the time) when we were in high school—contains this missive, a hand-written note which will change the course of my life. In it he is offering me…everything he has to give. We are 17. I accept. We marry. We have a baby. We create a life.

Miles to go before I sleep.

A high school teacher who often stamps his foot in frustration and rage in front of my desk because I am “not living up to my full potential”, bleakly, defeatedly asks me at a graduation dinner what I will do with my life now? Now, he means, because I am pregnant. And he knows. He also gifts me with a poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. Characteristically, I assure him I’ll be fine, but I understand him and his question and poem, with my whole soul.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

A junior college English professor walks with me to my car. I am wearing elbow-length black leather gloves. I am heading home to my toddler, my baby boy. The professor talks fervently, gesticulating, imploring that I not choose the conventional path, that I choose my love of English literature, my gifts in writing. I never forget what he says. In fact, I will carry his words, and that short walk to my car, with me like a talisman, a charm, for the rest of my life. But at that moment, I turn away.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

I meet a man in a junior college night course and when I talk with him in the parking lot under the streetlights after class, in my light blue t-shirt with lace around the collar, I find that I am shivering, shaking, my body alive with something I don’t understand. Unknown to me, he will follow me across the state and I will suddenly spot him on campus. I will feel as if I am in a dream. A long time later I will choose that dream for awhile, dedicate my thesis (a book of poetry) to him, and then turn away.

I have promises to keep.

Later, a second college professor pleads the same argument as the first, promising I can do anything I want to with literature, with writing, within this world I love so much that is…my world. His words, too, will never leave me. I tuck the letter he has written me about it amongst my most treasured possessions, and also, I keep it in my heart. But at that moment, I turn away.

I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

And miles to go before I sleep.

Writing my first book, I find myself on a chilly fall afternoon, the grass covered in butter yellow leaves, sitting on a cold stone bench in front of the English building at my old college campus. I am remembering what it is to love words so deeply I can barely breathe. I cannot hope for anyone to understand what is so preciously held within my heart. I understand in that moment that I can choose to double back, to not turn away again. But it isn’t time; I have more to do before I sleep, more miles, more beautiful miles.

In these beautiful miles, in my beautiful life

I raise my beloved son and watch him fly from the nest on his own, creating his own beautiful life. I later go on to have my sweet daughter. I love my life.

And

I make concessions and compromises.
I fulfill promises.

And

I also go back to school and earn a master’s degree in English and a bachelor’s in Environmental Studies. I fall more and more madly in love with philosophy, with literature, with poetry, with writing and with professors, with Nature, with authors. I stumble and fall headlong into affairs of the heart. I write my own poetry, my own books. I write and write and write; essays that spill out of me like water and never stop.

I re-read the letters.

I remember the words, the walk, the poems.

I never really forget any of it, but I am preoccupied, to say the least. And I am questioning what all of these words mean—and whether or not just being alive is enough. It is.

But.

This morning. This morning!

I sit down at my desk and then almost immediately stand up again and hurry to the bookshelves and begin gathering book after book into my arms, clutching them to my chest, tears running down my cheeks like the rain that is suddenly falling from the sky outside my writing room: Mary Oliver, Bill Plotkin, Sylvia Plath, George Monbiot, Vandana Shiva, Richard Powers, Fitzgerald, Franzen, Cheever…on and on. They gush out onto my desk and splash onto the floor.

Circulation! Blood, platelets, serum…Love. Life.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair

But there are TWO poems here where I thought was only one. Two! And they live in me still—intertwining, circling back, echoing, reverberating, reemerging.

It is here I find the treasure. Unlikely as all get-out, a rare gift never quite forgotten, but also not quite remembered.

Hidden amongst the undergrowth, the bracken: the overgrown path. Covered in mud and debris, but still shining, shining, shining I find not only the path, but the lost diamond ring; I am lucky beyond words.

***

I realize suddenly this morning that I find myself standing at the end of one poem and at the beginning of the other:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I return my now-dead first husband’s poems to the pages where they belong, beside my freshman I.D. card in which I have an inexplicably hideous perm. I realize that I too have offered and given…everything.

And now.

That husband is dead, one child grown and the other well on her way. All these years I was never lost; I never really forgot, and I loved and love it all—every moment on every road. Out of love, I made and broke and fulfilled so many promises, walking all those gorgeous miles and miles and miles. And now I find myself, still with the most delicate and worthy of promises left to keep, swathed in the loveliest life, suddenly in a place where I can now gather everything I love to my heart and let it all spill out onto the floor, in this house, at this desk, in this life. No longer miles to go before I sleep.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.

I choose the road less traveled now.

And it will make all the difference.

image credit Eva Hamitaj

No issue with that tho, right? Stories inform, they educate, conjure emotions, delve, skim, awaken. Most of all, they entertain. They can feel like we’ve experienced so much of life when all we’ve really done is parked our patoots on the couch.

But hold up…

Entertainment: Watch. Story. Program. Feed. Stream. Channel. Content. Narrative. Plot. Network. Web. Net.

Huh…

(and silly me, I thought entertainment was just fun and games)

But that’s another post for another day, and one I’m pretty sure I’ve already written.

Ahem. Anyhoo.

Ride with me for a sec here. Let’s do this thing I do (not just me): differentiating capital from lower case. In this instance: life from Life.

Lower case life is conceptual; it’s words, it’s a story, a framing, an overlay. I’m not necessarily talking Netflix or networks here, although certainly those can and usually are related—I’m talking about the stories we tell ourselves inside our own heads about ourselves and our lives.

Upper case Life is Reality. Lower case reality is what we think and the stories we tell. What we highlight and hide, intentionally or otherwise.

Lower case life is neat. It tracks. It makes sense. We understand it. The problem is, lower case life isn’t true. It’s just a story. It’s a fantasy or a nightmare, and the real problem with that is that we don’t realize it. We mistake life for Life, unwittingly exchanging reality for Reality and most tragic of all, missing the point.

Life, Reality, isn’t neat. As Alan Watts notes, in The Meaning of Happiness, you cannot separate the flower from its muddy roots (well, you can…but spoiler alert: it dies.) You cannot abstract and live the story instead of living Life (well, you can try—and oh how we try—but life dies and you’re left with Life, which you’re gonna be kinda mad about, I guarantee it.) And herein lies the issue.

While stories give us a satisfyingly tidy A to Z, Life gives us…everything. The Reality is that we ARE Life.

Try this: Picture a map you bought at B & N. Now picture the actual floor or dirt under your feet. Different, right? Story v. Capital L Life. Concepts v. Reality. Words v. Presence.

As always this is a bit tongue in cheek as we’re writing and reading words and creating a story even here, but words and stories are not a problem, the conceptual is not a problem. Everything becomes a problem once we forget we’re no longer dealing in Life, Reality and Presence; we’re dealing with illusions.

Period.

And boy howdy how we’ve forgotten!

Enter: Pain with a capital P.

Pain debuts when Reality doesn’t match the stories. When the terrain was not pictured on the map. We get upset: this wasn’t supposed to happen! In the story, there was an ending I liked! I was entertained by the show, I organized my life according to these concepts I really believe in—but in my Life, I’m suffering!

The best we can do in the story model is to weave unexpected, unwanted Reality into our little stories, do a re-frame. Some of us are experts at that, at rewriting history, at telling a story about what happened and what it means so that we feel better, so that we can go on with all of it. But we don’t deal with the actual issue, that we think the story is Real, and it isn’t.

Simulacrum doesn’t make for a well-Lived Life.

To quote Alan again, same source,

…the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change.

Circulation and change.

These do not occur in stories. They may appear to, but these appearances are only part of the story. Part of the formula. Conceptual. Mapped.

Circulation and change are Life. They are Reality. And we don’t tend to like them.

What we don’t like is that Life and Reality are messy and uncomfortable. They include icky things like diarrhea and mosquitos and decline and death. They don’t let us hold onto what we’ve achieved or stockpiled or planned. They include a lot of things we don’t want included in our story; things we try our best to control or hide or whitewash or eradicate.

Which all brings us, of course, however obliquely, back to Neil Postman, and to Conscientious Objections. To Postman’s essay on Alfred Korzybski.

My friends, Alfred Korzybski is a man after my own heart; this apparently off-putting dude attempted to keep language grounded in Reality. I’d like to invite him for tea but he’s dead.

He’s still invited.

Korzybski was someone who understood what I mean by Life and life. He understood circulation and change. He understood that words tend to (and by “tend to” I mean exclusively) represent concepts, and that we as humans tend to confuse concepts with Reality (and by “tend to” I mean…). So, hero that he is, he set about to align language more with Reality, or at a minimum, to insert into language, reminders that we are not able to represent the whole picture with that language, so people would be less likely to substitute concepts for Reality, life for Life.

Korzybski talks about this process as “abstraction”, which is exactly what I’m referencing with upper case and lower case. (See? Tea.)

Korzybski brilliantly suggested, for instance, inserting dates referencing this person’s (or era or whatever’s) take at that time, like this: Watts₁₉₄₀.

Yas, queen! (Appreciation not appropriation)

Brilliant.

He also advised a) sprinkling a lot of “etc.”s into speech and writing to remind the speaker and receiver that we’re obv not talking about the whole pic, and b) using be-verbing with caution if at all (“I am confused” v. “at this moment, I am not sure what’s going on”). Imagine what glowing mental health might blossom from this type of Reality framing! We could even combine these suggestions, as in: “Iₐₚᵣᵢₗ ₁₆ ₂₀₂₆ ₁₂–₄ ₚ.ₘ. watched ALL the episodes of Big Mistakes on Netflix” rather than “I am sedentary and lazy”, the way my mind tends to spin it. Language shapes thought at least as much as thought shapes language.

Korzybski understood abstraction. He understood mapping vs. terrain. Stories vs. Life. And he got it not just on the level of thought, but on a physical Reality level. He understood that even what we see with our physical eyes is not Reality. That even that Reality is also an abstraction, is also lower case reality. In Reality, what is true is: “billions of electrons in constant movement”, when what we reconstruct as our lower case reality (which we mistake for upper case Reality) is: “a cup”. In other words, even what I refer to as Reality is just a concept!

We could go deeper here but I don’t think functionally that we need to.

We are movement, we are a happening. We are not static things, like a cup, and even a cup is not a cup.

Most of us know this, but how many LIVE it?

Let’s go there.

What does LIVING IT actually look like? I’m going to hazard a guess that the answer may shock you. It’s so simple, but it’s so NOT how we do things. Concepts, words, life v. Life, reality v. Reality—is about control. But that control is only ever an illusion. The antidote? Back to Watts₁₉₄₀ (and all sages prior and post):…acceptance.

But that’s too simplistic. That’s a concept. Let’s open it up.

True acceptance (obv not acceptance as in rolling over) is wide-openness, but it’s also awareness. It’s realizing we like stories, that within the framework of communication—both in self-talk and communication with others—we unavoidably tell ourselves and everyone else intentional or unintentional stories. That we talk in maps because that’s how we’re hard-wired. That words can do nothing but highlight and hide and are never Whole Truth. That any verbal or written expression is an abstraction. It’s not necessarily stopping the abstraction or the stories that we’re after, but perceiving them, as Wattsᵃˡʷᵃʸˢ (in my own semantic alignment, superscript means something enduring throughout someone’s life, no problem, you’re welcome) would say, listening to them like the barking of a dog in the distance, the sound of waves on the shore. Or my own personal favorite: wind in the trees.

Our brains and egos (as in logical thought and protective mechanisms, respectively), if we can falsely separate the two concepts for our purposes here, are built for stories. They’re built for abstraction. In fact, we cannot function without it. We cannot bottom-up all of the information our systems take in. We must top-down, we must abstract to even walk down the street or pick up a pen. It’s ok. The trick is in the realization, at least part of the time, that we’re not ever communicating or thinking the whole, or the Real. Above all, it’s in not expecting that things will follow the storyline we like best.

We can all understand from experience that THIS is where the pain dissolves; have you ever had the experience of listening to someone go ballistic about something you don’t give a crap about? Or maybe that you weren’t even aware of? Yeah, that. We care because we invest our thoughts, our energy, our time. And it’s not about not investing, it’s about realizing we’re investing, and that we don’t actually get to draw the map from A to Z and control the outcome. We still get out our pens and get in our cars and do all the things, and certainly we write what we want to write and drive where we want to get to, or at least head in that direction, but we don’t get to live by the map.

We have a beautiful opportunity to actually live this gorgeous, unimaginable gift we came here for. We can elect to simply take as it comes and enjoy the rollercoaster ride, to be truly present for what’s really here—the terrain—every stick and stone and insect and banged knee. THAT is our experience if we allow it. Or, we are blinded by our stories and don’t experience it at all. But if we can hear the crashing of the waves on the shore and BE HERE and appreciate it all, rather than keeping our eyes glued to the map, then we’re in the pocket. Then we’re Alive, rather than merely alive.

Even when we’re suffering.

I’m₂₀₂₆ not all the way there yet, friends, but wind in the trees is one of my favorite sounds of all time, so we’ll see where this story takes us ;).

Prize

Price

What is the price of keeping your eyes on the prize?

What is the price of keeping your eyes on the price?

Or the prize, in keeping your eyes on the price?

The prize of keeping your eyes on the prize?

What do we lose by focusing on the cost, or the reward?
What do we gain?

Opportunity cost.

There is no no-choice.

Where do you want to go?

Not go?

Who do you want to be?

Or not be?

Where do you want to spend your energy?

Where do you not?

What do you create?
What do you destroy?

What do you feed?
What do you starve?
Wolves, and all that.

And do we have a choice?

Just a few questions for me, for you, today.

Me rabidly mumbling: “NIMBYs on steroids…”

Anyhoozle…

I’ve spotted baited pest pucks with the plastic frame literally eaten through by cockroaches trying to get to this apparently delicious stuff that kills them or renders them infertile. Déjà vu! Reminds me of the lines I see around my local McDonald’s (or the CVS shot clinic for that matter—hey, don’t hate, you get a free donut! We’re all about keeping you healthy, folks! Keep it moving…nothing to see here)…

Just for fun, let’s do a little side-by-side comparison, shall we? Yes, my friends, you know we shall.

Let’s take our tenacious cockroach friends as an example here:

Graphics note: please add to Packaging Strategy “designed to draw in consumer”. Both columns. I can only go so many rounds with Chat, which someone smarter than I am hilariously and accurately dubbed, “the Amelia Bedelia of the internet”.🤣 🤣 🤣 A truer word…

But I digress…

Eerie resemblance in this chart? Anyone else seeing it?

As in, both columns are essentially the same??

Makes you realize the term “consumer” is a little more dead-on than you’d originally hoped, yeah? (Like TV "programming”… “Just name it what it is, Dr. Evil, hide it in plain sight; it’ll be our little inside joke muahahahaha…”).

By design, the path to the end result (their pot of black gold at the end of your particolored—hey! sounds like a party!— rainbow™ of disease), is a little more convoluted for human pests, but the result is the same. Harder to track, and buys you time to make them rich before you die! Win-win! Along this superfun highway of illness, maiming and eventual early death after repeated ingestion of highly processed food-like products et al., the death system will also milk you for all the medical procedures and pharmaceutical products (and those to address their side effects!) you’ll need to attempt to treat all these boringly common diseases and disorders that tend to come part and parcel with this diet:

Obesity, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), hypertension, coronary artery disease, atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease, brain fog, impaired executive functioning, depression, anxiety disorders, mood instability, addictive eating behaviors, gut dysbiosis, increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut), irritable bowel symptoms, reduced microbial diversity, chronic low-grade inflammation, autoimmune conditions, exacerbation of inflammatory disorders, hormonal imbalances, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), fertility challenges, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, dental caries, sleep disturbances and reduced satiety signaling.

And you silly, you thought it was all “a natural part of aging”…

Customers For Life (or what’s left of it), I believe is what they call it.

Hey, another plus: you get to be inattentive, more compliant and less of an annoying rabble-rouser if you’re hobbled with this stuff, don’tcha know. And why don’t you get all those “vaccines” they want you to get while you’re at it? Oh boy! Who doesn’t want to trade their health, bodily autonomy and sovereignty for a (mercifully shortened) lifetime of pain and suffering?

Speaking of those shady-shammy pharmaceutical products, vaccines, let’s add to the fun and make sure we’re being inclusive here! Dollying-out even more for a minute (sorry, the term “Zoom™” now belongs to the online meeting industry), it’s clear we need to think multi-pronged delivery system. For example, here are a few of the known potential impacts of cell towers, cell phones, vaccines, herbicides and environmental plastics and other contaminants: endocrine disruption, hormonal imbalance, reproductive changes, microbiome alterations, chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, DNA damage, neurodevelopmental effects, cognitive changes, respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, increased blood pressure, metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, liver damage, kidney damage, chemical toxicity, carcinogenic effects, increased risk of certain cancers, developmental delays, fertility impacts, decreased sperm quality, thyroid disruption…

oh shoot, look at the time. And we were having so much fun!

Hmmmm…does something feel kinda, well, off to you?

Maybe a little re-Webstering is in order: who is the real pest here? Who, exactly, is the weed? And whose opinion gets to be right? Who decides? Who gets to highlight and hide? In the nouveau-terminology of 2021, who gets to control the narrative?

It’s weird, but I don’t remember there being a vote. I don’t remember being asked what I’d like for my body, for my children, for my table, for my neighborhood, for my world. I do seem to recall mandates. I remember 5G towers appearing overnight. I remember Whole Foods being taken over by Amazon and then Amazon taking over everything. I remember fast food joints popping up on every corner. I remember not being allowed to go get a salad at a restaurant because I said no thank you to injecting a pharmaceutical product into my body. I remember my daughter not being allowed to go to public school for the same, uh, offense.

Am I pissed about it, hell yes. But did I create my own world when I wasn’t allowed in theirs anymore? Hell yes. Is it way better than anything they offer? You betcha.

I’m grateful to know about the affects of pesticides and herbicides on the body. I’m over the moon to have had access to education and revolutionaries unveiling the evils of processed food and more importantly, the blessings of Real Food. I’m grateful to understand that marketing inherently creates perceived deficiencies, and that this is a story we don’t have to believe—we’re not deficient in pharmaceuticals, in cloud seeding, in chemtrails, in chemically poisoned food, in immune systems; we’re simply poisoning and ignoring ourselves into oblivion.

We’ve forgotten who we are.

I’m grateful to get that the pathologization of the body, of childbirth, of menopause—the denial of the wisdom and competency of the body—is false. I’m grateful to understand that the body requires Real Food, fresh air, movement and balance, despite the sedentary, passive decrepitude (“ask your doctor about blah blah blah, our new drug we’re selling the hell out of and want to enlist your help in making us even wealthier even though you, like your Dr., know next to nothing about our product*) that’s marketed on every channel and in every available space and encouraged by technology—and to get to turn away from all of it and create a world as closely in alignment with the body’s wisdom, with Nature, as I realistically can. Not everyone is this fortunate. Not everyone understands the stakes.

Do you ever have that dream where you’re trying to tell someone something that will save them, but they can’t hear you? Where your phone doesn’t have numbers on it or you’re running through molasses or something and you can’t get to them? I think a lot of us are in that collective nightmare, watching people we love, people in general, get sucked under.

But more and more of us are also waking up, looking around, and shaking off the nightmare. Come one, come all, you’re welcome here; there is indeed room at the inn!

Let’s think long-term: as the survivors of this onslaught, those who will be the ones who are healthy enough and alive enough to bear children and pass on our knowledge (as opposed to those who aren’t and don’t), may at some point become the norm—sadly, by process of elimination.

Consider this: Some German cockroach populations have developed something called “glucose aversion”; they’ve evolved to perceive glucose (used in bait) as bitter instead of sweet. And they just walk away.

So, what I’m saying is this: there’s hope.

While we’re waiting for this evolution in our own species, stay awake, friend. Be the outlier. Stay healthy. Stay connected to Nature. And whatever you do, don’t take the bait, because it may not be the Land of the Free anymore, but it sure as hell may become the Home of the Brave again. High five, heroes.

Image credit: Harden, C. (2026). Highly Processed Food vs. Synthetic Bait Systems [Infographic]. Co-created with ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Yeah. That.

In my reading this morning, I came across an expression of something that made such exquisite sense, that put into words something I’d never seen or heard put so rightly. Here it is:

Nothing is more degenerate than the kind of ethics or morality that survives in the shape of collective ideas even after the World Spirit has ceased to inhabit them—to use Hegelian expression as a kind of shorthand. Once the state of human consciousness and the state of social forces of production have abandoned these collective ideas, these ideas acquire repressive and violent qualities.

—Adorno, 1963, as cited in Butler, 2025, p. 4

He said “degenerate”.

I don’t think there exists a more apt description of the current vaccine situation (most egregiously but not exclusively the covid debacle and the ethically-devoid childhood vaccine schedule disaster). I won’t call it “the current vaccine debate”, because it’s simply no longer (and in truth, never was) a debate. If one chooses to look closely, they will find the safety and efficacy “science” behind vaccines a complete, utter and absolute embarrassment of a sham. This is not conjecture or my opinion, this is merely what is. If you’re in doubt, or if you have children whose health and lives may hang in the balance of what you know—or fail to know—pick up any one of these books (no question there are more great ones out there; these are just the one’s I’ve personally read):

Kennedy, Robert F., Jr., and Brian Hooker. Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.

O’Toole, Zoey, and Mary Holland, eds. Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth. New York: The Turtles Team, 2022.

Siri, Aaron. Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines. Independently published, 2025.

Farber, Celia. Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2006.

Alternately, merely look at the science itself—which would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious. A few key items to search for:

• Randomized placebo controlled trials (RCTs—the “gold standard” of vaccine science—spoiler alert, there are zero) because…placebo. See below

• Which placebo the pharmaceutical product was measured against (should be saline/water—spoiler alert, there are none using true placebos, they’re always compared with another vaccine or active control)

• Length of monitoring after injection for adverse events (some are as little as 4 days)

• Size of the study sample (how many people were in the study—often miserably few)

…and my friends, prepare to be scandalized by this information alone; this is the “science” we all trusted when we allowed these pharma products to be irreversibly injected into our most vulnerable: our elderly, our infants and our children.

You can perhaps imagine why actual gold standard science has never been applied to vaccines.

Those continuing to “debate” are either as yet truly uninformed or willfully ignorant—clutching their blindfolds (and sporting nurse masks alone in their cars no doubt)—or, despite the glaring evidence to the contrary, sputtering ye olde “safe and effective” programming from the rooftops, in the throes of a blind religious fervor*.

Butler, in Giving an Account of Oneself (2025) states,

The truth is, “The World Spirit” no longer inhabits the simulacra ethos of vaccine-land (an inverted Disneyland owned and operated overwhelmingly by 4 corporations)—or at least we’re finally, thank God, reaching that tipping point. The way those who have historically profited off of the lies regarding the safety and efficacy of these products seek to continue those profits despite the unmasking of their fraudulence, is to continue to impose themselves and eclipse the present with their lies via repression and violence. (Aided and abetted by legal immunity from the vast number of deaths and injuries these products have caused, I might add.)

Mandates are repression and violence.

Denying personal sovereignty is repression and violence.

Injecting a pharmaceutical product into a human body or forcing any other medical procedure against a person’s will or without (actual) informed consent is repression and violence (remember lobotomies, or forced sterilizations??).

Stripping human rights such as education, access to nature, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to earn a living, ability to congregate, etc., when the pharmaceutical product/medical procedure is refused, is repression and violence.

Silencing, defaming or disappearing those who speak out against the pharmaceutical product/medical procedure is repression and violence.

Violence and repression are evidence of a dying ethos, perpetuated by the few who profit from propping up the corpse, Weekend at Bernie’s-style, for as long as possible.

Think about it: why would a product (this is merely a corporate product we’re talking about here, masquerading as some kind of moral necessity) need to be enforced violently, or those who oppose it repressed, if it was actually something of value that people would choose of their own accord when provided with the truth about the product??

Crickets.

Let’s never forget the censorship, repression and oppression we endured during the covid train wreck that made unseeable that the emperor of vaccine science (among other atrocities) was, indeed, naked.

Not to minimize the actual pain, suffering and death that resulted from the intentional and heavy-handed application of this repression and violence of vaccine mandating by governments, companies and other people (it’s all people) who perpetuated it, but the signal of this repression and violence is actually good news; we’re nearing the end of the war.

Many of us were aware of and sadly became fugitives of this war fought not only for our own and our children’s health and very lives, but for ethos dominance. Perhaps one of the most important historical events of our lifetimes, this battle over not just personal or medical freedoms was supremely concerned with the emergence of a new state of human consciousness. Those who made bank from the old consciousness are fighting like hell to keep their golden geese, and fighting dirty. A dirtier fight I’ve never seen.

And vaccines are just the tip of the ice burg.

But the very fact that these repressive, violent methods are in play signals that these frauds are over—their time is up; they’re on their way out.

In reality, these hucksters are no more than modern day snake oil salesmen doddering on way past their expiration date. It’s time we run these degenerates out of town for good.

Yeehaw

and

Buh-Buy.

*Aaron Siri’s brilliant framing as “religious”.

image credit nickbrumbywesterns.com

I learned a new word the other day, which in itself is kind of what this post is about—words (the medium is the message, you know). I won’t keep you in suspense: the word is “reification”. Now maybe I’m just an idiot, but I’m going to assume that if I didn’t know this word, perhaps you don’t either. So here you go:

Reifying means: to consider or represent (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing : to give definite content and form to (a concept or idea).

But I’ll go you one better: It’s mistaking the conceptual for the Real.

As it seems to happen, several things I’ve been reading/re-reading recently all gelled at the point of this concept, at this junction: Neil Postman, in his book Conscientious Objections, from the essay “Defending Against the Indefensible” named it for me. Which brought to mind Truckee (I’ll get there in a sec). Enter recall of Alan Watts lectures. Enter Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity. Enter Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. I’m pretty sure it’s also in Ivan Antic’s The Physics of Consciousness and probably a billion other things, but you get the point.

Which makes it so funny that we’re all writing about it. In words. In concepts. Not in reality, because Reality can never be captured in concepts or words. Which is…The Point (though reality is a different story altogether. [Literally. Literally a story 😂 okay I’ll stop!]) At best, words are a finger pointing at the moon, understood as that. At worst, they’re pure propaganda. And let’s consider that this doesn’t just encompass the micro—the word itself, single words or concepts, but the meta—mistaking the world of words for the world.

There’s where we really walk off the cliff, friends.

I remember when I first got a glimpse of the concept of reification—I think it was about 20 years ago, probably from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth or something along those lines that I was reading at the time. Ditching the concept/not confusing the word (the idea contained within the word—the highlights and hides), with the actual thing—was freedom to me. I went around looking at things in Truckee, where I was at the time: river, stick, stone, duck…without their word labels. It was like I was really seeing for the first time.

The Lie: a word=the actual whole thing

In the truly wise words (words!) of one of my favorite professors, Dr. Robert Hubble, words highlight and hide. In other words (words! It never ends!!), they are never the whole (in the wrong mouths, they’re also deceptive, manipulative little buggers too).

The Truth: a word ≠ the actual thing

In fact, words are merely sounds—or even more accurately, per Alan Watts, “noise” (spoken words, anyway)—represented by graphic symbols, representing stylized collections of concepts. Full stop.

Like the part and parcel of this post, language, while useful in the extreme, can never be anything more than this bunch of made up symbols representing the symbolized thing. Forget that and you’re doomed. It’s like AI: use it as a tool and it’s great. Think it’s anything else and you’re a goner.

Hoodwinkers afoot abound…ahoy!

Words, however, because we believe the lie (a word=the whole of the actual thing) make us little gods—well, they make some of us little gods; they make most of us little automatons, plebes and proletariate—serving those little gods. In a sense, words create a pretend universe and make us think we live in it. But do words themselves create it? Or do people create using words? The definers are the rulers, the gods. These gods can be kind or they can be cruel, but they rule over you, you can be certain of that. Intentionally, consciously, or not.

ASIDE: you can bet I’m teaching my daughter all of this. Take that, world-of-words creeps and tyrants, I’m onto you. Even better, those of us who actually see the pathetic bleep you’re trying to pull are not only critical thinkers ourselves, but are waking up, consciously encouraging and raising more and more pesky critical thinkers in our wake. For many of us, the anger has integrated, and we’re creating aligned lives more and more in Reality (where the creeps have no jurisdiction, sorry, toots [both kinds]).

The more you live on a screen, the more you live in their world—the more control they have over you, because they define more and more of reality for you and isolate you from everything that could easily prove otherwise (a classic abuser trick, btw). They are looking to literally obliterate Reality with their images—and guess what? You can live there too if you’re cool enough! Can you imagine living in Meta’s world? Literally wearing something over your eyes, telling you what reality is?? Can you imagine the cojones, the audacity to trademark the word (the concept, the reality) meta???? They’re literally telling you they are the creators of meaning. Don’t bother with it, they’ve got it covered, just buy their little mask thing. And that’s just the latest in a long line of stupidity including social media overall. Don’t let them create your reality at your own expense for their benefit. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t step into that boxcar of your own free will. Just don’t do it.

Instead, learn this word: reification. And then, as Postman recommends, ask these two questions a lot: Who said so? And why?

You might be reeeeeeeeeeaaaaal shocked for awhile.

This never gets old. Capitol “R” Reality never gets old; it’s not always what we want it to be in our little realities, but it’s fresh. It’s the concepts that often age badly.

Little gods.

As we should well know by now, he who controls the narrative controls reality.

But not Reality.

Which do you live in? And if you don’t recognize the difference—there’s your answer: lower case.

If you don’t know the answer, you are both a little god of your own reality and missing out on Reality, on Life. You are a subject, not a king, not a queen; a servant, a slave.

And here’s almost where I leave you. But:

Reification.

Wake up, Mr. Green.

Reification.

Psst.

Here’s the door, slip out with me.

Pull the bag off of your head, let’s help each other untie our hands and walk out of the dungeon.

Remember: Words create knots or loosen them. They are handcuffs or they are their keys.

They are nothing…in Reality.

In reality, they are everything.

Are you allowing everything—your reality—to be created for you rather than living in Reality?

It’s time, isn’t it?

Let’s sit under the night sky, listening to the sounds of the night creatures, the crickets, the owl, the frog. The Real. Let’s feel the grit of the soil. One, two three…let’s open our eyes and see each other! See our children! Let’s really see for maybe the first time, what’s actually there. Without words. Without concepts. Without the little gods telling us what to see. Reality is all you will ever have of value. Touch it. Breathe it in. Feel its sharp edges. It’s why we’re here.

Unreify.

Verb it:

Live.

This is a sign to me that it’s something we’ve simply forgotten. Something that perhaps has been pasted over and hidden.

That’s the way it hit me, anyway.

This morning Neil Postman is blowing my mind, as usual, in that deceptively humble, polite and humorous way he does, with his 1992 book, Technopoly. (I am only comforted when I think about the fact that Postman is no longer with us and can no longer actively continue to assist us in navigating the current numbing maze of technology—although I think he’s left all the crumbs we need to find our way—by how many many books he authored, and how many I have yet to read—hurray!). Postman is a genius. The end.

So what hit me this morning was a sort of spin-off of Postman’s analogy of a card deck. The deck of cards analogy is used to highlight that as Americans in particular (though also most of the world at this point, to varying degrees) we’ve lost our sense not only of history itself, but of the anchor that that history affords in ascertaining meaning in our lives. The deck of cards: one understands fairly quickly, when handed a new deck of cards, that there is an order to the cards: the king of spades will follow the queen of spades every time. However, if you shuffle the deck, a three of hearts appearing after a king of spades won’t phase anyone. Basically, the idea is that we’re living our lives within a shuffled deck of cards, which makes just about anything plausible (as long as it begins with “studies show”…—that’s also from Postman). Which makes us, as a side-note, sitting ducks for manipulations of all sorts. It’s technology that’s shuffled the deck—spewing clouds of information in no particular order, raining down on our unprotected heads at every moment. (Postman brilliantly goes on to say that our society is now living with AIDS—Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome; our cultures’ “information immune system is inoperable”.

I know it’s easy to skim this stuff, but just take in the ingeniousness of that for a sec.

Okay—big breath in, and let it go—so that’s your backstory.

So I’m laying in bed reading this, and a thought rudely interrupts, “I need to finish this online course today before my first client.” And then I think about what I’m reading, and then about how sometimes it’s very difficult to sort out what I want or need to be doing at any given moment (when I have free time): do I read Postman or Pantanjali? Do I work on a client report? Organize my daughter’s bedlam of an art table? Grocery shop? How do I decide?

Being in the now of this occurrence occurring to me, of course there are analytical rubrics I could apply: what do I simply feel like doing, or what will cause me the most pain if I don’t do etc. (and in any given moment, the two may or may not be the same thing). But if there’s some breathing space, some peace and quiet, nothing is imminently required of me, and what I want to do is a little bit more diaphanous and unconfined, it becomes apparent that I could apply any rubric at any time, and thus, they’re all meaningless.

Wait. There it is! My first clue: Meaninglesssssssssssnesssss…. (please do me a favor and picture this uttered by the Cheshire Cat).

So finally (thank you for your patience), THIS is the thought that hit me first as mind-blowing and almost immediately afterwards as completely obvious: there are levels.

Levels?? Categories?

(ASIDE: Forgive me, but I like systems. I find that systems enable me to live life as a highly functioning person, which I enjoy.*)

So anyhoo, these levels or categories in descending order might go something like this in my life (all of them happening of course, in the eternal nowwwwwww):

1. Life Happening (making food, playing with my daughter, cleaning the house, etc)

2. Work (writing, creating, client sessions etc)

3. Organization/Structure (choosing what to do when)

4. Foundational Meaning (WHY)

**Let’s please for now just ignore the fact that these are somewhat arbitrary categories because of course we can label or un-label anything out of existence (“everything is nothing”/”nothing is everything”/”everything is love”/”everything is energy”/”there is nothing but now” etc.), and of course any time we use a word we highlight some things and hide others. Just roll with me here for a moment. **

Here’s the point: what we’re often missing is not only number 3, (organization/systems), but number 4—the meaning by which everything is structured and organized and from which everything else we choose to engage with flows.

As Americans in particular, we’ve been stripped of our traditional foundational meanings on a large scale and left to redefine them for ourselves (if we even know to do so) in an age, as the Postman would say, of the bottomless glut of shuffled-deck information that is the technopoly we swim in and breathe every moment of our modern lives. But they’ve not only been stripped, they’ve been surreptitiously supplanted.

I wonder what would be the result of asking 100 people on the street: what is the foundational meaning of your life?

Religion previously formed the foundation of people’s lives (and obviously still does for many). Beliefs used to be the foundation (and obviously still blah blah). Cultural life. Family. But now, I would hazard, for the majority of “typical Americans” isolated and stuffed with endless information, there’s merely a blank stare—a glance at a watch—a habitual gaze at one’s phone glued to the hand, already inactive for too long. A scrambling for distraction—something, anything but depth, anything to continue the masquerade that we know what we’re doing on any level approaching actual Foundational Meaning. It’s a sickness, it’s contagious and it’s deadly. It’s quite possible that for many, the glut of information, the shuffled deck, becomes The Thing in Itself, becomes the meaning: devoid, simultaneously, of Meaning. I see it every day, and so do you, if you’re paying attention.

Can you ask yourself: What is the Foundational Meaning of your life?

Because I’m sorry, folks (and congratulations), but you’re on your own with that now. And if you don’t ask yourself that question, you’re getting swept up in the raging river of Digital Nothingness. Observe! Let’s let’s look up from our screens, ladies and gentlemen, and notice that this river has already breached its banks. And it’s coming for you.

Okay. So let’s now go back to the Levels of my Life.

When I understand that these levels exist, then I understand why laying in bed on a Wednesday morning reading Postman, who is pointing at the naked emperor, or Patanjali, literally laying out the science of living a meaningful life, is so damned important. Is so critical.

Certainly there is a time and place for every level, but when I take the time that I’m not otherwise occupied, as often as needed, to reassess and ask myself The Real Questions and realign, go back to 4, rather than getting caught up ceaselessly in the first three levels (oh so easy to do!), I’m investing, I’m anchoring my life in Meaning.

We as a culture are missing Meaning—entirely. Unimpeded access to unending, disordered and often dubious information via technology can act as a fantastic servant, but is a serious cluster-fuck of a leader. Because it is devoid of Meaning.

We might compare information technology, quite aptly it occurs to me, to the mind. Not only does I.T. consume the ego-mind, but it mirrors it: the ego-mind is madness, directly due the the truth that its activity is devoid of Meaning. Without Soul, or whatever you’d like to call the guiding part of you that is Truth, Oneness, Knowing, etc., information is only mind entertainment. Like info tech, the ego-mind is a useful worker but a shit boss. Technology in general, and AI specifically, is devoid of Meaning, while dangerously poised to play God, to usurp Meaning. In many ways, it already does.

When the cat’s away…

(The cat, my friends, is away.)

If you as an individual fail to recognize this turn of events, this even-more-watering-down and destruction of Meaning, you’ll simply and without apologies be swept away in the raging river of meaninglessness. But mark my words, you’ll be told it’s a pleasure cruise—and you might even believe it.

It’s every man for himself at this point. They’ve infiltrated your entire life with technology, with information. From morning til night we are in danger of so subtly, so unobtrusively, so easily, being coddled along by the nothingness of information, of systems, of life choices built on nothing.

So they can be your number 4.

Wake up, Mr. Green.

Here’s my call to arms this morning. My clarion call:

Fucking find your level 4.

I’m not advocating just desperately grabbing onto whatever life raft you spot first—having a baby or hanging onto every word of a YouTube guru or getting married or joining a stupid cult or something. These can be (as almost anything can be) just more distraction and aren’t the road to Meaning. Beware of anything your ego-mind may urge you to use that is merely more giving over of your power and responsibility for your life. I’m talking about getting yourself the F to shore.

Believe me, if you’re not entirely asleep or sold-out, on some level, even if it’s subconscious, everyone is looking for level 4. Which is why we become markets for marketers. Don’t be a market. If you don’t consciously wake up and do the work to define for yourself your level 4, someone else will define it for you. And believe me, it will benefit them, not you. Don’t engage cruise control and go to sleep at the wheel just because Tesla made it possible, because it’s easier, because you’re too distracted to do otherwise, or because you taking time out to assess your life and determine your 4 is inconvenient and well, just not that entertaining.

Getting yourself to shore and to 4 probably looks like some form of meditation. Of turning away from the noise and going inward. Sitting or walking in nature with no agenda. Finding out what’s inside you besides an echo of the outside noise. Consistently. And then creating a life around that.

It’s so simple. And so easy to forget to do. There’s just so much to distract us.

But here’s the thing: you only have one life—at least in this incarnation. You only have so much time. Don’t relinquish your humanity to become a market for someone else’s product and profit. Be the infinite being you are. Remember your Meaning and LIVE. Without level 4, you’re not just drifting, you’re being methodically and intentionally swept towards the drain at an alarming rate. And this isn’t metaphorical: are you eating what the indoctrination machines tell you to eat? You’re going to get sick, become a market for pharma and die. Are you spending your time on what the machine tell you to do? Basing your life on popularity, or Instagram fame or whatever stupid thing is the thing right now? You’re becoming a market for social media and consumption. You’re going to die spiritually. You’re going to cease to exist in any meaningful way.

I’m telling you, your very life is at risk here.

Without defining your level 4, you don’t have real peace, you have endless distraction. Your structure is meaningless, and your life is a house of cards. And deep down, my friend, you know it.

We have to distill our focus.

We have to take responsibility for ourselves and stop allowing ourselves to be, as another brilliant Neil Postman book warns, entertained to death. Informed to death. We have to find our level 4. When we find that, everything else falls into place, everything else makes sense. But here’s the catch: it takes un-learning. It takes effort. It takes the ability to be with pain. And it takes time. A myriad of forces large and small want to make sure we don’t have that time, that we don’t un-learn our indoctrination, and that we don’t understand that we need to make an effort. Certainly they want us to turn to our screens at any hint of potential pain. It’s not in their best interest for you to wake up—they lose their markets. But if you don’t, you lose your life.

It’s a slippery slope, information, technology, and don’t I know it.

But I’m awake. I’m reading in bed on a Wednesday morning. I’m in my level 4 work, which is the most important thing I could be doing right now. And so, just by reading this, are you.

Excellent work, us.

Have a fantastic day, and I wish for you in this holiday season Meaning and thus, true Peace.

*As someone with a history of being (I feel unfairly) lambasted for enjoying my systems so much, I was validated and encouraged by the Netflix series, Alone Australia (and probably the U.S. one too, I just haven’t watched it), in which individuals are dropped off in the wilderness with 10 items of their choice to survive as long as possible and win a cash prize. Here’s why I was validated and encouraged: it became quite obvious early on that they had to organize—wait for it….SYSTEMS—to survive! How to get food, shelter, etc., everything distilled into a system for survival. I realized that this is what we do as humans. I’m just being human—and it’s my level 3 gosh darn it.

**(Side rant: …even though raw and vegan…underwhelming. Restaurants are most often the lowest quality food for the highest price. Generally over-salted, over-processed, over-fatty…over it. I think we’ve been so duped into thinking of restaurant as “fancy” or “high quality” or “fun”.)**

Anyhoooo.

I imagine what I actually want to write about is somehow related to this, but we’ll see.

What I actually want to write about is a deer.

Driving home from said restaurant in the dark, Vivi and I hadn’t even a gotten half a mile or so when I saw it. To even think about this brings tears to my eyes: a regal upright head, antlers alight in oncoming traffic; an impossibly beautiful creature laying, hurt, in the median of a busy street.

It took me a second to register what I’d seen: a deer, hit by a car, but still very much alive, unmoving, head up—steadily staring into the onslaught of oncoming traffic on a crowded Austin thoroughfare. I ordered ChatGPT to find the closest emergency vet service who would see a deer and navigated into the nearest turn lane.

I turned the car around as soon as I could and a few hundred feet later, sure enough, there he was. I pulled my car in front of him, stopping traffic in the left lane. He looked right at me—and miracle of all miracles—got to his feet! Clearly with a broken leg or foot, he began limping into oncoming traffic going the other direction—I warned my daughter not to look, that he might be hit again, but then another miracle, he pivoted and headed towards us! I slowly maneuvered my car so that it blocked both lanes on my side and he gracefully, though three-leggedly, leapt across the road and into the woods.

Huge sigh of relief. Thank God, he was safe.

All the way home I silently cursed cars, and stupid restaurants, and streets. As my daughter had voiced herself just the other day, I also fervently wished I lived in a cabin somewhere, somehow outside of this mess humans have created, blindly destroying the very shoulders of nature upon which we stand. One nation, under cash, control, and numbness.

But here I was, part of it all. Trapped.

It took a few days for this experience to percolate before I realized that while I was certainly crying for the beautiful deer, for the loss of our collective connection with nature, angry at the futility of the countless cars driving by this wonderful creature and no one stopping to help, that I was, of course, also crying for me.

Ah. So.

To put it mildly, I’ve been through an incredibly challenging time since my move to Texas. Almost fully absorbed in not only the move and re-creation of mine and my daughter’s lives in yet another new city, I was also unexpectedly weighed down by sudden huge financial concerns and the threat of loss of housing and food instability. And angry about it. Finding myself in a real mess, I’d also become largely disconnected from what matters most to me. Rather than consistent connection with the expanded Self, joy and nature, I’d found myself more often than not allowing myself to become weighed down by fear, anger, resentment and survival.

All the true sages, both ancient and modern, know that when the body is calm, the Truth resurfaces—hence not only the recommendations for all of the yoga, meditation, and other Oneness reminder practices, but also the admonition for pure food and care for the needs of the body. When you’re in survival mode, the mind becomes absorbed in, well, survival, and there tends not to be much room for the mind to step away and allow for the experience of pervasive Truth. Sometimes, however, out of an absolute fall-apart, we’re forced into surrender, and we find ourselves laying, dazed and hurt, in the middle of a busy street, just staring into oncoming traffic.

This morning I realized that witnessing that injured deer holding his gorgeous head up in the middle of the road, amid the impersonal, inhuman stream of shiny metal boxes, mirrored to me what I’d been through—what we’ve all collectively been through. Our humanity, our natural beauty, our True Natures have been all but snuffed out by the deafening roar of mechanistic “progress”.

But when someone saw him, acknowledged his life, stopped traffic and he got up and got off the road into nature, not only did HE win, but I did too.

Because guess what: amid the roar and the mess, someone had stopped. I had stopped. I can stop! I had not only wanted to help, but did; I can help. He gathered himself and gracefully loped off to safety—and not into a cage or a house or a zoo, but back into the woods! I can turn it around too—and stop running into traffic. Just like a Jungian dream, I was every part of that encounter: He was me! I was him! We were the same. And that realization gave me all the understanding and hope I’ve been needing. Maybe I’ve sustained some injuries too, but with the help of others who see me and stopped to help, I was also stopping, helping, getting myself out of the middle of the road, out of the danger of oncoming traffic, back into the woods where I belonged. And though it’s been messy at times, even when I was down, I’ve still held my head up and looked that traffic in the eye, and you know what? I’m standing back up.

But here’s the thing: even though I was the injured deer, I was also the mess, the traffic, the crushing “progress” the street and the woods. I ran over myself, I injured myself, I broke my own leg, and I’m also the healing and the home I’m escaping back to. Just part and parcel of the whole.

There it is: Gratitude.

On the way home that night, Vivi and I prayed that the deer would heal and have plenty of food and rest and warmth and love. Of course, unknowingly, I was praying for me too— for all of us. In this big old dream we’re in, sometimes you have go to a restaurant, thinking it’s a special treat, to realize that what you really want and need is just an apple. And sometimes you have to realize you’re part of the mess to also be the one who turns the car around, holds back traffic, accepts help and finds your way back home.

I know.

But let’s just start.

Defining Freedom (as opposed to “freedom”) requires a stripping away. Belief, mainly, must be disposed of. What a deceptively simple sentence! Einstein referred to humanity as seeing itself through an “optical delusion”. It would seem that stripping away that optical delusion would be key. It’s also easy, on the other hand, to strip everything away and thus come up with nothing at all, which is its own Truth, but I’ll just define, at least for this initial part of the discussion, right off the bat, that we’re discussing Freedom within the human experience. I hate to say “the human experience” because that typically brings to mind some odious visions of bread lines or on the other end of the spectrum, Cafe Gratitudisms, but let’s ignore those here. By “the human experience” I only mean what we experience while alive as human beings. Period.

Ok. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere already. As a human being, what does Freedom mean? Defining it from a small “f” perspective, it’s easy to come up with any number of “freedoms”, such as the freedom to vote, or the freedom to travel. Sure. But let’s strip that away too. While those kinds of freedoms may be important to a particular individual’s idea (or a group’s ideas) of freedom, while related of course, they’re not what I’m getting at today. These are more of a result of Freedom as I’m discussing it here.

As conflicted as the constructors of the U.S. Constitution were, I (and a few others perhaps) also think they were onto something, namely that stuff about freedom from tyranny, the right to self-govern and freedom as a natural right. I understand they were referring to government, but I think we can apply some of this to a definition of personal human Freedom that I’m aiming for here. I see those three are most certainly key. So let’s start there:

Freedom is:

1. Freedom from tyranny 2. A natural right 3. Self-governance.

Do these even need discussing further? Freedom from tyranny: freedom from oppression. I think that’s clear and obvious. Freedom as a natural right: Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness…also clear. By definition, as long as I’m not impeding your pursuit of these, then we’re good. *Which does not, however, include me doing something I don’t want to do that you want me to do that you perceive will make you happy; that’s tyranny—see how we’re off to an awesome start?* And self-governance: I should be able to make my own choices, as long as they don’t violate your rights (see this here entire paragraph above).

Let’s jump into a just little bit of stuff I’ve been reading lately.

Simone de Beauvoir says something similar to the FFs in The Ethics of Ambiguity: “Freedom is the source from which all significance and all values spring. It is the original condition of man, a condition which he is perpetually obliged to confirm.” Okay.

I believe it could be successfully argued that Freedom is something we ARE, not something we have to earn or learn. But it’s also something we can become confused about, and others may attempt to obscure our freedom either by manipulation or by force and in that sense, Freedom is something we may need to re-member. And, as Beauvoir confirms, it’s also something we are “perpetually obliged to confirm.” Why? Assumably not only because others may try to obscure it or remove it, but because we can do this to ourselves in our own minds. Ah.

*Does everyone care about Freedom? I think we all feel the bondage of not-Freedom in things that bind our freedoms to varying degrees . But I also think that few of us ever really attempt to get down to brass tacks to excavate the underlying Freedom or to separate that from ensuing freedoms. You’re welcome.*

At least for myself, I often recognize freedom in others that I don’t experience myself at least at times, such as the freedom to say what I want to say, the freedom to look the way I want to look, do with my time what I’d like, act in ways that I don’t, consequences be damned. I think it’s fairly obvious (evident in “consequences be damned”) that most of these un-freedoms tend to be self-imposed and of two types: 1) necessary social-behavioral prunings or dampenings so as not to self-destruct/self-sabotage or to impinge on others’ actual needs (or may simply arise from off-the-rails egoic desires e.g., I may want to read all day but my daughter needs a present mom) or 2) generally emanate from conscious or unconscious fears.

Whether we make choices from perceived societal expectations or avoidance of a predicted fallout, often, an un-free feeling is a result of complying with others’ expectations in order to receive a more important wanted result (e.g., my truest desire is that my daughter remains a well-adjusted person and feels loved which trumps the very real desire to read all day) or payout (acceptance, financial or other reward), some of which we may perceive—and may perceive correctly in some instances—as necessary for ours or others’ survival. More often, however, what appears as a survival need is not, and transcending the fear may open previously unimagined possibilities.

Do this enough, and we might eventually get to Freedom.

Freedom (capitol F) as a concept is on the face of it, pretty simple. We’ve already defined it, really, in few sentences—in 3 points. Freedom (cap F) as a lived reality is the sticking point. Is it, as Pamela Anderson might point out, merely a matter of challenging oneself over and over into a larger and larger playing field? Discovering that with each fear overcome, paper tiger after paper tiger becomes merely impotent wads of litter? The actual doing of this is bravery (and hence… Brene Brown’s career)—never easy, sometimes death-defying, at least to our egos (which is the only place any of these battles are actually taking place).

Or is Freedom something else?

And what about those who set out to conquer a tyrant (whether disguised as a person or situation or in one’s own psyche) and meets physical death because of it? I think as humans we all want some kind of a guarantee that this won’t happen TO US. I know I do. SDB herself addresses the reality of the situation—the issue of “situated freedom”.

But let’s kind of bunny-hop over that, because here’s where we transition from merely the human circumstantial experience, the situated freedom (although quantumly, I recognize the holographic nature of the situation itself as well). And here’s that crux: freedoms happen in situations, whereas Freedom just is. Realization of Freedom may or may not result in freedoms. As Eve Babitz says in Slow Days, “The rain is freedom; it has always been like that in L.A…”.

Put that in your pipe (but don’t smoke it. Smoking is bad for you).

Isn’t it true that I am free to make any decision I want to? Choose anything that is available to me? And, given my choice doesn’t harm another, that the only thing holding me back is fear? Isn’t it true that some freedoms may not be worth my time or my life to me? And that some may be? Small “f” freedoms are individual—I may not care about the freedom to dye my hair purple at my place of employment, but to you, it may be symbolic of something meaningful to you and worth risking your livelihood to do so—and by doing so, you may discover many more freedoms you assumed were unreachable, or may not have even been aware of. (Or you may lose your job, be blackballed in your profession, become severely depressed and unemployable and die penniless in the gutter, I don’t know.) Let’s also acknowledge the slippery slope of relinquishing freedoms that we don’t personally care about—I’m not saying that freedoms are unimportant, not at all. But point being, Freedom is a different animal.

Freedom (big “f”) means I am not internally imprisoned or bullied by anyone, including myself—no tyrant (including myself), holds the keys to a prison cell where I reside; there is no prison. But True Freedom doesn’t mean freedom from fear. It means that whether I experience fear or not, I don’t let myself and thus my decisions become derailed by it. I can make whatever decision I want to make (and there may be real things—small “t”—to fear), but fear does not control me. Wake up, Mr. Green.

To be clear, Freedom is not about wearing your favorite porn star’s swag to church or finally saying a big “f you” to your ex. Big “f” Freedom is about Peace and Love. It’s about understanding on an integrated level (enlightenment!) that there is nothing else but these, no matter what forms would appear to be on the screens of our lives, and that as adults (but actually always—although this is where small “f” freedom is vitally humanly important) we never are at anyone’s mercy. Freedom is the integrated embodied understanding of The Field and that everything is merely possibility and tendency, and that when we shift our gaze we shift our world. A miracle, as the Book of Miracles reminds us (praphrased), is a shift in perception. And a shift in perception, Bohm reminds us, the observer (paraphrased), enables holomovement and creation of form.

I see it, but I’m not there with that truly integrated, embodied understanding. I still sometimes cower, at least to some degree, in the presence of tyrants both imagined and real (although in this sense I’m getting at and getting to, they’re all imagined). But at least I see there’s a path, and at least (I think) I’m on it.

Do we resist Freedom because it takes us out of games we like to play with ourselves? Because they’re all we understand? Do we deny its existence because to embody it seems too huge, too unfamiliar, too scary? Do we prefer that others hold power over us, at least perceptually, so that we can continue to complain, to live small, because that’s easier? And what would it be like to live in Freedom? Can we even imagine Peace and Love being the foundation of our existence? Does even that seem…boring? The ego likes entertainment. It prefers a fight. It loves to have a problem to solve, tension to resolve. But what if we can pop out of that, into…Freedom? What if we do?

What

If

We

Do

???

Just asking you because it’s what I’m asking myself.

Bon Voyage!

So, what would Postman say if he were here to see the dawn of AI-generated writing — like this very explication you are reading? Probably something like the following:

If the 18th century was an “Age of Exposition,” where men were remembered chiefly for the clarity and force of their written words, then ours may become the “Age of Simulation,” where we remember no one at all. The written word once testified to the labor of thought — a human mind grappling with reality and leaving behind a trail of argument, insight, or imagination. That labor was visible in the text itself: in its structure, its cadence, its failures as well as its triumphs.

AI-generated writing obscures that labor. It produces the form of thought without the struggle of thinking. What was once a record of a mind wrestling with truth or beauty is now a product assembled by statistical processes. The danger is not that the machine will think for us, but that we will accept its products as if thinking has occurred.

In earlier eras, the written word was a measure of intellect and character. Men were remembered for their words because their words revealed their minds. What, then, are we to remember in a culture where the words can no longer be reliably traced to a mind? If all can produce essays, sermons, poems, and letters with a click, then words themselves will lose their authority as a mark of human achievement.

Just as television transformed public discourse into entertainment, AI may transform writing into a mere simulation of discourse — a performance without a performer. If the written word once bound a culture to sustained argument and reflection, AI-generated writing may bind us instead to a culture of endless surfaces, where authorship is anonymous, responsibility is diffuse, and meaning is increasingly elusive.

The central question is not, “Can the machine write?” but, “What becomes of us when we no longer value writing as the trace of a human soul?”

Postman, of course, did not live to see ChatGPT or Substack or Medium. But I suspect he would have raised an eyebrow, chuckled darkly, and reminded us that media don’t just change how we say things — they change what counts as saying something at all.

And so, with an irony he would surely appreciate: the “Postman-esque” passage above was itself generated by AI. A simulation of a simulation, in a culture that may be on the verge of forgetting who, if anyone, is speaking.

Quite the pickle.

Generally, I think it’s safe to say that all people use some combination and synthesis of many factors, whether purposely chosen or not, to determine how they live their lives (e.g., WHAT MATTERS to them).

Okay.

I suppose that at least to some degree adequately sets the stage for transition to or for the folding-in of the AI question. That “question”, for me, here, in this context, is baked into the question of “WHAT MATTERS” in terms of the human.

(WHAT MATTERS…does asking WHAT MATTERS, matter?? It depends, Sisypheanly, on the philosophy you’ve selected, intentionally or not.)

Whatever the guiding principals or philosophy or framework one uses consciously or unconsciously as their yardstick, I assert that there is potentially something to the fact of being human that is, if not meaningful (and we can’t say it is for sure), then at least unique. Perhaps this is the only thing we can own as humans: that we are, at least in part, human, and not something else. (And AI, in all its glory, is not.)

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: AI as a tool, as an extension of or varying form of other things we use, such as a dictionary, a library, a book, a secretary, a personal/professional assistant is one thing and in my mind, nothing of too much weight or of moral/ethical value, nothing to discuss, though I think it could be argued that this begins, perhaps, to poison the well. But let’s just say for the sake of things here that sure, when a pencil becomes a thing, when paper exists, you no longer make scratches in the dirt with a stick.

But the moment you use AI to create your art in place of you—and by “art” I mean any expression that is particular to you and your skillset, which is arguably inherently the only expressive characteristic of your particular humanness…then you’re finished in that realm—you have relinquished the thing that made you express your existence in a way no one else could have. Maybe that relinquishing is only relinquishing in some FORM a representation of you—but it’s a codified version of you nonetheless. It’s not all about expression, but let’s stay here for a moment.

It’s tricky. Expression is always codified due to the definition of expression itself: to express something, there is the genesis, the original spark, impulse or idea or whatever, and then there is the expression of that: two different animals, and one is removed at least to some degree from the other. But this is almost not worth discussing as expression necessitates expressing, and if it doesn’t, then it remains in the realm of internal experience, which we’ll get around to later in this piece.

True artists get the closest to pure expression. As Alan Watts explained, we hone our skills as artists to become more and more accurate conducers of that pure expression; a skilled pianist can express the spark (etc.) more purely than a novice; we are the instrument and we can play it well or poorly. But with AI, the codification via further codified processes is at least twice removed from its original source, introducing an exponentially multiplying entropy/dilution/distortion of expression. And not only is the expression filtered by human-codified processes, but at some vaguely defined (or not) incarnation point, by non-human codified processes. It’s one thing to sing another’s song, but quite another for AI to sing it.

The synthesis of WHAT MATTERS and AI, is: WHAT MATTERS WITH AI. First, it would seem, the first question must be answered: WHAT MATTERS. By this let’s go a bit further than I did earlier; not WHAT MATTES TO YOU, but WHAT MATTERS, period. Because this question cannot be answered without applying an adopted or created philosophy, we cannot actually definitively answer the other question WHAT MATTERS WITH AI. However, if we define in any way that a human existence has value, then WHAT MATTERS for the human must have something to do with its humanness. [This doesn’t assume an arbitrarily assigned hierarchical value (e.g., rocks—>plants—>insects—>animals—>human)]. And its humanness must be defined in some sense in terms of the snowflake principle; that is, there never was, is or will ever be anyone exactly like you.

AI alters, if not removes, that humanness; it erases you and offers in your place a synthesis of data; a simulacra.

If WHAT MATTERS has something to do with the authenticity of the human experience, then AI cannot intervene. If AI becomes the distorting lens through which we see ourselves, or the filter or fiber through which we express our experience, we have become the machine, a mocking of the one thing that we can truly own: our humanness.

The onus of responsibility/opportunity to define AI’s role for ourselves personally, is upon each one of us; if we refuse to see this clearly for what it is and simply allow ourselves to be swept up in the convenience of what AI offers, then we are at risk of being subsumed by the codification, an assimilated and homogenized version of the collective, losing the only thing we might be able to say for sure is our own.

DOES our humanness, our uniqueness MATTER in the larger scheme? I think so, but I don’t know—if there is a thing such as “meaning”, then this one is probably all we’ve got. I mean, perhaps, like other life forms, we are here one moment in the span of Time, and gone the next—did we MATTER? It’s that snake-eating-its-own-tail conundrum: either everything MATTERS, or nothing does. Perhaps this is an integral part of the MEANING question. Let’s talk about one more point before I go.

CAN a human be subsumed? Or does the human’s experience, even of being “subsumed”, belong to it as its consubstantial human experience and humanness?

What do you WANT your life to be??

What does AI actually interface with? What does it affect? CAN it ever actually interface with the human? I’d yell an unequivocal YES!! Certainly it can affect the human’s perceptual experience of itself and of its interaction with the “outside world”, in addition to its expression. AI can affect our experience of our daily life in multiple ways. Also, going a little bit outside our discussion here, we can’t deny that cyborg reality exists. That real-life and now commonly occurring integration of technology not only into the human form but the human psyche/mental processes exists. This goes, I suppose, beyond the question of AI, but is certainly not tangential to it. But now we’re back then, at the start: what does it mean, at the foundation of it, to be human?

I suppose this discussion is just that: a discussion without a conclusive answer. What I do know is that if we each individually eschew this discussion, that potentially, much is at risk—possibly everything.

Let’s go here, now→If we cannot determine WHAT MATTERS from an objective viewpoint, we can certainly determine it from a personal perspective. But as previously discussed, that necessitates the adoption of a philosophy—or does it? On one level, it does. Evidenced in our reactions, decisions, plans, even thoughts is our personal consciously or unconsciously adopted philosophy.

But there’s something else, too.

Just the experience of existing is a thing; it doesn’t have to be solely about expression or receptive understanding: The Real. The origination—the spark. Life. Without this keyboard, without this screen, if I am in a state that is as uncontaminated by thought and technology as possible (it’s like jet fuel in the breastmilk or microplastics at this point and a matter of degree of contamination rather than whether or not), then I can have an experiential, somatic, phenomenological experience of being that falls entirely outside the realm of the conceptual. Perhaps THAT is all we have that is truly ours. Passively relinquishing this experience, no matter how painful or blissful, to non-human influences, benign or not, may just be the biggest heist ever executed on humankind.

The politics going down in L.A., going down in the world, when I moved, I knew were my hill to die on. I was never going to be able to look past the facade barely covering the biggest scam I’m sure I’ll never see the likes of again in my own lifetime. Not that it was just L.A., but L.A. was backing this B.S. like its new fake best friend. And so I left.

Leaving L.A. for me was like leaving a lover—the one you knew you’d be so happy with for the rest of your life (the one, as Eve would say, you didn’t mind too much) if you could only put up with their philandering, but you can’t, so you leave. Only it was never L.A. itself that was a problem, it was these sinister people “in charge” of it, so I guess it was more like leaving the lover you knew you’d be happy with forever if only their awful family didn’t interrupt your life and your lover didn’t put up with them so much that you had to leave. But a place can’t kick out the bad eggs I suppose, so in the end it isn’t in any way the fault of L.A. itself, and I miss it dearly. But I’ve talked so much about loving L.A, about leaving L.A., written so much about it; it’s not that I ever think I’ll get over it, it’s just that it’s what it is. Which is entwined with, but not exactly about what happened to me this morning, which is that I saw and understood something about myself I’ve honestly never seen or understood before—which feels like it’s a majorly pivotal point in my life.

In my life I have felt consistently as if I should be different: more “together”, less “all over the place”, more “contained” and
dignified” or “respectable”or something. Instead I was always leaking all over the place, trying not to be leaking all over the place, trying to be less obnoxiously different than I should be, trying to fit into these attractive boxes that always tore or bent out of shape or got all soggy from my leaking out of them as soon as I got in.

But enough suspense. Here’s what it is that happened this morning:

In this one moment of clarity, because I could see it in Eve, I could suddenly see it in myself: I’m not a mess, I’m passionate. I’m in love with so much of life. I’m not defective, I’m beautiful.

I find myself sobbing out this lifetime of thinking I’ve been a side-eye, people whispering about how I wasn’t quite fitting in. And me taking on the job myself of trying to fix myself so I could be how I was supposed to be but wasn’t.

**To be honest, I want to be a little bit pissed that no on told me I was okay a long time ago. But you know what? I can think of a lot of people who did just that. But I couldn’t see it (I’ll get to the bottom of that in a sec). Maybe people who I wish would have seen me when I couldn’t just bought into my own view of myself—I guess I can’t blame them for believing me—who knows more about themselves than…them? And you know, I think lots of people want you to think something’s wrong with you so that you don’t live your full life, so that they, in their own insecurity, feel like at least they’re doing better than you are. But really and truly, I could start naming people who saw me and loved me and celebrated me exactly as I am, but then someone I didn’t name might feel left out. Anyway, thank you to those of you who actually do see what I couldn’t. Til now.**

This essay (this “thing” I’m writing at this moment) is a great example of how much I’ve thought of myself as a mess. As too much. As too little. Just about every time I write about something personal, this voice shows up: Why should I write about myself? And why should I think anyone would be interested? How conceited, how self-centered, how messy, how embarrassing, how…wrong.

All of this probably comes from my poor mother, who was never acceptable to herself. Who couldn’t bear to look at the monstrosity that was her childhood long enough to have a proper decade or so of crying and to get past it so that she could let herself live, let herself be, and stop trying to be someone more acceptably-1950’s-perfect—to fit some mold and being so angry that she couldn’t quite do it—and pretty upset that I wouldn’t fit in it ether. No blame.

But check this out:

Understanding myself as a passionate person rather than a mess makes every puzzle piece fall into place.

It’s why I fall in love with everything and feel so much. It’s why I can’t learn enough about everything I love. It’s why I don’t ever want to let L.A. go, not fully. Passion is messy. Sometimes it’s loud, it’s leaky, it’s a lot of crying and laughing and everything in between. It’s not contained or dignified, at least not all the time. Sometimes it’s very quiet. Sometimes it doesn’t want to talk, or do anything—passion takes a lot of recovery time, especially if you’re an absolute introvert like me—and sometimes it loves jabbering and doing all of the things it thought it wouldn’t ever want to again just yesterday afternoon.

Passion has its challenges. But I don’t think they need to be fixed, I think they need to be embraced. This is the moment I realize I will probably never have perfect “balance” in my life like I’ve always tried to have and failed miserably after feeling super “soft life” for three days in a row. I’ll probably never be the person who’s super consistently “together” in a traditional way, because as soon as I understand something, I’m ready to move on, or take it further—I’m always in a state of learning, a beginner, in a way—so I’m never really that put-together person who appears to others just so wise and teaching the same mastery class for 30 years in a row. This is the moment I realize I’ll never look or be “perfect” in the way people appear in magazines or some books (thank God not Eve’s books); as a commercial actor, I both made fun of that and also tried to BE it. I’ll probably never be consistently consistent at anything but being passionate about what I’m passionate about, which is a lot, usually all at once. Which is often frustrating, because you can’t do and have and be everything at once, particularly because a lot of it is mutually exclusive or at least contradictory. I often want everything at once, I want to experience everything I want to experience, which for the first time, I don’t see as embarrassing, or too much or self-absorbed or wrong. I just see it as how I’ve always been and as okay as any other way to be.

I’ve always wanted to read every book about crows or plants or whatever else, and every book by whatever author I’m into at the moment. I’ve always wanted to live in small sanctuary-y places, make them beautiful, and in them paint, laugh, sing, dance with people I love, and also by myself. I’ve always wanted to be with plants, to touch trees, to sit in grass, to play, to work hard, to love my kids and my home and my pets and plants and friends and family and clients in my own way. But I’ve never felt entirely free to be entirely myself unless I was alone, without guilt and shame and self-recrimination ruining my day. And while the guilt and shame and self-recrimination may persist as echoes of everything I’ve been through, those voices now become background noise: thinking I or even any of that should be different stops today.

No longer is that person that I am unacceptable to myself. No longer will I try to fix her, change her, reign her in or tell her she shouldn’t be exactly who she is, no matter how painful how I am sometimes is for me. No longer will I believe people who sigh exasperatedly down at me from atop their high horses. (Ride away already, folks).

I can appreciate the ways in which I am consistent, where I show up, such as a parent, or in my work, as a professional—but as a parent and a professional who is always interested in and pushing into new content, into new ways of being, into new insights and not embarrassed to admit that even though I’m really good at one kind of thing, that I’m also always taking that further and branching into new ways of teaching and learning. I think my kids and my clients benefit from this. I can appreciate where I’m organized (which I very much often am and love to be), where I’m steadfast, and where I’m very much not a mess, because I’m certainly all that as well. I’m all of it.

**Here’s where that over-used quote about “I contain multitudes” (or something like that ) would go but I refuse to put it in here.**

I think over the years that integrity has become something that is the basis of everything that means anything to me. Whenever I catch myself out of integrity, which I certainly do, I do my best to right the ship and the situation as much as possible. But I think I didn’t see that by judging myself so harshly for who I am, who I can be at my core—a passionate person, with all that entails, was actually so far out of integrity.

Eve herself might have been shocked at what I’m going to say next, and I’m pretty sure shocked was something Eve wasn’t very often. What I’m going to say is this: I have Eve Babitz to thank for being willing to (and being unable NOT to) be anything but unapologetically Eve Babitz. And for bringing all of her into her writing. *And to her editors for not neatening her up too much*. In all her craziness, her messiness, her wildness, she was, I’m going to dare to say, integrated. I could explain that, but I won’t. And because I could see her, in all her whole-hearted-life-feasting, in her imperfect-ness, her enthusiastic extreme messiness, in her leaking all over the place, her fierce independence, her huge love of life, mixed in with her intelligence, her consistency, her goodness, strength, her honesty, her hard work and her talent—all of it together—as extraordinarily gorgeous, I could suddenly, in a flash of light, see myself that way too. And what have we been comparing ourselves to anyway?? For how much I’ve seen myself as so vastly different from Eve, I suddenly see that our similarities are even more striking. And Eve and I, these passionate women that we are, we’re just fine.

Signing in here on Substack, it’s been so long since I’ve been on here that they make me forage around for a passcode in my email, which almost ruins the whole thing. Almost.

But here I am.

I don’t know if or why writing is important to me anymore, but sure as anything, it just starts happening on its own, eventually, so I guess it’s that at least.

The Eve book I’m currently on is called Two By Two and is about the L.A. dance scene. This is a world I’m not currently nor have I ever been a part of, although my sister once took me country line dancing at In Cahoots, which is one of the dance places Eve references in this book. So I do feel part of Eve-things in a haphazard but mostly meaningless way.

I don’t think what I may be getting to here has much to do with the world of dance, even though I sometimes wish I’d been a dancer—it seems so alive—that intrigues me; but there it is, I’ve already said it: it’s Eve, and because of Eve, it’s also dance too, which is ultimately the same thing—it’s really the whole thing about not just BEing alive, but feeling and acting like it too, rather than just maintaining and struggling to do basic things like get a good night’s sleep now and then amid the laundry and the unending battle with the toilet ring.

I find myself now in the perfect house, in an almost perfect city (it isn’t L.A., so it’s not perfect, but it’s as good as it gets since L.A. isn’t L.A. anymore like it used to be), recovering still from an adrenal crash that reminded me I’ll probably really and truly die some day. Which makes me think about the fact that I’ve not ever planned my life (much at all, it turns out—despite the really believable trompe l’oeil facade otherwise), but especially not around the fact that I’ll die eventually. Or rather, except for my surprisingly rock-solid consistency with a lot of things (my children, my health and my work including writing etc.), I’ve pivoted with the wind and can’t seem to do otherwise no matter how hard I try. Something was always behind me hissing stridently through its teeth “ONE LIFE, YOU HAVE ONE LIFE”, and I want to experience as much of what I want to experience as possible, which doesn’t bode well for things like living in one place forever or having one job or other things people tend to think of as reliable and focused or doing it right, whatever my parents seemed to value, and thus what I’ve always thought I should probably value too, but couldn’t quite figure out how to do it.

I have to say I’m actually very glad this is the case, although realizing that this living in this body thing won’t last forever is a bit of a shock—despite, well, everything that would make it seem like I’ve been thinking about this all along. And maybe I have. I don’t know. And maybe it’s a bit of a shocker for everyone no matter what, I don’t know that either. But it sure makes me want to Really Live. Even though I didn’t actually plan on dying, I’ve also spent a good portion of my life in a kind of half-panic about whether or not I was spending my time “correctly”—which includes a lot of spiritual work that I now don’t see as half as valuable as Just Living For Real With What’s In Front of My Face, which now that I think of it maybe is a result of all the spiritual work. But anyway, I spent a ton of time thinking about when I got to the end of my life would I think I had spent my time right. This, it turns out, is very different than planning on dying, because you think you’ll just be able to go on forever checking to see if you’re doing it right, when it turns out that’s not true at all, and you might as well just live. Which is very different than thinking about living or rather, just living. So, it turns out, it seems I don’t know how to just live all that well, unless you count everything as just living.

In any case, this is embarrassing to admit.

Eve was a master at just living, and at least from what I can tell from her biographies, autobiographies (which is pretty much everything she wrote) and her “fiction”. She miraculously didn’t feel the need to Be Something, which is pounded into most of the rest of us basically from birth. When she asked her mother what would happen if she didn’t really want to Be Anything, her mother told her that probably everyone would be just fine.

Wow. Can you imagine how different life would have been if that’s what your mother had told you?

Eve partied and danced and drank and drugged and then woke up and did it all over again. For a long time. With true reckless abandon. No apologies. She wasn’t always nice, her house was a disgusting pig sty (an affront, even, to actual pig styes) and she always did just what she wanted. She knew she didn’t want to be tied down—by a man, or kids, or anything else, but especially those, even though she also had a part of her that sometimes wanted to be rescued and just sort of slump into that kind of life. But she didn’t actually do it (not that that’s how everyone, including me, sees children, husbands or family life, but I get it).

I think Eve was very much the counterweight to her friend/mortal enemy, Joan Didion—Eve lived life from the other side of the coin but was no less a sharp intellect or observer—while Joan’s famous giant brain was front and center, even as she hid in plain sight behind her husband and her cold reporter’s take, Eve’s intellect was obscured by her sparkly dresses, her cleavage and her just as out-there as her cleavage lifestyle that distracted everyone until she was almost dead; that’s the way she hid. She also loved people and cared and really saw them and experienced everything. I’m not saying this is better than any other way to do things, but it sure was full-out. The fact that Eve is dead now is exactly the same fact that will be true of all of us at some point. No matter how we lived, or didn’t.

I find myself, so unlike Eve (which is probably why she both appeals so much to me and repels me at the same time), mostly picking up the house, making sure my daughter, the dog, the fish, the plants and the guinea pigs are fed at regular intervals, and that my clients are moving forward in the best ways possible. And trying to make sure I don’t completely fall apart myself and, applicable here, to not look like I’m a sad unfortunate victim of something I didn’t choose (because I did)—meaning I try to work out and wash my hair once in a while. I try to give my daughter the best childhood she can have, but often find myself sighing at her Eve-like abandon and disdain for picking up her clothes or toys or doing anything she doesn’t have a passion for, and then getting pretty annoyed and blame-y at myself for caring so much about her doing these things that I used to not care about either but that now seem to be the basis of my existence.

This morning I have at least 2 hours to myself—which is a gift and wonderful, but they also seem paltry and thin, those 2 hours. And in those same two hours I need to decide: do I work out? Do I rest? Do I catch up with a friend or relative? Or do I write? This morning, I rest and write. But to do that, I don’t work out or do anything else. But I’m tired anyway—and it’s one of those days that working out will probably make it worse, not better. My body is telling me lately to rest. To lay down. Not to go dancing or go to an art show, or see a friend, or to do much of anything let alone with anything close to reckless abandon. It sometimes feels like insult to injury: I’ve spent most of my life taking care of others and now I’m tired and that’s it. That’s IT?? But I am not going there, and plus maybe it’s not that true.

I think that’s part of why L.A. is what L.A. is to me: my true Home and this place of Life and Creativity and Fun. It was actually my home, for one, but also because I felt free there—it’s where I spent the only years of my life when I wasn’t Raising a Child and engaged in a Responsible Career, not tied to a partner, just finding out who I was and enjoying the hell out of life—if not quite in an Eve-abandon, then at least something somewhat Eve-adjacent, as she would say. In L.A. I did what I wanted, for the most part. I dated when I wanted to, I had passionate affairs, I slept in and worked just enough to pay my bills. But I know, at the end of that era, I was also ready for it to end. I was bored and ready for something new.

I love both of my children with all my heart and would never change anything about them or about me having them. I love my home, I love my pets and my plants and my life. I love being a mother. I love my clients and my little office. But like a lot of women, I also miss myself. And within that, I miss wild abandon. There is too seldom a balance between me and me taking care of others. But if I had the opportunity to balance that more in my favor, I don’t think I’d choose it, at least not right now; I know how fleeting childhood is and I don’t want to miss any of my daughter’s, and I love even the circumspectness of my life too much to walk too far in the other direction. Maybe that’s part of the always-reviewing part of me: I love everything at once and can’t have everything, at least all at the same time. There’s a yearning for sure. But we’re maybe getting a bit ragged and maudlin here, and I’m feeling a bit too exposed.

So I’d love to end this piece (“piece” seems so self-important—rant? Essay? Thing? I think “thing” is the most accurate) with some kind of hopeful reinvigoration of Life, or rather wild-abandon-Life Re-Discovered—and I do hope for that, at least in some incarnation I actually want. I hope that at some point I’ll have rested enough, I’ll be comfortable enough in my new city, I’ll have time enough and won’t spend it regretting I didn’t enjoy my daughter enough—that I’ll truly want to join life outside of home and parenting again. I try. I forayed, in fact, into dinner with friends last night which was lovely, although I felt I talked too much (after very little time with adults prior—that tends to embarrassingly occur) and leaked and sweated out too much uninteresting detail about my life (which is mostly about being a mom)—and then sort of got blame-y on myself about it which is probably the worst of all ways to spend your time. I’m getting, though, honestly, too far from what I used to see as “ideal me”, to a place where I just am glad I get to be alive, to experience whatever it is that happens, to get to love my daughter and take care of our home. But some days, friends, I wish, just a little bit, I could come up with a teaspoonfull of that reckless abandon again. Maybe it will happen. We’ll see. I have a feeling I may be pleasantly surprised.

(I had forgotten, however, that movies are almost never relaxing for me. They usually stir up something that wants to kick up dust in my consciousness and wake me up at 3 a.m. to write about it. Le Sigh. This one was no exception.)

Anyway. I don’t know why I wanted to watch this film—I guess because I like Pamela Anderson. She seems, despite previous incarnations, to be surprisingly authentic and a genuinely nice person. There’s also something over-the-top and bigger-than-life about Las Vegas and Old Hollywood and costumes and showgirls and theatrical productions that fascinates me—and maybe something about their dustiness or decline even more so: Golden Ages of the Past.

As a theatrical aside, a wonderful friend of mine (toot toot) owns the largest collection of showgirl costumes in the world. Visiting him and his haunted Las Vegas showgirl museum is one of my favorite destinations.

But back to our relatable girl Pam and Showgirl. This particular movie (as many movies do) reminded me of how hard it must be to make a good film, let alone a great one. Though that this was not a great film (it has its moments) is not the point. The point that kicked around in my consciousness and woke me up at 3 a.m. demanding airtime on the page is: women’s currency.

No matter what anyone says, I’ll never be convinced this is not still very much a man’s world (if you disagree with that, this might be due to the fact that you may never have experienced being a woman or that you’ve just never thought about it or that you are delusional or that you’re so privileged you can’t find your way out of a paper bag. Nope, sorry babe, those are the only options. Kiiiind of kidding). The truth is that in many sectors, incalculably, in both obvious and invisible ways, a woman’s social and financial worth is often still determined to some degree by her looks—or rather, by the value men place on women’s looks—at least when that woman is young and beautiful. More attractive women are treated better, receive more promotions, and in general, the more conventionally attractive a woman is, the more financial, career and personal opportunities and advantages available to her (look it up)—and beauty can almost always be monetized in some fashion. But (another Le Sigh) a woman’s youth and beauty are also always temporary. As we all know, while a man grows “rugged” or “distinguished” with age (and doesn’t stand helplessly by as at least some portion of his currency falls off with his looks), a woman just gets…old. If she’s able to adapt, to trade on something other than her sexuality, she passes into the next stage of her life intact. If she can’t, she doesn’t.

Captain Obvious Observation: Women in Hollywood (and everywhere else) aren’t just trying to preserve their looks with plastic surgeries and makeup, they’re trying to preserve their currency and their perceived value.

In Showgirl, Pamela Anderson portrays the still beautiful but aging showgirl, Shelley. The show she’s starred in for the span of her career (Le Razzle Dazzle, a faded but once-glitzy nod to something—at least to her—vaguely Parisian and “classy”), is closing down. As with Shelley herself, the show aged and is unceremoniously tossed into the dust bin. Younger dancers in the show are forced to audition for seamier productions (still able to cash in on their looks, which Shelley can no longer do—as we see in her audition in the opening scene) which disgusts Shelley, as she views La Raz as an elegant and worthy “spectacle”. Shelley, previously valued for her shell (her body/looks) having fallen for the tricky fickleness of beauty-as-currency and putting all her chips down on the showcasing of that youth and beauty-as-value, faces an uncertain future. Having raised her now-grown daughter Hannah alone to the best of her abilities, she has clearly fallen short in the role of motherhood in many ways (e.g., Shelley forgets how old her daughter is, doesn’t know what her college major is and regularly left young Hannah in a car with a Gameboy while she performed two shows a night to support the two of them with, inexplicably, zero help from the show’s long-time manager and, later revealed—spoiler alert!!—her daughter’s father—though no one, apparently, knows about this but Shelley and That Guy). The past-her-prime beauty is now at loose ends; partially estranged from her dismissive and angry daughter, with the impending closure of the now passé La Razzle Dazzle, it appears she may wither into oblivion like her broke and broken-down friend Annette, previously also a showgirl in Le Razzle Dazzle but forced out of the show as she aged, now a leathery cocktail waitress quickly aging out of that role as well. It doesn’t appear that either woman will be allowed to gracefully exit at all intact.

In an *actually* heartwarming moment at the end of the film, Hannah (now an aspiring photographer and thus ultimately an observer rather than a participant, unlike her mother, à la the character of Mark in Rent), initially scathingly scornful of her mother and her apparently inexplicable choice to persist in her seedy showgirl career, angry that her childhood appeared to come second to what she sees as a meaningless and superficial show, finally finds understanding for her mother’s staunchly defended choice to garner value where she could find it; in her beauty and in the (if only costumed-imitation) class and glamour of the work that made Shelley feel seen, loved, and worthy.

Ahem. Pardon the interruption, but I’m not a total stranger to this costumed-imitation world. I promise this ties in.

Before a second round of diapers and years of often sleepless nights and all that goes along with the very meaningful (at least to our children) and messy-but-beautiful sacrifice that is new motherhood, I blatantly engaged in the economy of sexuality and attraction too. Stop right there! As a low-level-ish commercial actress and model (supplemented by very part-time work as a speech pathologist) I made a mostly decent living primarily by looking, as they say in the biz, “aspirational”. Year after year, audition after audition, waiting patiently in endless roomfuls of women who looked nearly identical to me, at some point I found myself no longer auditioning for “attractive girlfriend/wife” or “young mother” roles, but for the parts of vaguely-ill-but-still-gardening women in pharmaceutical commercials. That, I determined, was the moment to bow out. At the time, I was about to be engaged to a man who could “take care of me” financially, and also had my other career which was not dependent on attractiveness, thus surviving the transition from looks-economy intact. But many are not so lucky.

The truth is, I should be embarrassed (though I’m not, simply because at this point I don’t have any illusions that I’m better than I actually am) to admit I’d laughed my way through this commercial career; I could afford to, with a college education, several degrees and certifications and a second solid professional career, I didn’t need to rely on my looks—I just acted for fun. Like Hannah, I’d glance a little dismissively at older women in auditions, some seeming well aware of their declining opportunities and growing more desperate as they aged, while I was simply in it for the fun, playing the game until it ceased to be a kick anymore and jumped out, landing safely on my feet.

Though I’m glad I enjoyed commercial acting, looking back, I was wrong to laugh and to be so dismissive of both my own personal work as an actor and of the work in general; I think in part it was a protection—if I failed at it, it was only a lark anyway. But I actually became quite skilled at it. The bad part is that I was oblivious to the fact that others depended on the job (that I semi-referred to as a joke) to raise their children or just to feed themselves; to them it was deadly serious—I must have come off like a chump.

I had been fortunate enough to enjoy an upbringing in which college and a career not reliant completely on attractiveness were not only possible but expected. Not true for all. Through no fault of their own, some women’s only currency is their sexual attraction, and at some point in every woman’s life, if you’re relying on your looks, not only is nobody having fun anymore, but nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s getting paid, and suddenly you’re an Annette or a Shelley, invisible, forgotten, without resources, perhaps without an income and a way to feed yourself or your children or a home.

Not such a gas then, is it?

Like many women, I got a taste of powerlessness after voluntarily giving up my careers to raise my daughter. Upon her birth (like my son’s), what immediately became vitally important to me was parenting her—being with her and caring for her, and thus, when my ex and I split, I became dependent upon child support (you can’t be two places at once!), finding myself wedged firmly in the Ye Olde Woman Problem: dependent upon the goodwill of a man (who wasn’t even my partner anymore) to feed and house my daughter and myself. I was one of the lucky ones whose ex actually provided (and still provides) ample child support that allowed me to stay home with her. I’m lucky also in that I am able to ease back into my second career and eventually become financially independent again; but I am still a mother first and refuse, beyond providing for our basic needs, to choose financial gains over time with my daughter. And so, here we are, ladies. Still. Something is out of whack. Why, we might as ourselves, is this most vital “women’s work” not assigned financial value—the way virtually every other kind of work is assigned value? No wonder so many unskilled (in terms of traditional employment) single moms the world over resort to monetizing the only thing they can monetize: their bodies and their looks.

**For a shockingly depressing peek into this phenomenon (not just of single moms but of women in general) in economically undeveloped countries, watch an episode or two of 90 Day Fiancé**

Eve Babitz’ book, I Used to Be Charming, comprised of a series of nonfictional essays written for numerous magazine publications, centers around the title essay in which Babitz describes the horrific accidental scorching off of much of the skin of her lower body and the details her recovery. Nowhere in it or in any of the other essays, however, despite the title, does she cease to be charming. Beauty and her sister, charm, were her currencies, and after her accident, disabled and poor, she was mostly left with…charming. In the end, Eve was also periodically a fantastic writer, which, in conjunction with being beautiful (which she used somewhat unscrupulously to her advantage), and having hobnobbed with many of the rich and famous, belatedly but eventually saved her from the unsavory demise of Shelleys and Annettes.

The fact that women can and do use the system of male-gaze valued beauty to their advantage may appear empowering, and it may indeed actually be that for them, for a time. But like many historically feminine perks, this advantage derives from dependency rather than real power. When the male gaze shifts away from her, she better have used her beauty tactically and set herself up well: with a man with money or means, a career not dependent on her looks, or by stashing cash away while she can—or she finds herself as Shelley and Annette do, with declining (or no) prospects for the future.

Harsh.

Pam Anderson, in Showgirl, is barefaced for most of the film, as she is in real life (and in real life has certainly managed to use her beauty tactically). Much has been made in legacy media of how “courageous” she is to reveal her un made-up face, genuinely reflecting her strength of character, but also revealing the dastardly awful alive-and-well presence of the systemically oppressive male gaze. She’s arguably still a very beautiful woman, though not the bombshell she once was (her body is still spectacular, clearly not only due to plastic surgery, but also excruciatingly hard work): she’s an icon of beauty and beautiful still, and still using that to trade on (nothing wrong with that, it’s all part and parcel).

The Last Showgirl is one of those films that feels a little bit eerie because it seems to mirror the actor’s actual life, while at the same time, in clear view but at the same time invisibly showcasing (oxymoron?) that it isn’t: clearly Pamela Anderson is still cashing in on her looks—however, now that cashing in is in terms of the disappearance of her conventional youthful beauty which is of course also the topic of the film. But there’s some slight of hand going on as well: what the real Pamela Anderson also seems to be trading on currently is authenticity, and that may be true to some extent. It’s no doubt empowering for the individual woman to feel, for instance, that she need not attractive-ize herself for a man or anyone else to be valued (in a film or in real life), and I think it’s important to acknowledge that she IS doing some real and important work here in publicly standing up to that gaze, giving it the finger and defining for herself what she wants to look like, what she wants to claim as her value. But PA is an icon, trading still not only on her beauty and celebrity, but also on her skill as an actor and performer (her second career). I don’t think Pamela is snickering all the way to the bank; I think she’s sincere. But still, how empowering in real terms is not wearing makeup to the typical aging woman who trades on her looks alone? Not at all. In fact, it may look more like suicide.

Femininity is too easily and too often used against the female by those in power for their own benefit.

Yes, I know that our value as human beings is not only not in what we look like (or what we do for work, for that matter), but in who we really are—in our human authenticity (at least that’s what I think). Too bad this is too often invisible in the realm of financial value, just like the value of the career of mother. Maybe that’s changing, but I’ll be honest, I’m a little worried about the shaky value of authenticity in the current public space, period.

It might seem, in a Sneetch kind of way, with AI offering a seemingly level-er playing field to everyone with access to it that can make anyone beautiful and smart (at least online), make anyone appear to be what they are not, in which ChatGPT, who (“who”??) can write the pants off (or at least as well as ) most authors, with robots increasingly replacing service workers and where Meta offers (or threatens) to immerse us in a world in which we can live and represent ourselves there however we’d like on the screen, that authenticity might become valued as the only Real currency left.

But IS it valued?

It seems to me that the genuine human qualities are instead being incorporated into and indiscriminately gobbled up by AI, however powerfully assistive it may be. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and out of step, in love with dusty long-gone things. Perhaps the idea of transferring the power of the male gaze, at least in some ways, to the neutral gaze of technology doesn seem potentially preferable to the old system. I admit that ChatGPT provides better answers than any therapist I’ve ever had, solves my mathematical calculation issues faster than any mathematician, and organizes my thoughts on paper. Maybe human qualities are error-prone, imperfect, and better accomplished by non-human means. Maybe things are already too far gone.

Who, in the face of all that, is one lone woman, bare-faced, still using her looks to pay her bills?

But wait a sec. Hold up.

Perhaps I’ve been too cynical. Too quick to judge. What if, instead of simply continuing to work the look-at-me system, Pamela is standing, as someone who can bring much needed attention to a space that desperately calls out to be seen, honored and defended, especially now in this digital age of AI, of the WEF’s deceptive Nature Action Agenda and of screens and virtual reality. What if her role in this movie and her makup-free face are actually important angry screams we need to hear. Maybe the natural, the genuine, if not on a path to extinction, certainly is becoming an endangered species.

Current feminine beauty standards, in some ways, have become too expensive, too fraught and too inhuman; no one looks naturally like Kim Kardashian or the Pamela of old: a made-up, done-up-for-the-boys, plastically enhanced bombshell, or even like the run-of-the-mill instagram influencer. Is that the definition of beauty now? Is this the bar women have to approach to be valued in the public space?

Maybe the state of things has gone so haywire, gotten so far removed from Nature, so far out of whack, that without Real people standing up for Real things, in their Real power, as their Real selves, baring their Real faces—that the actual REAL may functionally disappear from human experience. For the first time in the history of humanity, it seems entirely too possible. But we simply can’t let the Real disappear for us and survive as we are—truly human. In my opinion, this Real experience is what we’re here for. If we want to be truly fulfilled, healthy and balanced humans, we have to look away from the screen, take off the Meta headset, exit the VR, the digital, and look around us. We have to move our bodies, reconnect with the Earth, with Nature, with each other. There is no Real health without it.

Maybe in a roundabout way, arguably THE woman (at 57 no less) who could still be pimping the male-gaze system all the way to the bank, by turning it on its head and refusing to comply any longer with its demands (to no small chorus of dismay and rebuke by many a man, I’m guessing), is instead powerfully participating in an important uprising: that of the Defense of the Real. Perhaps we are seeing the dawn of a new kind of currency, not just for women, but for everyone. Perhaps, after all, Pamela Anderson isn’t just a beautiful bimbo forced to disappear with her looks. Perhaps she is just the unlikely heroine we need, at the perfect moment. Just maybe this is a woman who has both literally and figuratively removed the mask, is prepared and stepping up to show her authentic self, ready to usher in this new kind of currency: the Real.

Up until about 3:20 this morning I could only remain silent, choking on the billowing black smoke blowing out of my chest, mute with grief.

***

Living in L.A. in 2021, I published a large collection of my own essays, written over a period of ten years. The book was a sort of near-final-draft version titled The Brush Fire Essays: Modern Examinations of Consciousness in Form (I highly recommend it if you don’t mind some typos, have 1500 extra hours you don’t know what to do with and have always wondered what I thought about a bunch of stuff. Someday I’ll complete the final edits. Maybe.).

Anyway.

The last essay included in that book, a love letter to Life, was written February 14th, 2021, Valentine’s Day. Shortly after that, I wrote another essay, Losing L.A.: Disappeared, publishing it on Substack a year later on February 26th, 2022. This was one of the first of a group of essays I uploaded to Substack. The essay indirectly expressed my incredulity at the political events in L.A. which affected my daughter and myself and so many others in such a personal way that I could no longer participate—and intimated my final decision to move out of my beloved L.A.. Out, in fact, of California.

I wondered, over the past week or so, why I hadn’t included that essay in the book. I suppose then that it felt like a good breaking point and that the essay belonged to a new era. But it’s an interesting choice, as it was about leaving L.A., and would have been a fitting final essay for the book—especially considering the cover. Maybe I’ll include it if I ever get to those final edits. In any case, it all seems to have come full circle. But perhaps that is only in retrospect.

The cover of The Brush Fires Essays is, unshockingly, a photo of a California brush fire. While my graphic designer volleyed potential cover after cover at me, I was adamant from start to finish that I must have this picture, this cover. The cover is a tribute to Los Angeles, to the wildfires there and simultaneously to the phenomenon in which a fire sweeps through a life and along with the destruction it wreaks, also clears dead material and allows for new growth. In the introduction, I explain, “The writing…tells a story without being a story itself; one that unfolded as I write through pain, joy, realizations, and re-memberings—each essay burned something less true away to make space for new understandings to arise within the context of my life.”

It is, coincidentally, how Osho recommends finding one’s true self, neti neti, by simply removing impurities. Finding out what you are not reveals who you are.

But this will not be an essay about some desperate grasp at a metaphorical silver lining in the burning of Los Angeles.

No.

If you have lived in L.A. for any period of time, fire (whether natural or not) has been part of your life. You know that sometimes the sky will turn an eerie shade of orange and cast a golden glow over everything. You know that sometimes you’ll be advised by the local weather service to stay indoors because the air quality, from the smoke, is poor. You will likely be all too familiar with fire tracking services. If you live in Topanga, as I did at one time, you’ll be handed a binder with your rental documents. That binder will contain instructions for exactly what to do when there is fire. Not if, but when.

But this will also not be an essay about fire hazards endemic to living in Los Angeles.

No.

I inherently but perhaps dysfunctionally want to see L.A. now. It is incomprehensible to me. I picture over and over landing at Burbank airport, grabbing my luggage as usual off of one of the two carousels, always tearful with joy, stepping out into the L.A. air that feels like freedom. I picture, in that freedom, driving, driving, driving. But everything will only appear as it did in my past: driving the gorgeous PCH in wonder as I have done so many times. Swishing through Malibu on my way to the canyon. Standing in the waves with my daughter on the beach in Malibu, skipping rocks and watching the sandpipers. Strolling through Palisades. Wandering awestruck around the Lake Shrine. Driving past Moonshadows (my daughter and I breaking out in Cat Stephens glory each time). Casting a friendly glance at Malibu Farms as I whoosh by. Watching as the Santa Monica pier approaches in the distance as I drive, peaceful and happy—always and forever not quite believing my incredible luck at somehow landing here, at living here.

Only…I don’t anymore.

I don’t know how to understand that.

I also don’t know how to deal with phrases such as “charred human remains pulled from a structure close to Duke’s”, when what I recall is sitting at a table at Dukes with my tiny daughter and her dad, having a drink. When what I recall is breezing countless times by whatever structure those human remains were pulled out of. It doesn’t make any sense to me. What was thriving life and the background to my life is…what? What is it now??

I don’t know what to do with feeling as if I’ve abandoned a place I loved that is now hurting and in need. I moved because I felt L.A. had abandoned me, requiring me to shoot myself and my little daughter up with poisons so we could go to the damned library or to a restaurant, or so I could enroll her in a ballet class. Never! But it was never L.A. that abandoned me. Never the place. I will always love the land in L.A.. The ocean, the palm trees, the sand, the hills, the air, the trails, the particular way the sunlight hits your skin. The jacaranda trees.

I want to draw some lofty conclusion here that this fire that is telling me to scorch my past and to love this land, where I live now. And maybe it is, in a small way. But I feel a strong resistance. It’s difficult when your being seems corporeally made up of the soil, the sand, the air, the sunlight of a certain place, and to not be there. I am nonsensically afraid that if I completely open up to where I am now that I might be abandoning the first place even more than I already have by leaving it. That I might never be able to return. I know this doesn’t compute. I also know that there is nothing but here, that this beautiful Earth includes both L.A. and my current home and that I can love it all. I know that perhaps all this might be letting me know that I might want to focus on where I am now.

But I am often 3 years old inside and don’t want to.

Sigh.

I am still grieving the L.A. I lost when I left it, and now this: more loss. Apparently it’s not yet time for this sorrow to let go of me. This fire and the fire of leaving is still blazing through my life, still burning dead material. Someday I will see the path it has cleared, someday the new growth will become apparent.

I think.

But maybe not today, not this week. This week is still for the mourning that is still my present and not yet in my past.

I love you, L.A., I will always love you. I don’t care how scorched, charred or decimated; you will always be beautiful. My heart is with you. I will come to you and kneel down on your burnt soil, bowing my head as I run my hands over your scarred skin, my tears cooling your singed earth. I will try as hard as I can to heal your hurt, as you have healed mine. No matter where I live and how much I may eventually grow to love it, you will aways, always, have my heart, L.A.. Always.

image credit Pixabay

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---Osho

photo credit Mahima

Maybe I’m mistaken, but the only question I have this morning is how do I get back to the lush air, the sweetness, the gardenias of L.A.? To the fading purple jacaranda? How do I get back to the place where I felt so vibrantly, vibratingly myself?

I drag the dining room table back into the living room where it belongs, where I can write properly. Writing may put things back into place. Or it may become a red dust devil that twirls me away and plunks me back down, killing a witch but proffering a small window within which I may make off with the ruby slippers, click my heels twice and finally discover myself brushing off this dry red dust, home. I’d say this morning there’s roughly an equal chance of either.

Before the world went crazy, I was happy. I was home.

And then I let it all get to me.

I think if I have one core problem, it’s that: I let things get to me. I’ll be perfectly happy sitting on the couch reading and then glance at my phone and let something get to me. Or out of the corner of my eye I’ll catch sight of someone lurking along the nice, smooth concrete floors of Natural Grocers wearing a damned surgical mask and suddenly I’m swearing under my breath.

Maybe I’m just letting the desert get to me today, but I’m not getting any younger, that’s for sure. And I think this dry air is doing me no favors.

People tell you to bloom where you’re planted and that it doesn’t matter where you are. Which I know is absolute bullshit because during monsoon season* when I painted the shed in my backyard I was happy in there. Like, really happy.

But now it’s either too cold or too hot or too early or too late and it’s always too dry and I’m too busy and I get lost and can’t seem to find my way back to my shed. I also can’t seem to shed the ominous feeling that someone’s taking roll and I’m absent from where I’m supposed to be. Once, I had a chance to live in the cool shade of the canyon, in a cabin next to the creek, which might have saved me—but I blew that, so at some point, I think I just have to give up trying to stay in the desert and finally go back home.

You may think I’m deluded but places make me feel happy.

Some of the spreading disaster of this morning is due to the fact that I’ve spent it, uncomfortable and cold, reading my way back to L.A.—and away from here. Most of the time here I can gaze out at the mountains and be something like okay, even overwhelmingly grateful and in awe, but I mostly don’t go outside because it’s too dry and too cold or too hot and everything is desiccated and I don’t want to desiccate; I don’t want to watch idly as my life desiccates. I’m not doing well as a bird of paradise trying to become a cactus, or at least a succulent (which, btw, is so mis-named).

I know you’re supposed to fall in love with people and not places, but I fell in love with L.A. and the moment I step out of Burbank airport I start to cry I’m so happy to be back there.

And why shouldn’t you be where you love??**

But this morning, not stepping out of the Burbank airport, I’m uncomfortable and restless and going rancid. This morning I crave only the sheeny L.A. sunshine on sparkling concrete sidewalks that I can never adequately describe. I crave breathing the open, alive air of L.A. that has always smelled, to me, exactly like Love.

*I do love monsoon season. In fact, the delightful discovery of the all-too fickle promise of a monsoon season may be the faint but still audible siren song that holds me here. That and avoiding, at least for a time, once again relocating my even more delightful daughter.

**I guess the obvious answer to this question is the very reason I left: when where you love turns its back on you, won’t let you enter a restaurant unless you poison yourself and tells your little daughter she can’t go to school unless you do the unthinkable and poison her as well. Dark times, but maybe, just maybe I can somehow skirt all of that now. Maybe it wasn’t L.A. that turned its back—maybe it was just some people I didn’t know, who didn’t matter. Maybe I can somehow, finally learning I had what it took all along (courage, heart and brains), get back home.

image credit Vincent Gerbouin