I recently had the distinct pleasure of dining at Heirloom Cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District with two of my best friends. It was a bold plan, we didn’t have reservations, it was a beautiful Saturday evening, and Heirloom is popular, but we were just down the block. One of my friends walked down and put us on the “notify me” list and left her phone number.

They called, surprisingly, and offered us three seats at the bar around 6:30 pm. Cool, I prefer eating at the bar anyway, it reminds me of when I was a cook.

Little did I know.

It hit me like an unexpected ocean wave when we walked through the door. I had never been in this restaurant before but I felt suddenly, profoundly, oddly, at home. I rocked back on my heels a bit, dismissing it as an effect of the tasteful yet reserved decor—very SF bougie casual—kind of my style.

Once we were seated at the bar and I had the menu in my hand, my dismissal began to wear off. The menu is simple: one prix fixe, a set of ala carte’s, and about two dozen wines by the glass thoughtfully curated to match the food on the menu.

This is exactly the form of menu we used decades ago when I worked as a cook at my favorite food service job in Austin in the 1980s. It was crafted for late summer: tomato, corn, fresh bean, local sustainable fish, duck confit, and a hangar steak for my friend jones-ing for a steak.

Okay, I thought to myself, this must be some kind of culinary standard thing, taught at the schools, my chef in Austin was a CIA grad. He was a stickler for form.

I took a deep breath and put down the menu, I knew what I wanted—the early girl tomato salad, with whipped ricotta, croutons, cucumber, and roasted tomato vinaigrette and the Brentwood (as in CA) corn soup, garnished with crème fraîche, crispy shallots, and Espelette (Basque peppers).

I don’t have any pictures. I pocket my phone during shared meals.

While I was waiting, I looked down the bar at the guys in the kitchen (view pictured above). This is when impermanence grabbed me by the throat. He’s the crimson guy with the crown of skulls behind the wheel below:

I was suddenly, deeply, overcome with grief. I loved professional cooking. I left it because it seemed like an impotent response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. My friends were dying ugly deaths alone. I wanted to do something, so I turned to nursing. That’s another essay.

To me, working in a restaurant (with exactly the same vibe as this one) was like getting paid to throw a party. I worked in every role from dishwasher, to prep cook, to range cook, to line cook, to baker, to bar-back, to server, to floor manager in a place just like this one.

I will never do this again. Like an aging athlete, I don’t have it in me any more. I couldn’t perform, I wouldn’t even try. God, I miss it so. I really loved the work, every bit of it, from slinging dishes in the dishwashing galley to solving customer’s issues on the floor. I was home then too, I knew what I was doing, I was very good at it, people came back to eat where I worked.

I suppose I held the notion in my mind subconsciously that one day, after other things happened in my life, I would have the choice to go back to food service. When I imagined retirement as I was aging I did not account for the decline in my physical stamina and the fragility of my aging frame in my retirement fantasies.

In my 40’s, I imagined myself doing the things I loved to do in my 40’s, except in my 60’s, and doing them with more money and time. Bzzt. Wrong. I don’t have my 40’s body. Those things, some of them, are no longer an option. Working in a crazy-busy kitchen making the best food that can be made out of the best ingredients we can get is no longer something I can do.

I began sobbing, right there at the bar, into my Maine Root root beer. Tears streaming down my face, which I kept wiping away with my cloth napkin while my other two friends chatted with each other as if they were enjoying a pleasant meal, which we all were, supposedly, but I was also crying ugly.

One might have thought I had stumbled across an old lover for whom I was still carrying a torch, and I saw her out with her much more attractive and well off new boyfriend. That is exactly how it felt.

I felt just as foolish, just as undefended, and just as vulnerable as I would have in that situation. There was my lover—a certain kind of restaurant—cavorting around with someone else, having the time of her life. While I sit just down the bar, basking in the memories of our lost love, pining to re-unite.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, I walk into mine.

Buried loves are like that. I suppose I never really resolved abandoning my restaurant career.1 I knew it was best for us both at the time, but I didn’t leave for lack of love. I left in spite of my deep, boundless love for feeding people.

I know it is cliché, but food, more precisely cooking, is my love language. If you want to know if I love you, ask yourself this: if I can, have I cooked for you? If I have, check it off, I do.

If I haven’t, that’s probably because I haven’t had the chance.

Be hungry.

Imagine if someone walked up to you on a Wednesday and said “it’s Tuesday,” You’d correct them. You may feel it would be rude to stay silent. This person could be making bad decisions based on their bad information, you could stop that.

Now imagine this same person tells you that they decided to quit their job or get a divorce because the astrology is favorable—the planets align, Mercury is no longer retrograde, and the sun is in the seventh house. You might hold your tongue, but they are wrong. Provably so.

Why would you not owe them the same correction? Why would you not mention that because of the earth’s axial procession the position of the sun has shifted by almost one full zodiac sign since the original dates for it’s transit across various constellations were determined? Why would you not mention that when astrology says the sun is “in Aries” astronomy places it “in Pisces?”

Why would you not mention Ophiuchus, the 13th constellation through which the sun’s elliptical orbit passes (between Scorpio and Sagittarius) that astrologers pretend isn’t there? Why would you not mention that constellations themselves are arbitrary groupings of otherwise unrelated objects which are enormously distant from each other?

Why would you not mention that the date and time of birth is arbitrary? Why would you not point out that one might be Libra rising because the obstetrician scheduled their birth to accommodate his tee times that day?

Because Astrology functions loosely like a religion. That is, it is meaningful only to people who believe in it. It is internally consistent.

Science doesn’t care whether or not a person believes in it, it will still influence events and shape outcomes. It is not internally consistent, that’s why scientists have jobs—to work out the inconsistencies. That’s where the new knowledge is. That’s where progress happens.

This dovetails into a social norm of live and let live. Most people see little problem with others believing what they want to believe—unless they want to believe it is Tuesday when it is really Wednesday.

People die when they believe that being unvaccinated is safer than vaccination. Their children die too. Their elderly have needlessly shortened and unpleasant lives.

Is it better to ignore science when it conflicts with belief? Is science only acceptable when and where scientific findings pose no threat to religious doctrine? What’s the difference between being wrong about what day it is and being wrong about the path of the planet Mercury influencing human behavior?

Nothing, they are equally false. Decisions made on the basis of either falsehood can be risky. They are not based in reality, but we only intervene with the former. Not believing astrology isn’t killing children in the US, not believing in science is.

Let’s take one more step into politics, which also functions like a religion and while pretending to be rational. I can’t bring to mind one political decision made by MAGA that was rational and rooted in a view of the world we all see. Those who have their eyes open are ignored at best, or get identified as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Why do we not have Wednesday Derangement Syndrome?

MAGA pretends they can force reality to bend to their vision of how things should be, and the rest of the country stands mute, or engages in debates with themselves about what causes all this. Why? Why are we so reluctant to intervene? It’s Wednesday! MAGA thinks it is Tuesday.

What do we owe the people around us when they are lost in a harmful delusions? Some are so deep they can’t help themselves. They will see, we are already seeing, that they need a full blown obvious disaster to happen before they will open their eyes to the world around them.

There no amount of argument that will convince a committed Virgo that they are really a Leo. The Virgo has to realize something for themselves, or they are remain lost, disconnected from reason. How do we help? Should we?

What do those of us with a rational view of political Reality owe those deluded by MAGA? What do we owe someone making a living at casting Astrological charts? What do we owe people putting themselves and others at needless risk of preventable illness? What do we owe ourselves?

Allowing someone to believe today is Tuesday when it is really Wednesday is considered abandonment. It may be a minor form, but it is abandonment, it is a manifestation of ill will.

Perhaps for a close friend or family member you might take them aside for a conversation about astrology. Perhaps you would take them aside and say that while astrology is a fun and interesting fantasy world which also teach them something about life, much in the same way that Tolkien or Star Wars might, but don’t try to build a light saber at home kids; it ain’t ever going to happen.

But, we stand mute in the face of family members, friends, journalists and public servants telling us that we have a fit president, his executive office holders respect their oaths of office, and the GOP respects the Constitution.

Where is the line?

“PITY THE NATION”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (After Khalil Gibran) 2007

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

copyright Lawrence Ferlingetti

What do we owe ourselves? Pity?

There were relatively few Asians of any gender where I grew up in Texas. I don’t remember feeling any particular way about Asians until I moved to New York City in 1999 at 39 years of age.

I began to notice the fetishized sexualization of Asian women when I was working in Manhattan’s Korea-town in the 2010s. The streets were full of Asian people, there were television studios on the block, and seeing fans mob some tiny, overwhelmed Asian celebrity as she walked down the sidewalk surrounded by burly security guards was a regular event.

I was a Zen student, studying Japanese Zen with Japanese teachers. I began to study the Japanese language, I developed an interest in traveling there, and began to watch Japanese movies in particular. I had friends who were Japanese who were helping me understand the culture. I began eating and learning to cook Japanese food.

I was also lonely and brimming with sexual desire. I developed a fan’s interest in several Japanese actresses, musicians, and other celebrities. I began collecting fan merch. This was unremarkable to me until I was called on it by Asian friends who happened to also be car enthusiasts.

My “type” doesn’t touch on ethnicity, I am inclined to brunettes and body contours that are athletic and trim. Asian women frequently catch my eye. Perhaps because of the sexualization of Asian women developing at this time, I caught wind from some Asian friends that being a fan of Sayaka Ando’s movies, Blackpink’s music, Awkwafina’s comedy, and Yuja Wang’s virtuosity, as a Boomer White guy, signaled to pop culture observers, and perhaps to all of these performers, that I might be a creep.

The suspicion from my drifter friends seemed to be that those afflicted with yellow fever see something in Asian women simply because they are Asian. Some who knew me more personally gently suggested that because of my interest in Zen I secretly harbored a notion that I needed something from the Far East in my life, so I pursued what’s missing via sexual desire. Maybe?

If this is true I don’t see it. I am also not going to deny that I have blind spots, particularly around sex, but my Asian women friends are more different from each other than my non-Asian women friends. They run the gamut. I honestly can’t identify something they all share in their personalities.

When posted this Substack article about regretting her minor role in the film Tokyo Drift because it strengthened the marginalization of Asian culture, I clicked.

FETISHIZED

I Was Thrilled to Be in Tokyo Drift. Twenty Years Later, I See the Problem.

Being on the set of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was pure magic. We actually shot in Los Angeles; a parking lot had been transformed into Tokyo. The set was packed with Asian American extras, import cars, and people from the scene who were losing their minds that we got to be there. The energy was thick with excitement…

Read more

18 days ago · 179 likes · 18 comments · Kaila Yu

After I learned that Ms. Yu wrote a book called “Fetishized,” (published by Penguin, no less) from which this excellent work was derived, I apologized to my TBR pile and bought her book.

I could not put it down until I finished it. I was expecting something less personal and more harshly polemic. Ms. Yu’s prose and Notes on Substack echo with messages honed by important feminist critics. I anticipated that her book would be a detailed recounting of the feminist perspective on the pathology of Asian schoolgirl cosplay, or something like that. I wanted to read that.

Fetishized is memoir. It is intensely personal, she recounts terrifying sexual abuse, jaw-dropping professional discourtesy, surgical self-mutilation, and reliance on recreational drugs used to comfort herself while accepting the thousand cuts of simmering humiliation which are demanded as the price for entry into, and toleration of, the pursuit of fetishized fame.

Her role model was Sung Hi Lee, who appeared in Playboy in an iconic nude photo called “Got Milk?” by pin-up fans. Google it if you’re curious. Her desire for attention and affirmation from others led her into a kind of cruel optimism1—the things she did to chase her goals also prevented her from reaching them.

The book is not an anti-male or anti-sex screed. Her perspective is powerfully self-aware. She owns all of her decisions, especially the bad ones, with radical, unflinching honesty. She outlines how her pursuit of modeling led her to form an Asian female rock band which achieved some acclaim (Nylon Pink) while she began to understand that the power of the fetish she milked was a manifestation of colonialism.

Her pursuit of professional success as a model and musician relied upon persistent, systemic objectification and marginalization of Asian women that echo back to Madame Butterfly and beyond. She didn’t seek objectification, but she used it, and she realized that what she regarded as ambitiously thirsty professional attention-seeking was undermining the success of Asian artists not playing to these stereotypes…and worse

This was where the film Tokyo Drift was a hook for me. I know drifters2 on the East coast, guys from Hong Kong who pour all of themselves into the import car modification and enhancement culture. Yes, every garage had a pinup calendar on the wall (Ms Yu might have been a model for some of them) but these guys spent all their time and money on these cars as a way to find a way to belong in the US as young men without acting White, or hewing to the Model Minority tropes. They smoked cigs, and brushed shoulders with organized crime. They were masculine, but not like Tom Cruise or Vin Diesel.

I didn’t go see “Tokyo Drift” because the star was a White dude. My drifter friends hated the whole idea of the movie, considering it a kind of cultural approbation. They refused to see it. I had no interest. I bookmarked Tokyo Drift in my mind as being offensive to the people it was supposedly about and forgot about it

Ms. Yu’s piece on Substack caused something else to click for me. The approbation, without reward of any kind, of Asian car culture by the makers of this film was resonant with the colonial savagery that accompanied my ancestors to this country.

White American colonialists dressed up in Native American headdresses to disguise themselves for the Boston Tea Revolt, used Native American imagery as mascots for sports teams, and adopted Native American names for the cities, rivers, and mountains where they settled after slaughtering the indigenous people who were in the way of manifest destiny.

Fast forward to now, and White movie dudes rush in and harvest a culture they did not otherwise support so they can crank out another sequel for a successful, if childish and shallow, film franchise. Ms Yu made me glad I declined to watch any of those films, even though she was in them.

The final part of Fetishized is the most powerful. Ms. Yu catalogs her shortcomings and offers them to the reader unadorned. She watched one of her friends spiral into an early death from liver cirrhosis just as she had found her own solid sobriety.

The Asian spa shootings in Atlanta were a wake-up call for Ms. Yu. I remember all this vividly because I was working with a new advocacy group for Asian massage workers called Red Canary Song at that time. It had been formed as a response to the killing of an Asian massage spa worker in Queens by the abusive actions of an NYPD officer (she jumped from a 4th floor window to evade him). He faced no legal repercussions.

I was an early ally. I supported the sex worker advocates and their other allies by showing up to demonstrations and giving them seed money. After it got underway I backed off quietly. The organizers didn’t need my help, many were hostile to involvement by White men categorically. In the end, it turns out many of the sex workers didn’t want to be identified by advocates anyway. It wasn’t safe for them to have any kind of a public profile.

I wasn’t carrying the guilt of being a part of the fetish problem aside from being a K-pop fan. My favorite band was Blackpink. I found the fetishized sexualization of their videos distracting, not titillating. It was kind of hard to watch. They looked too young for their clothes, and too skinny for good health.

I was really a fan of the musicians who made Blackpink’s music. The lyrics were mediocre, but the musical production was inventive, well-done, and evoked the 1970s funk acts from my youth. The singer-dancers fronting on stage, whom everyone saw as the band, were also talented, but I was there for the music.

Ms.Yu takes ownership of much more to reckon with concerning the Atlanta spa shootings. I think she is a bit hard on herself in her book, she couldn’t have done what she did without men who were unable to see women of the demi-monde3 as mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. It wasn’t all her, and she did what the system pressured her to do.

Men retain their social status when they become clients for sexual services, and/or of sexually-loaded entertainment. Boys will be boys and all. They can return to their usual lives in the world with little more than winking acknowledgment from other men of the universal nature of sexual play.

Women of the demi-monde who provide that entertainment get a scarlet A. Once they’re in the demi-monde, they’re stuck there—that’s who they are. They find themselves with a social status they can’t shake, or can only shake the way Ms. Yu has, at great cost.

I recommended Ms Yu’s SubStack to anyone who seeks to understand the connection between the clownish twin Japanese Austin Powers’ characters Fook Yu and Fook Mi and the murders at the spa in Atlanta. It’s there, and Ms Yu points the way not as a properly-distant ivory tower critic, but as a self-aware and now remorseful former participant in the problem.

That’s rare, and she’s on Substack.

Check her out.

The polls came in, and the majority decidedly leans toward a publishing schedule unrestrained by the calendar. I was surprised by that, and I am most grateful to my generous readers for their enthusiasm.

There was another cluster of votes around a weekly schedule, which is what I thought the winning choice might be. I suppose I was reaching for my ancient writing fantasy—a weekly column in a small paper from the 1970’s era of newspaper publishing, or perhaps a regular contributor to The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town.

I want my readers to have a relationship with my writing like I have had with writers in those roles. During the week, I would reflect on events and wonder what so-and-so would be writing about it this week. It might feel like pulling over a stool from an unoccupied part of the bar and joining a gossip mob over a Jack and Coke every Friday.

Substack’s bar is way too big. I am still turning over figurative rocks here and finding the most amazing writing talent. I wonder if Substack is enabling a view to the wealth of writing talent that has always been available or if there is something about these times that makes people discover they can write.

I suspect (but cannot confirm, the votes are anonymous) that the weekly cluster comes from more recent subscribers who are also established users of the Substack app and website. They already have inboxes stuffed full of things to read, many of those writers are far more compelling than I.

My long-term readers know that there have been weeks-long stretches of silence from Richard’s Rants over the years, and they have not yet discovered these other wonderful writers..

Ready, Set…Retire!

Toe drama permitting, I will be attending at least four religious retreats in the next four months. If you’re truly curious about who Richard is, watch what I do, ignore all the poor me whining about the state of my life. That’s just discharge of emotions. I try to keep it to a minimum. Everyone has their own version of this noise.

What matters to me is directly reflected in what I do. I really am an open book.

Sept 4-7, 2026 - Garrison NY (across the Hudson from West Point)

Dharmapunx - Starting over: Stepping out of old stories into new experiences. Josh Korda has been an important teacher of mine for more than fifteen years. He is a Vipassana teacher, not Zen. Vipassana practice is colorful, musical, and full of imagery. It describes a kind of psychological cognitive map for understanding the problems with having an ego.

Josh uses guided imagery in meditation sessions to encourage specific skillful activity in specific parts of the nervous system. He teaches a fascinating blend of neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. This will be a totally different vibe than the Zen sesshins to which I am accustomed. The agenda resembles a chill, low-key holiday.

Attendance could not be more appropriate for me. It is beautiful how the timing worked out. The retreat begins on my official retirement date.

Sept 11-14, Oct 16-18, and Dec 2-7, 2026 - Minneapolis, MN

Dharma Field - Tenzo apprenticeships I, II, and III (of V).

I have no idea what this is going to be like, and I don’t think anyone else does either. The gentleman providing my training has been doing this for three decades, I’m not aware that he has trained anyone else. I’ve seen other people in the kitchen with him, but he has always been there for me.

I hope to sit zazen1 with the other students when the work in the kitchen permits it, but I have no idea what it is like to be in the Zen center during sesshin without being a participant. I know it will be quiet, I am curious what MY mental posture will be.

I have not started a new job as a cook in four decades. I really want to do something more to prepare, but the truth is I am ready now. I have nothing else to do other than wait until this all begins.

I have been amused by the careful communication I have received from the Zen center. They gently prod me to inquire if I still remember that I volunteered for this. LOL. It is all I have been thinking about all summer, dude.

Sept 15-22 Oy vey, y’all - Richard is in Texas

Entirely for serendipitous reasons, I am spending the (balance of) the Jewish High Holidays in Texas. I am not Jewish, and Texas certainly isn’t.

I keep track of Jewish holidays because, true to stereotype, my health care providers are on vacation during this period. In fact, if you want a true view into my twisted psyche, I deliberately chose an Irish Catholic vascular surgeon as a back-up for my Jewish foot surgeon because I knew he’d be taking different holidays.

I will be in Texas to enjoy a friend’s backyard. Watch, no one will let me just sit back there and read, which is what I want to do. Fortunately, those aren’t my only plans, but I have lost the nostalgia that used to move me to revisit haunts and landmarks in Texas from my life. Perhaps that is the perspective that this time in my life offers me. It is good to let things go. I have certainly let go of the notion that anything still remains in Texas which informs my identity now. I left Austin before Musk could find Texas on a map.

Let it Go - Let Them - Let It Be

The Beatles were a lot younger when they paraphrased the The Holy Mother’s basic life guidance as “Let It Be.” I tried to take this in as a young man, but I regarded “let it be” as something like an exhale, something you did to let off the pressure of life before it built up again.

As an older man, I realize it is a full-time posture of spirit. “Let it be” is a recognition of one’s own ordinariness, and that can be a powerful locus of existence. “Let it be” is not apathy, nihilism, or resignation.

It is a way to meet the world. We all know what we can do something about. Finding these levers is the essential task of childhood. Children soon begin to experience that they can’t always count on the cooperation of other people in the world. They begin to fight, to push back in the ways that they can, and some persuasive interventions with others work while others don’t.

Not everyone finds their way, but many of us reach the realization that being happy is preferable to being right when those are one’s only two choices. The skill in need of application when faced with this binary choice is knowing how and when to let go.

It is often easier to figuratively hold one’s grip on something rather than release a grip on something seemingly already in hand.2 Many of my life’s most significant troubles as well as my meaningful resolutions of them have been versions of this basic problem. Opening the hand of thought is a challenge. We are trained to equate certainty with safety. Releasing the grip can be scary.

I am in a time of life during which I anticipate facing many opportunities to practice this skill. I am letting go of things from my identity as a professional in my head to my actual toes on my feet. I have seven toes left, soon to be six.

By the way, for those unfamiliar with diabetic neuropathy in human feet, my toes do not just rot and fall off. The neuropathy causes muscles to grow (and shrink) unevenly in my foot, which causes my toes to be out of position both in my shoes and with respect to each other.

They rub against my shoes, and each other, in ways human toes did not evolve to tolerate. This causes wounds that cannot heal. The solution is removing the toe. Eventually3, I will run out of toes to amputate, and those left will be free to do their thing inside of my clownish and ugly diabetic shoes.

But, beyond that, a day is coming when my task will be letting go of life itself. I’m not dying, but I am aging. This body ain’t the same. I can’t do things I used to be able to do. I can’t drink like I used to be able to drink. Hell, I can barely tolerate flying economy.

I could join the Boomer wellness community, or rage against aging with supplements like the manosphere. There is a little good information in all that nonsense. I do take Vitamin D and Iron supplements. I do eat low on the food chain.4 I deliberately eat fermented foods. But these interventions are aimed at promoting comfort rather than longevity. I want to be ready to meet my endings by having been mostly comfortable on the journey to meet them.

That ending, like all the others I will have been through before it, will mostly be about letting go. I’m going to practice up.

So, I’ve let go of making a Rant schedule, but I am going to trim my enthusiasm for the “Publish” button as well. Some times I need to come back to a piece. Some times I just need to let it go.

Find your words of wisdom.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs, and spam.

I am getting ready to deliberately not have a full time job. People call this retirement, and that’s not wrong, but it just doesn’t fit my state of mind. I am looking forward to finally, at last, pursuing my dreams deferred. Working full-time has been in my way. Retirement doesn’t feel like an ending, it feels like graduation from a very long education.

As you may have noted, I have been writing and publishing frequently on Richard’s Rants in 2026; it has been a refuge while I bounce back from a series of 2026 set-backs. I have been shut-in as I nursed various toe ailments; I have been nursing one or the other since early March. It is almost September, the best outlook currently is that I will be finished bandaging something daily in October. 2026 has been rough. You, dear reader, have helped me.

Now, I have enough control over my life to enforce a publishing cadence at Richard’s Rants. Should I?

If anyone cares to vote, I will take note of your feedback. The new cadence, should there be one, will begin September 5, 2026. Stay tuned.

Thank you in advance.

Toe Drama

For those keeping score, this toe currently throbbing on my right foot is the same one that turned bad when I was on holiday on Puget sound. It has been x-rayed, osteomyelitis (bone infection) has set-in on the distal (far end) segment of the metatarsal (toe bone). The infection is smoldering, like embers, as opposed to raging like a wildfire. Treatment decisions are a coin flip at the moment, so I’m going with “hope it goes away.”

Joking, I’m treating it aggressively with surface antisepsis (keeping it clean AF) to see if I can postpone the amputation to after my planned September travel (and the Jewish holidays, which I’m spending in Texas, oy).

This plan can blow the eff up, so stay tuned.

Cory Doctorow has written a book about it. The mistakes that tech companies make are no longer occult facts to discover by business data-sleuthing. There are books written about these repeated mistakes, television miniseries produced which feature them, movies produced to document them, too many long-form business journalism articles to count, but the same mistakes get made over and over and over again.

ACT I: An idea turns into a platform. The leadership, wanting to build a company at all costs, tries it’s best to serve the users first and foremost. This is where the mission-driven coders jump in to make start-ups happen. These are the most confident and best coders in the world, they know what they can do, so they take (absurdly generous offers of) deferred shares for compensation. Something beautiful and profoundly useful to users is built, and users show up by word of mouth. They fall in love with the product, and build a presence and a user community. The platform’s user base becomes locked and loaded.

ACT II: Business customers (data brokers, advertisers, etc.) start to ask for features that degrade, but do not destroy, the user experience. The company leadership, convinced they can make it up to the users later with all that money from the secondary business customers, enables those features, and rolls them out with a bunch of word salad double-speak public relations bullshit. This is when the coders who built the company cash out and move on.

ACT III: This much is never enough, so the tech platform leadership starts to put the squeeze on the business customers they have been catering to at the expense of the actual users. Advertising and data-sharing rates go up, space on the pages shrinks so more advertising can be churned, user agreements are “updated” to reflect that data you used to control is now bundled and sold to “third party partners” to improve the user experience, or some pathetically hollow bullshit like that.

Now, no one likes it. It sucks for the users. It sucks for the business customers.

—FINIS—

Substack is in ACT II, they entered when they threw a party for the manosphere to invite their particularly distasteful and cult-like followers over to the platform. I’m surprised they didn’t sign with a logistics partner like Shop to ship workout supplements and take a piece at retail, but I digress.

If you are a Substack user for whom advertisers will purchase access, your eyeballs (mine too) are on your Notes feed. Notes is a pilot for advertising, because it IS advertising. There are just a satisfying proportion of Substackers taking advantage of the freedom to use this pilot feature to be funny, interesting, thoughtful, and meaningful in front of a bunch other people who read, mostly those who read them, or read someone who reads them. That’s great. It is what community is for. Good words should be shared. Substack is great at this.

The Dashboard is polluting this fun use of the Notes feature. I am a data scientist, self-taught, but hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for my employer ride on my expertise. I know how the Dashboard is built, why they choose these metrics, and how they cleverly designed the plots and tables to disguise the incentive.

Substackers are being subtly taught that high subscriber counts, likes, follows, restacks, and page views are signals of quality writing. That’s never been true. Quality writing often co-occurs with popularity, but quality writing is so routinely overlooked and ignored by readers it is almost cliche to point that out.

Human beings can know about 150 people. I call that a tribe. I have about that many subscribers and I am genuinely worried what might happen if it gets much higher. I think I’d be comfortable with 150 views of a post, even if the subscribers counts were higher. I’m not sure the kind of writing I do is suited for a large audience. That’s not why I write.

I know others do quite pointedly write to acquire an audience and I applaud them. Self-promotion isn’t easy for me to witness. I know the hazards, there are many patches of hard concrete down that road. Some people do it well, and with grace, I am not among those.

What I want instead is what we have here, at Substack, at least until the end of Act II. I want an online writer’s room. I want to read your stuff, I want you to read mine, and I want to know what you want me to know. I don’t want too many readers to know. There’s time for that when I’m dead.

Don’t make it about me, make it about my writing, and shoot your best shot. I want to know what sucks. I want to know what is wrong with it, but I want to hear those messages delivered with a friendly slap on the back and a “I do this shit too.” I want to die a better writer. That’s it. The Pulitzer can be awarded later.

I want to know when something lands. “That landed” is worth 500 words of glazed praise. I know when something lands for me. That’s why I read your stuff on Substack: to give your words a place to land. Mine already have (for me).

But folks, I experiment here. I write things I’m not sure I can, or if I should. Once it is on the page, it is not me. It’s my writing. Those are different things. One can hate my writing and love me. I can give you a short list of people to ask about how that works.

Most of my closest friends cringe at my version of events I’ve written about that they witnessed, I probably have a reputation with others who know me less intimately as bordering on something of a fabulist from time to time….

That may or may not be fair. I will be taking no further questions.

Guilty. I’m writing. These are my stories to tell, not sworn testimony before a jury. I love my writer’s imagination. Sometimes I do take literary license with the facts (especially those that make me look bad) so that the truth can be told.

I may not recall exactly what happened as you do, but I will tell you the Truth of it. That writing for me; photographing what I see with words. (that’s Bukowski). My eyes aren’t always that great.

But Substack is headed to a bad place. The pangram roll-out was about validating human user and word counts for business data consumers. This was a solid Act II move. That means there is some pushback from data brokers about the data, it might not look completely real to them (do you really think anyone really wants to read clavicular?).

That’s not where their attention should be. It should be on de-duplicating the Notes feed and enabling application programming interfaces to lift-and-shift data to user-owned spaces. That would be the Act I move. Act I is already over.

Who knows how long they will be in Act II? Probably for a while, but it will be a slow grind on people who write for the reasons I do.

So, while we still have it, I encourage you, the Substacker reading this (my apologies to my email-only and RSS subscribers, this is kind of inside baseball), to be the community you want to have.

This will be hard because building something is hard. You will be giving out more than you get back more often than not. There is not a singular purpose for being on Substack. Some writers here do not respond to feedback, others write better in their replies than in the actual piece.

To each his own. I will give you a quote from a DM chat with another Substacker: “Writers can be a weird bunch.” Yeah, thanks Sherlock.

I don’t think and are here for the same reasons, but I read them both. I implore to someday let us all know just how Bad that Bunny can get. I will be a paid subscriber to for as long as I can. She’s done, and is still doing, God’s work.

I’m really a writer, when it comes right down to it, because saw what I saw in the world in the 1980s (he was on NPR back when it was actually public radio). My thoughts came out of Andrei’s mouth on a regular basis those days, and with a laconically chill Romanian accent to boot. We think alike...maybe I’m not so much of a loser after all. It is a unique thrill for me to be able to subscribe to his Substack today.

provides the news I trust. There’s no way to conceive of my world today without her. reminds me that there still are good men in the world, writes about those men too. That’s really important to me. So many men suck, I look for the helpers, just like Mr. Rogers told me to.

walks the wobbly tight-rope of self-inquiry with me. My former Zen teacher steadily contributes insightful and boots-on-the-ground helpful commentary where Zen and psychoanalysis overlap in the Venn diagram of self-knowledge. makes sure I am no longer the smartest person in the room when it comes to living with AI.

I could name a dozen more, you know who you are, but the fun I have here is with a bunch of people who write to an audience of crickets just like I do. You are fun people. You aren’t cranking mediocrity to hit a word quota for a publishing contract.

You’re here for the same secret reason I am—you love reading your stuff. Substack gives me a place to go back and read my own writing and distribute it to people who also want to read it.

This won’t be around forever, but nothing ever is. Let’s make it great. Let’s all invest in a future of tired tales beginning with “Remember when Substack…?” to tell our combination Flock camera, mood stabilizer, and sex robot someday.

Oh wait, that device is already in your hand.

It’s a pilot. Like Notes.

Pictured at the top of this essay is the time-dependent Schrodinger equation rendered in bra-ket1 notation. This is to quantum physics what F=ma is to classical (visible) physics. Yes, the quantum state of a system now determines what that system will become in the future. The surprise is that it works backwards and forwards in time just like F=ma.

God’s hands contain no dice.

Once again, for those in the back, the present contains the future, energy carries it forward.2 We can’t see the past, but we can calculate it from what we know about the present. The future is baked into now.

This equation has never failed to be verified experimentally, they’ve been trying for almost one hundred years. This is in God’s notebook.

Let’s think of cream pouring into coffee. The coffee and cream are separate initially. Everything that is going to be in your beverage is already present in the cream and the coffee. So why is that not the same as your desired beverage?

The pour sets the starting arrangement; Ĥ can be thought of as the process that turns every moment into the next one, it is represented by the Ĥ symbol just to the right of the equals sign. The |Psi> notation represents the complete description of the cup at an instant from which the odds of every shade it could become can be computed.

The shocking thing here is that you can calculate the state of your un-stirred cream and coffee from the caramel colored drink in your hands. Why? Because it isn’t actually mixed, it is in one of a very large number of possible molecular-level arrangements that all look the same to the human eye.

Think of a dance performance. When you get to the end of it and the dancers stand hand-in-hand for their bows, the dancers have moved through so many different positions that you lost track, you can’t retrace all their steps in your mind, their positions in the bowing-line seem random. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

If you had a video you could simply watch in reverse and it would be revealed that there’s nothing random at all about where they ended up for the encore bows. What is worth measuring is how random the line looks to someone without the video, and that has an exact formula, the Gibbs entropy:

where p_i is the probability of finding a dancer in region i of the encore bow line. All dancers offstage: one p = 1, the rest 0, and S = 0. The curtain goes up.

As they take the stage, eventually evenly over N positions on stage: each p = 1/N, and S = k_B ln N. Bumping into each other as they run on stage drives this quantity higher. This is the second law of thermodynamics expressed as an idea about the chorus line bowing-line order.

While stirring cream into your coffee you can’t see the cream and coffee on the molecular level, your retina “averages” them. That doesn't stop Schrödinger's equation from putting every molecule back where it was before the pour dispersed the cream's information into the black coffee. It might be just math, that is, a matter of tracking a very large number of degrees of freedom.

Serious people are actually testing this.

Now, consider the notion that Reality is One Thing. Dating has to work the same way nuclear fission does, according to the same laws, no matter how impossible it is to track the finer points of the operation of those laws.

So, how does this explain and Jacob?3 Dating is coffee.

One of the possibilities when P matched on Hinge was that she would get stood up. She is perhaps the most experienced dater I have ever known, certainly the most experienced one with whom I have knowingly conversed (on Substack). Surely she calculated beforehand that being stood up was a possibility. I’m willing to wager there may have been a book with her, or in her car.

But, what were the possibilities that all five of these conditions would be true?

1. P sat at the bar, emotionally available

2. Hinge Jacob acted like an avoidant coward

3. Bartender Jacob was working at the bar at which they agreed to meet.

4. Bartender Jacob acted with engaged empathy.

5. Bartender Jacob was working that night

The outcome? P enjoyed being stood up. Now, this particular outcome was predictable if you are a regular reader of hers. Why? Sometimes P’s dates attempt to seduce her with poop stories.

Take note, all of these conditions, prior to P darkening the door at Bartender Jacob’s bar to meet Hinge Jacob, were predictable and possible. These conditions entangle with each other. Bartender Jacob possibly only speaks to her because there was room for her to wait at the bar, not a table…but tell me something else that improbably couldn't have happened that night.

Dating isn’t just hard to predict, the outcome depends on the decisions of a number of separate agents. If Bartender Jacob was off, or if P wasn’t to his taste as a customer, the outcome might have been double strawberry-matcha worthy.

I don’t mean to pick on , she’s a good sport, and a good writer, and brilliant, and funny, and gorgeous, and dating! Decent men of PNW I implore you, brush up that Hinge profile. You could end up a Substack essay!

So, I really question how one can wrap one’s mind around a date well enough to say whether it was a success or a failure? At the point in time when you make the judgment, you can’t possibly conceive of the degrees of freedom. You are in the cup.

Do not ignore that we would all feel differently about Hinge Jacob if we found out he got hit by Seattle light rail on the way to meet P. She might even drop by to see Jacob in the hospital…after having a drink mixed by Jacob, but I digress.

I am resolved to use my new-found retirement-enabled freedom to try dating. Not try dating again, I’ve never really done it as I am resolved to do it now. I have never been who I am now.

When I was “dating” before I was actually desperately in search of myself. I wanted the missing piece, the mother I never had, the companion I never had for myself, the person who loves me no matter what. There were no possible successful outcomes…perhaps other than eventually giving up, which I did.

Now, that person I was looking for in the dating apps looks back at me in every mirror, I want a good hang for him. In my wildest fantasies my hangs would be people who will roll their eyes at my idiocy and will gently reflect back to me any of the many things about myself to which I am blind.

Great googly-moogly I can’t conceive of the number of things that would have to go right for one single person, my soul-mate or whatever, to actually end up across the table from me on a night I wisely elect to not tell my poop stories. That seems utterly inconceivable.

But, I figure there are about thirty-thousand available women in the New York City area who would make a good hang for me. Maybe thirty-five hundred of them can roll their eyes at my nonsense. Maybe 350 of those have a hinge profile, I might swipe-right on 35.

I want to meet some of those 35. That feels like a lift, but doable.

I’ll bring a book.

Sexual interest is not assault. Rape is not a crime of unbridled sexual interest. One can want to fuck and protect someone at the same time. In fact, I can’t imagine any other way to feel about someone I want to fuck. Of course I want to protect them. More than anything else I want them to feel safe. Of course I want their prior fully informed freely-chosen consent. They also need to have mine.

Yes, I am going to use “to fuck” instead of all the other rhetorically softer variations of that semantic utterance. To fuck someone means I want to be close to them, share myself with them, and see to their enjoyment of our encounter. If using that verbiage means some will eschew my company, than I’m going to have to accept that, because I am done with hiding my manifestation of life’s desire that life persist.

I admit the words “to fuck” have a staccato feature when paired this way. It sounds aggressive, and it is. It isn’t the aggression of injustice and dominance, it is the aggression of a flower poking up through a crack in a concrete driveway. To want to fuck is to want to feel, to share, to put something out there which wants to be met.

I join the queue carefully behind the other diners at the bakery perusing the line of pastries from which we can choose. I’m gazing at croissants, pastries, and buns I want to eat because I want to live. I look up and see a lovely woman smiling at me awaiting my requests. She’s surprisingly well put together for her role, and her smile is genuine. She’s my physical type; an open heart is displayed across her face.

I want to fuck her. I notice this and order my pastry. I will never see her again. What harm have I done? My smile returning hers was ordinary, the way I caught my breath when she bent over to grab my pastry wasn’t audible or known to anyone but me.

As I sit here typing I can glance up at her behind the counter and watch her work, appreciating the way she moves, and how her clothes fall against her contours, I enjoy that. Our gazes locked once, we both smiled and then averted our eyes. Did I just confess my dangerous desire? Did she finger the cylinder of pepper spray in her pocket and scan for the nearest exit just in case? Maybe, I can’t control that. I can’t even control having this notion pop into my mind.

I just wish this notion that my desire makes me a threat to others didn’t immediately manifest in my mind when I’m “caught” (by my own disapproval) admiring a woman.

Incels externalize this, as far as I can tell. They blame others, women as a group, for these feelings, their powerlessness over them turns them to rage and rejection. Perhaps I might have turned to incel rage. For years while I weighed more than four hundred pounds I think I was bordering on it.

I felt hopelessly helpless. My inability to manifest what I wanted turned to anger. The gatekeepers for my imagined relief were women. Imagine hearing endless stories from women whom I found attractive lamenting their choices of the worthless pieces of shit they choose as dates.

They seemed to repeatedly choose men who were frank misogynists—spoiled, horny, entitled teenagers who had physically matured to adulthood—who spat out the most horrible things about women in the company of only other men. These were the guys getting the dates while I studied the literary proclivities of the Playmate of the Month from her interview alongside the nudes. I imagined what having a coffee or seeing a play with her might be like. Did she read Beckett?

“Not all men” is more than a reply-guy’s defense against an imagined online slight of his manhood. It was my rallying cry, my slogan, my banner, it was emblazoned on the football scarf I stretched over my head figuratively in social situations. You want a nice guy? I’m standing right fucking here, and I have nothing planned for the weekend.

That was as effective a strategy for getting laid as starting a Substack is for getting a well-paying writing gig. Nothing. I got nothing. Nada. I got a life of celibacy, but was it involuntary? Not exactly. I undermined myself, I just didn’t know I was doing it. My romantic strategy was cruel optimism.1 The things I was doing to achieve my goal were the very things that kept it out of reach.

Fortunately, a woman did save me—my therapist. I didn’t fuck her, though I initially wanted to. With her help, I found the appropriate target for my rage—my own disordered thinking about sexuality which sprang from being the son of a misogynist sexual predator (of the Don Draper variety).

I grew up wanting to be his opposite—black where he was white, and vice versa. My dad was sexually promiscuous in his best moments, and a sexual predator in his worst. I didn’t know what I wanted other people to see in me as a man, but it sure as hell wasn’t that.

He did hurt people, myself included, but he was the only role model I had for masculine life until I reached adulthood. He wasn’t evil, not fundamentally, but he did suffer and support the evil of the patriarchy baked into my 1960s urban Texas culture.

I exist because becoming pregnant with me was the way my mother kept him from divorcing her for having the temerity to want to attend college and have a career (which he feared made him look inadequate). It would have been too scandalous for him to abandon a child this way. They both preferred the unseen abandonment of neglectful parenthood, as they had been both been abandoned this way themselves, they knew little of any other kind of home life.

So, they had me, and abandoned me emotionally literally from day one, and it was up to me to decipher what human relations were while ducking the blows and covering my ears during the worst parts of the non-stop showing of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe2 that was my home life.

They were married and divorced to each other three times before I was 17. I usually found out when another round of my home breaking up was happening from our black maid, whom I called Bobby. They told her (so she could start cleaning both their houses) before they told me.

This has left me with trauma that can’t be undone with thinking. I can’t think my way out of this. I have to have different experiences. My therapist gave me some rare homework for our annual August break: I have to get someone’s phone number, or at least ask.

She cautioned me against making it too high stakes at first, i.e., don’t go after the hottest person in the room. I’m supposed to just approach a woman I might want to fuck, chat until the time is right, and then ask for her number. That’s it.

I have never done this. I am 66 years old. Every number in my phone from a female is there because they offered it to me unsolicited.

The point isn’t to get her number, if fact, I get extra credit (from my shrink) if she doesn’t give it to me. The point is to have the experience of asking someone and surviving the encounter.

I need to encode new grooves in my brain. I can’t think my way through this. I have to have the experience of being safe taking this risk. I have to experience the consequences, feel them, and resolve myself emotionally afterwards.

From the time I began to speak until my mid twenties I was afflicted with a very severe stutter. I withdrew emotionally and socially because of it. My chief adaptive tool was what speech therapists call circumlocution, that is, finding another word or phrase with a similar meaning to substitute for what I anticipated stuttering on in the few seconds before I got to the blocking word or phrase in my sentence.

Stutterers know in advance when they are going to stutter (called a block). You know it is coming. I developed a massive vocabulary at a ridiculously young age (through voracious reading and use of a dictionary) so that I could be prepared for circumlocution. It isn’t crazy to say that being unable to freely choose all and each of my words in speech made me a much better writer.

I was twenty-six years old before I ordered what I wanted in a restaurant. Take this in. It is true. Think about the scale of fear that produced that.

Up until the summer I turned 26, I scanned the menu for things I knew I could say, and I ordered that. This also had the effect of exposing me to huge variety of foods as I was growing up. Once at a legendary Texas steak house as a teen I perused the menu and realized I could fluently and confidently order “mountain oysters” not knowing what they were (bull testes).

They’re actually pretty tasty deep fried, like chicken gizzards, and for decades the adults at that table with me that evening told stories about “Hank’s kid who ordered mountain oysters.” They of course, pushed back from a steak dinner loosening their huge silver belt buckles, kicking back in their expensive Cowboy boots that never saw an unpaved surface all their lives without every ordering this dish.

Men don’t eat balls, they have them, by God. To eat balls might betray some effeminate quality, I suppose. These men told me they frankly admired my courage. Fear can make one look courageous. I seemed to conquer mine with a little BBQ sauce on the side.

My current level of speech fluency manifested in my mid-twenties because I made myself stutter intentionally in public—mimicking the halting, frantic, speech of a stutterer in situations where I could actually speak fluently. Mind you, I never stuttered on purpose before this. Ever. This felt to me like voluntarily sticking a hand in a running blender.

It remains, to this day, the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.

I remember the first time I did it, standing across from a sandwich maker in a off-campus deli. I noticed that the sandwich maker didn’t flinch, or indicate impatience in any way. She simply stood there pencil in hand until I completed my order, smiling and asking if I wanted pickles afterwards.

This is so etched on my mind that forty years later I still remember she was wearing a light-blue bandanna around her head. Why did I do this? Was I so prescient and wise in the ways of living that I knew that this desensitization, this emotionally difficult and thoroughly terrifying stuttering cosplay, was my ticket out of the prison of my dis-fluency?

No, I did it because I wanted to fuck my speech therapist.

I think she knew this, though maybe just intuitively. When we discussed trying this strategy I was visibly repelled by it. “No fucking way” was my curt reply to her suggestion. She persisted, and she actually wandered into treacherous ethical territory as a therapist by making it clear to me that it would please her to no end personally if I were to go out and stutter intentionally and then report that experience back to her. She batted her eyes figuratively and asked me if I would please please please do that for her. She even pleaded that she needed to tell her supervisor that she got me to try.3

I wanted to please her, believe me, she was a vision of Italian beauty, training to be a classical vocalist, speech therapy was going to be her day job while she tried to be Renee Fleming. I would have tried to swim to shore from Alcatraz island (something no one has ever survived) to please her.

Because I wanted to fuck her I was willing to go do something I had avoided like a certain excruciatingly painful death for my entire life—stutter when I didn’t have to. Since completing that summer of speech therapy with my Italian Penelope, I have spoken, fluently, at length, in front of crowds approaching 2500 people; I have no fear of facing even larger audiences. I still stutter from time to time, like Biden did in public from time to time, but it doesn’t interfere with anything about my life. Most people don’t notice. I don’t even always notice.

This is what wanting to fuck someone brought me, yet I still regard this same drive as a universally visible threat to others which I have to conceal. I never told this speech therapist of my amorous feelings, we never physically touched. I behaved like a complete gentleman while I internally dissolved into pools of shimmering lust in her presence. I was grateful to sit behind a table lest I betray my secret physically. I was freed from a lifetime of imprisonment by fear of stuttering because of wanting to fuck her.

Now I need to bring this same courage to asking a woman for her number. Please don’t laugh, I acknowledge it is funny to read and talk about it, but the truth is that I am so desperately wanting to find this part of myself that I unconsciously hide it from my own view.

I tell myself I am fine being alone, and apparently, on the outside, I am. Being cat-fished on Substack in May and the unending negative self-talk in my brain inform me otherwise.

I don’t need a bunch of numbers in my phone, I’m not even sure I want a relationship in the sense that most people do. But, I do have to do this. I have to find the courage to free myself from my own irrational fears again.

I’ll let you know if I get pepper-sprayed.

Rant on the orange stain.

Wow, things are getting weird. Captain Bonespurs finally said something that made me laugh. He told a press gaggle that left the safe plane by hiding in a catering transport container so he could fly home on the more dangerous plane.

I literally burst out laughing when I read that.

Between strokes, apparently one of his fluffers told him that the plane he flew on did not have the defensive systems of either of the other two planes he loaded with US government employees and press for Iran to use as target practice.

The catering container in which he cowered to sneak on to his disguised plane didn’t have climate control systems either; it smelled vaguely of Ranch dressing. What courage.

Of course, he did not mention that the plane he was willing to board was not identifiable to anyone as a military target; it flew dark (no transmitters) until it got out of danger. That’s classified, ma’am.

His escape was concealed by two decoy planes, easily identifiable as military targets, full of people who had no idea that they were a taking part in an evasive military maneuver in response to an active credible threat of attack.

I think the Iranians knew the response would have been nuclear, so they elected to not commit suicide by cop. You watch, that will be Captain Bonespurs’s final excursion into airspace that Iran can threaten until his war, or his time in office, is over, whichever comes first.

Democratic Socialists of America Rant

Direct observation of Reality will teach you that good arises with evil. They need each other like black needs white. The wins, and strong showings as a loser, in political races by people who believe that government should be honest, transparent, and helpful are heartening signs of good in the world. Every time I turn around there’s another good candidate saying the right things in the press.

Is it any surprise that good, decent candidates are fleeing the party that loses to Captain Bonespurs? The Democratic party is a hollow shell of performative fundraising from celebrities and hedging oligarchs. It stands for nothing other than “we’re not that other guy.”

The DSA does stand for something, and like most marginalized political movements, it is full of extremist performers looking for attention. You will see a lot of red displayed at the meetings, a few Che Guevara t-shirts cut-off as crop tops, red Chinese stars on stray hats, tote-bags, and notebooks, as well as a lot of crescent moon jewelry.

Even though it’s only a few people, its very cringe.

Most of the people there simply want government to stop spending money on killing brown people at home and overseas. They want their government to prioritize providing food, housing, healthcare and dignity to people alive on the surface of the part of the planet it governs.

They want government to stop punishing people with poverty because they are not contributing sufficient value to shareholders via their existence. They want the people who are wealthy beyond their ability to consume to pay their fair share of the costs of providing everyone with food, housing, healthcare, and dignity (clothing, recreations, education).

They want one set of laws that everyone has to obey. They want those laws enforced without fear or favor. They want companies to operate safely, in a way that benefits the most people, without pollution and other destruction. They want those companies to spend money to satisfy the government that they will not cause harm to others in the future.

Good government is expensive, and those costs should be born by those who use it. This is only fair.

That’s what people want. The DSA is the only party that has that in their platform. That’s why people are emerging from it’s polemic ranks to run for office. It isn’t communism. No one wants state ownership of the means of producing wealth. They want the state to keep the production of wealth safe and lawful.

Yes, billionaires would be eliminated. An economic system that permits the existence of billionaires is badly broken.

Being a millionaire would be meaningful again, a true indicator of talent and skill instead of a measure of personal connections, willingness to do wrong, and/or dumb luck.

No one wants to eliminate wealthy people, or the opportunity to become wealthy. They just want government to stop protecting people who have more money than anyone can spend. They want the wealthy to earn their money lawfully and to pay for the resources they use to get wealthy, especially other people.

They want what FDR dreamed of, what Eisenhower wanted, what LBJ made into law, and what Biden began to get done again.

That’s the DSA.

AI Writing on Substack Rant

So you enjoy reading your own writing, and other people tell you that they enjoy it also. Perhaps you write well enough to be published somewhere, or have your own book. Perhaps you even have one, or more.

This is not why I write. There’s not really a reason I can identify as why I write, but it isn’t to make money. It would be great to get paid a living wage for writing, for showering, for doing my laundry, or for any number of things I do every day to be Richard. I’d be the cleanest MFer you’ve ever seen, or at least I think I would be.

I can’t imagine my life without writing. Is that why I write? It is why I shower and wash my clothes. Am I missing out on earning opportunities? People on OnlyFans get paid for masturbating, that seems like a pretty sustainable career. Do people retire from being professional masturbators?

Some people get paid on Substack for figurative literary masturbation. This thought has passed through my mind, but it seems like kind of a cheat. However, I confess that I after I write I feel uniquely complete. I’ve done what a part of me needs to do. Perhaps it is more like masturbation than it appears on the surface, at least with regard to my motives. I find the product of writing far more interesting though.

I’m thrilled, touched beyond measure, that there are dozens of people, many of whom I don’t know, who subscribe to this Substack. I get feedback from people I otherwise don’t know, and friends regularly remind me that they read Richard’s Rants to keep in touch with me, which they value.

I am greatly heartened by those who contribute money to encourage me to continue writing. I am actually making some money, it is welcome, and I promise to put it to good use having experiences I can write about later.

But forgive my hostility to the churn of people who see writing mostly as an opportunity to make money indoors—those obsessed with subscriber and follower counts. This doesn’t signal a dearth of loftier reasons for taking pen to paper, perhaps many of these subscriber-seeking writers also want to produce creative work for it’s own sake, but the score-keeping is just unseemly to me.

Also, using AI to create images to promote your Substack is lame. Please stop. We can tell, it turns me off. Let your writing stand on it’s own, stop flashing figurative AI tits for clicks.

wrote a very thought provoking piece about AI which resonates with me, someone who uses AI every day at work. She notes that there is an important distinction between those who use AI to help them think, and those who use it instead of thinking. This especially important with regard to writing.

I use AI in clinical decision support, i.e., to help people make better choices to help others heal. We have a policy, which pre-dates AI, against letting machines make treatment decisions. Before AI, this mostly related to how we responded to automated alarms. We haven’t found any reason to change that policy because of AI-assistant clinical decision support. The AI is simply a reference tool, like a dictionary or a thesaurus.

Do I use AI to write? As I have said before, no. I don’t have any reason to. I am not representing myself on Substack as an authority on anything other than being Richard (which is slippery enough), and AI can’t tell me a damn thing about being Richard. I have enough troubling figuring out Richard myself, and I been training to do this for more than sixty years.

If I were a journalist, a lawyer, or a scientist writing a Substack in those areas of expertise I would consider it bad faith to not use AI to inform my writing. AI can help experts check and develop their own thinking. I sure hope they use it.

But, there are worthless pieces of shit on Substack using AI to cut-paste publish returns from their prompts and represent that as their own writing. I was honeypot cat-fished by some entity which still has an active Substack account who did precisely this. I flirted with a machine for months. It was good at it.

Karma doesn’t need your help. Or mine. People passing off AI as their writing will get their reward. But soliciting paid subscriptions from people by cut-pasting AI replies and calling that your writing is a con. I think a day will come when it is also a crime, like revenge porn.

I’m also not thrilled by Substack’s rake on paid subscriptions. They used it to throw a party for some polemic con men who just got arrested for sexual assault, inviting them to the platform to churn subscriptions with their he-man alpha-male con. I’d rather supporters buy me a coffee than give any money to Substack, but it isn’t a hill I will die on.

Bay me a coffee

There’s no paid content here, I just have paid subscriptions turned on as a service to my readers, and so Substack would stop nagging me about it. That nagging is fair, bills have to be paid. You can pay for a subscription, no judgment, no new payment platform, Substack is no more or less evil than the others. All true.

But if you’re here to use this platform as a way to con people with AI….then surely you’re creative enough to complete that thought for me. If not, feed AI this essay as a prompt and ask the chatbot to complete it for you.

It will get it right.

It is hard for me to adjust how to spend money at this point in my life. For all of my life I have been in a default frame of mind—save money whenever I can. I trained myself to endure minor hardships, to do without, and to settle for less than I wanted if doing so meant that I could reduce spending..

Why? So I would have money in retirement. Why did I want money in retirement? To spend it. I don’t have children, I don’t have a sugar baby (applications still being accepted). I have people to whom I plan to bequeath the rest of my money, but I am not saving it for them. They get my mistakes—the money I didn’t spend.

I thought about this while I was flying economy to my mid-July vacation. I decided to upgrade to business class on the way back, I decided I am done with exchanging money for pain in my knees. I am done with trading my right to two arm-rests for a couple of hundred bucks. This sounds bougie and extravagant to me, but it’s not. It’s time I started spending my money this way. My default saving years are over. Let me explain why.

One of my favorite hospice patients was an anesthesiologist named Charlie who fell victim to a particularly virulent case of prostate cancer that struck him from being the picture of health in his mid 70’s. He was an easy hospice patient. He knew the drugs, and knew pain management. It was easy to keep him comfortable and in good spirits. He installed an espresso maker within reach of his hospital bed at home to deal with the drowsiness his pain meds could cause.

He hired his own nursing aides, they were always as under-worked as they were under-dressed. I kid you not, their names I remember were Amber, Tiffany, and Chantal. Yes, just go ahead and indulge all of your filthy assumptions about his motives. He was dying and all out of f*cks to give about anyone’s opinion of him.

When one of Charlie’s Angels answered the door (yes, that was his name for them) I would hear him call out from his bedroom “Not dead yet!” as I walked back through the maze of his cramped one-bedroom apartment that overlooked Central Park South. On my way back to his bedroom he would add “…feeling much better now. I think I’ll go for a walk.” He was full of one-liners from the canon of Monty Python.

In his room, he was a bare wisp of a skin-wrapped skeleton, grinning from ear to ear, propped up in a hospital bed, watching something on a giant (for that time) TV.

“Sorry to disappoint you” I would begin, “but I’m still your hospice nurse.”

“Yeah,” following our well-rehearsed script “I was totally robbed of all of my hospice nurse fantasies. Can’t the hospice agency spare a babe for this poor, dying, dirty old man? Have you no mercy?” He loved this banter. So did I.

“I told you Backdoor Hospice Nurses 9 was completely made up, that’s totally not what intermittent suction machines are used for” was my next line as his straight man.

“I almost died laughing at one through eight, though” was one of his quips in retort. His punchlines rotated, and made us both laugh each time. He would keep trying to come up with new ones.

Charlie and I had many deep, meaningful, intimate conversations. His emphasis on humor was deliberate. He knew that his pain would be minimized by the hormones and peptides which flood his system when he laughs. He knew that persistent, unrelenting, merry-making would keep him as free as possible of despair about his sudden, unwanted, demise from untreatable cancer.

He disclosed that comedy was his thing at the bedside in operating rooms. He deliberately made a point of putting people to sleep while they were laughing—he believed it made for better anesthesia and easier intubations. He had jokes about being a Stand-up Anesthesiologist (most sit on a stool by the head of the bed) that I wish I could recall. Charlie was naturally funny.

He had also been the primary caregiver for his father who died at ninety-something years of age, also a physician, barely a year before before Charlie got sick. This made him particularly appreciative of hospice caregivers.

He told me his father’s main regret was not spending his money. This unfortunately folded into Charlie’s biggest disappointment in his life: facing a sudden severe, unexpected illness himself he realized he made the same mistake his father admonished him against.

When we were getting to know each other by engaging in life reminiscence I asked him what he wishes he could have communicated to a pre-diagnosis version of himself. His answer startled me, it was immediate, and surprisingly hostile:

“Stop flying economy, you fucking idiot, you’re not in graduate school any more.”

It felt like he was talking to me, even though I was in my mid-forties at the time. I had never flown anything but economy. I wasn’t in grad school either.

“The last flight I made, coming back from going down to MD Anderson1, I sat in 32E, the middle seat, between two smelly people who both fell asleep. What an idiot.” He looked out his window and shook his head.

His regret was sincere, he looked me in the eye to make a silent point. I confess that this conversation had faded from my consciousness until I found myself regretting that I made the same choice recently. Charlie thought about it until he died. He was embarrassed that he squandered his father’s deathbed advice, and left his and his father’s money unspent.

I’ve realized as I reach retirement age that spending money is spitting in the face of your own immortality. It is a solid admission that you now believe you have more money than time left to spent it…and not (in my case) because you have so much money…you have so little time.

That’s a hard thing to do. I will find many excuses not to believe it. I can be really stubborn about persisting with the fear that I can run out of money because I am going to somehow need it, because (I will never confess this out loud) I will actually live forever. Somehow, I’ll be that guy.

The last time I saw Charlie alive he could barely speak. He was completely drained of life energy, dozing quietly, I put my hand on his shoulder and said “Charlie, is there anything else I can do for you?”

He eyes opened, he turned his head and said weakly “not dead yet.” with a wry smile.

“I noticed.” was my reply. “Anything else?”

“Don’t fly economy,” He smiled and feel gently back to sleep. He had remembered our conversation from a few weeks before. I was touched. A day or so later I got a call from one of his home health babes.

“Charlie asked me to call you when he died.” came her meek voice.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Ok, he died in the middle of watching Life of Brian.” Life of Brian was his favorite Monty Python movie, he could just about quote the dialog along from beginning to end of the entire film. I smiled to myself: what a role model this man was for me. I vowed to emulate his example.

I realize Charlie had faded from my memory until I winced from the pain in my knees about four hours into my recent six-hour cross-country flight to Seattle. Was I making Charlie’s mistake?

I was, but not on the way back.

Thanks, Charlie. I’m feeling much better now.

A careful reader let me know they were left unsatisfied by the ending of this essay just at the peak of their pique:

I swear this has never happened to me before! It was probably all that Merlot.

As full disclosure, I began formal Zen meditation practice at San Francisco Zen Center. My first half-day sesshin (retreat) didn’t go well. I found the students cold, aloof, brusque, and dismissive. There was a posted schedule, allegedly in English, but I didn’t understand any of the words on it. Here’s a deeper dive:

In short, the entire Saturday morning was a comedy of errors, literally and figuratively. I was locked out twice, once for orientation, and also the next morning. I wore shoes that were complicated and time-consuming to get on and off. I missed one of the meals while I was wondering around trying to find a bathroom, and then wandering around to try to figure out where the f*ck everyone went. At the other meal I breached some code of conduct I didn’t know anything about and was openly lectured by the big cheese.

I didn’t know this at the time, but this experience was resonant with the apocryphal introduction one gets as a novice monk in Japanese Zen lore.

In ancient Japan, monasteries were “three hots and a cot.” That is, they were institutions where one could get three hot meals during the day and sleep inside at night. The only other physical labor required to live there was upkeep of the facility and sitting, still inside, during the day. For young men without means in some periods of Japanese history, this appeared, on the surface, to be a pretty good option.

So, if you wanted to join, you reportedly were refused entry for a week. You would be fed, and most temples had a hut outside the main gates one could sleep in, but you would be expected to demonstrate that you really wanted to join whatever Zen equivalent of the People’s Front of Judea 12 you were petitioning for entry by sitting outside continuously at the gate for a full week. Once a novice had done this, they were interviewed and generally granted entry into the training program.

Of course, actual entrance policies varied from place to place, and who knows if people actually endured these legendary deprivations, but the general idea was that your sincerity and the capacity for self-denial had to be proven before you could get to the daily hot rice and the nightly dry, indoor, straw sleeping mat.

No one deliberately put me through something similar at SFZC, they were just self-absorbed.3

Years after I wrote the above-linked essay, Victoria Austin, one of the teachers at SFZC, contacted me. She apologized on behalf of SFZC and requested my permission to use my essay for a class she was teaching. We had a hearty laugh together about all this on the phone. She was very appreciative of my essay.

My disappointing first sesshin at SFZC was followed up just over a year later by a richly contrasting and deeply satisfying first sesshin at Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis, the Zen Center I have since called my home:

I give you all this context to understand the views I had when I visited Olympia Zen Center last month, and for what follows as my examination of maybe why Olympia Zen Center follows the rigid style that it does, and why my center, in some contrast, does what it does.

I hope this gives my previously unsatisfied readers the finish they were looking for, or at least enough of one to give another essay a go later.

Likely much of the reason San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) and Olympia Zen Center (OZC) seemed so similar to me is that both founders trained in modern Japanese Zen temples. I have yet to visit Japan, but from the descriptions I’ve read and the pictures/videos I’ve seen both US centers evoke their Japanese temple roots.

Dharma Field Zen Center (DFZC) was founded by Steve Hagen, who was trained in the United States. He was originally educated as a botanist. Moreover, he was influenced by Indian patriarchs as well as Japanese masters, and his personality is solidly matter-of-fact and thoroughly pragmatic. This is what initially drew me to being his student.

But honestly, that’s giving too much credit to the personalities involved. Leaders are important to be sure, but the vibe in a zendo is also dependent on the sangha, the congregation, and what they expect and want from their zendo.

SFZC is kind of the popular Big Leagues of Zen in the US. They have a training monastery as well, and dozens and dozens of Zen teachers in the US took all or a substantial part of their Zen teacher training from SFZC.

Suzuki, the founding teacher, used to cringe endlessly about the “smelly, long-haired hippies” who showed up for classes and services in those first few years (SFZC was founded in the early 1960s). These weren’t the students he wanted, but he taught who showed up.

I imagine that any kind of traditional practice ritual or form was a refuge for Suzuki while he otherwise held his nose, so he likely stubbornly pursued norms which evoked the religious world he came from. It is worth noting that these same forms had been used by students in Japan (who can also sometimes be raw) successfully for centuries.

When he died, SFZC had issues with the leadership Suzuki appointed on his death-bed. There are books about this period, I won’t go into the scandal now, but after Suzuki’s passing in 1971 SFZC went aggressively in pursuit of showy and ambitious goals for a dozen years under the now-disgraced (as of 1983) appointed leader, which is kind of un-Zen like.

Under the successor’s leadership, the center purchased and ornately decorated the center with pricey Buddhist Art (still there), spun-off a few small businesses, started a hospice, heavily promoted the monastery as a refuge for Americans curious about Zen. Further, as a vibe, they became rather self-impressed as competing Zen centers in the US were plagued by public scandal and private intrigue during this same era.

Hold my beer.

I honestly don’t know enough about what happened at SFZC before 2006 to have my own opinion. I wasn’t around, and each of the people I do know who were there tell me a different shade of the same story. My teacher’s teacher, Dainin Katagiri, who founded the Minnesota Zen Center (where my teacher trained) presided over SFZC during the difficult transition period after the successor teacher chosen by Suzuki resigned in disgrace over a sex scandal. He was accused, seemingly credibly, of sleeping with female students at the monastery.

I’ve never met him, but I know and have discussed all this with six men who knew him well, four of whom who were at SFZC at the time. Their stories don’t exactly match up, but none of them are edifying.

After this happened, while Katagiri was interim leader, they set up a democratic system for future SFZC leadership, making leaders accountable to the sangha (congregation). I have not been particularly impressed by the leadership since, but it has been ethical, wise and judicious. This is very Zen-like. Ordinariness is highly valued in Zen practice and culture

I think the democratically-elected leaders are invested in rigid religious forms because of a desire to not go off the rails again. In other words, they do it for the same reason Japanese monasteries did it for centuries before them.

Buddhism—the religion that promises nothing, and delivers.

My views of Olympia Zen Center are very minimally informed. I have made one visit, and attended one service. I have read the book the founder published about Ryokan. I have read the copy on the website about their history.

Ryokan is someone I would have sought out personally. He ran away from the monastery at which he trained because the head teacher died suddenly and named Ryokan as successor, a surprise to everyone. Ryokan did not feel he was right for the position. But, unlike others who flee the rigors of Zen life, he did not renounce his vows as a Zen monk ever.

This meant he lived with two robes, three bowls, and whatever paper and ink he could scare up to write poetry and do calligraphy for the rest of his life, just as he had vowed to do in the monastery. He supported himself by begging (routine for Zen priests in Japan in the late eighteenth century) and his wits, without the backup of a temple, bartering his highly-sought calligraphy and poetry for sustenance. It’s quite the tale, but he ended up squatting in a small cabin about an hour’s hike up a mountainside from a modest Japanese village for most of his life.

When he came to town, he sought the company of the village children. Most of the shops in the village displayed signs of his design. His poetry, while dismissive of ancient Japanese forms, was popular enough to be adequate barter with suppliers for more ink and paper.

Take note: Ryokan was of sound mind and body. He could have apprenticed a trade and become a householder. His deliberately impoverished existence was a choice compelled by his faithfulness to his Buddhist vows as a priest. He didn’t run away to flee his vows (well, not all of them), he ran away because he wanted the monks at the his teacher’s monastery to choose their own leader. I find it interesting that this is resonant with what Katagiri installed at SFZC after the leadership scandal there.

Ryokan spent his days with the children of the village nearest his hermitage, teaching them calligraphy and playing games with them. This may be why Eido Mary Frances Carney called her book about Ryokan Kakurenbo, that’s Japanese for a traditional hide and seek game that children play.

On top of all that, we wouldn’t know ANYTHING of Ryokan without the diligent archiving of his poetry and other works by Teishin, a nun who fell in love with him at the end of his life. Left to his own devices, I think he would have vanished without a trace of historical records.

To add to this, Eido Carney writes in her book about being called on the carpet in Japan at her grad school because of her interest in Ryokan academically. Ryokan was regarded as kind of a stain on Zen poetry by academic purists. This was not a dude who was believed to embody all that is formal and ritualized in Zen, or Japanese literary circles.

I suppose this is all why I was expecting Olympia Zen Center to approach the free-and-easy vibe of my home Zendo rather than the stuffy distance of a hallway full of shrines at which to bow on the way to the impeccably proper formal Zendo. It isn’t what I imagine Ryokan would have done, but I say that as someone substantially less informed and much more distant from what remains of him than the priest who designed all of this. Perhaps if I had her training, I would have different views.

I wasn’t disappointed in Olympia Zen Center, not at all. I was surprised because of the unseen expectations I had going in. The priest who greeted me there, while not the founder, is her choice to do this work, and he also trained at SFZC. In no way do I find any fault, I’m not qualified to judge.

It’s surprising how things manifest. In Minneapolis we are a people-forward group. The investment is made by the teachers in the students, not in the acquisition of jewels for the premises. Our sangha is composed of working people trying to make sense of human existence. When my teacher made me an Official Buddhist at a ceremony in 2012, his first advice was quick and direct:

“You can call yourself a Buddhist now…but I don’t recommend it.”

At SFZC, and the cousins I have visited (Austin Zen Center, Brooklyn Zen Center). as well as at Olympia Zen Center everyone seems eager to remind students that they can indeed call themselves Buddhists, and they wear complicated formal robes for ordinary daily services. There’s nothing wrong, particularly, about any of this. It is what humans do, and we all have to find our own way.

I have no doubt this helps many students to keep their focus. and the forms contribute to their development as Zen students.

I just prefer a good game of hide and seek.

note: this is a rare re-post of a 2006 Richard’s Rants essay which did not make the original Slashdot —> Blogger —> BlogSpot —> MailChimp —> Substack migration. It was originally ranted in August 2006. Sorry for broken links.

.I had a very disappointing Sesshin at the City Center location of the San Francisco Zen Center during my visit on July 14-15, 2006. Before you feel sorry for me, know that disappointment is really good material for working on one’s practice if it is approached with the right frame of mind. Don’t worry, difficult and painful as it was, the Sesshin was very good for my practice.

I expected a lot. These expectations bore the fruit they inevitably do: dhukka (which I understand as “persistent dissatisfaction” in English). San Francisco Zen Center is the US dharma home of Suzuki Roshi, whose book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, powerfully influenced me as a young man. Beyond that, Katagiri Roshi, my teacher’s teacher, also originated his US practice in this Center. It was my first Sesshin at a Soto Zen Center, it seemed fitting to begin where my lineage began in the US. I was going to be sitting zazen in the same zendo where three generations of my dharma lineage sat zazen. It’s even referred to as the Beginner’s Mind Zendo, it seemed a good place to begin.

I was in San Francisco on business, sort of. I had planned a trip to Napa Valley some months ago for the week of July 16-23. I found out after those plans had been made that my hospice was receiving a quite prestigious award from the American Hospital Association at their Leadership Summit 2006 in San Francisco on the weekend just prior to my Napa trip. The CEO of the hospice for which I work invited me to attend the ceremony as a representative for the staff and authorized a couple of nights at the San Francisco Hilton (on the hospice’s tab) for me.

That all went fine. It was a marvelous setup for my Sesshin. I was the star hospice nurse representing the staff from a hospice agency receiving a prestigious award. I was waited on hand and foot (by the hotel staff). I got to hob-nob with some major players in palliative care and watched some really great presentations. David Gergen was the keynote speaker on Friday, his speech was really fascinating. I felt important and cared for. The high and mighty fall hard and fast. Watch me.

My first clue concerning the tone of my upcoming experience at San Francisco Zen Center came during the orientation session in Friday night. I walked down Market street (Google map) from my hotel, arriving about a half hour early, and both of the doors to the Center were locked. There were people entering the Center who had keys, but no one offered to let me in or inquired about why I was waiting on the stoop. They just looked at me and did not return my smiles.

I started to feel my anger well up. Someone inside there knew I was coming. Someone inside there knew I was new. I was disappointed there was no effort made to account for my lack of information concerning what to do or where to be. This was the theme of my internal reactions that would be repeated throughout my encounter at Sesshin. I felt isolated and embarrassed.

There was a sign on the doors indicating that they are unlocked 15 minutes before scheduled Zazen, so I assumed that the 15 minute rule must have a wider application and I waited until 15 minutes before my appointed arrival to try a door again. At 6:45 I tried the door again, hopeful that someone would at least hear me trying to turn the knob. I had an appointment, so I had disappointment. Ironically (or maybe not), the Sensei who gave the dharma talk the next day touched on this very point. I felt a bit as though he was talking directly to me.

Still no open door. No open door. There’s a haiku there somewhere. Hmm.

About this time, a kind-looking gentleman with a shaved head walked up and I asked him if he would let me in for the Sesshin orientation. He indicated he would, but he said “do you know you are way early?”

“I thought the Sesshin orientation began at 7:00 p.m.” I said, digging out the e-mail I had received from the Center.

“Oh,” he said “maybe it does, come on in.”

I walked in and there was another gentleman eating dinner at what appeared to be the reception desk. He knew even less than the guy that let me in, but he did say he would check. He indicated a place for me to sit, and I sat, quiet as a good zen student, while 7:00 p.m. came and went according to the grandfather clock in the lobby. Two other students arrived as I did, asking the same questions, receiving the same dearth of answers.

About 7:05 p.m. (according to the clock, I had left my watch at home as a gesture of acknowledgment of the timelessness of zen practice), a woman walked up whose voice I recognized from my conversations with her on the phone when I arranged my visit. She said “Oh! It’s already seven o-clock, isn’t it?” That’s mindfulness for you. I introduced myself to her, expecting that this would set in motion some series of events and welcomes to the Center. Instead, what I felt from her tepid acknowledgment of my introduction was “so what?” Another newcomer indicated to her that it was already past 7, she dismissed the time on the clock in the lobby with “Oh, that clock is always wrong” and told her she had eight minutes to get her stuff upstairs and report to the Buddha room.

I was surprised by inattention to such details as the accuracy of a clock at a zen Center. That wouldn’t be the last such surprise. My expectations were really high.

A few minutes later, another gentleman in a kimono walked up and indicated we should sit in the Buddha room and he’d be with us in a moment. I learned later that this gentleman was the “Ino.” Also typical of my experience at the Center, I was not told what “Ino” means. I just assumed he was a leader of some sort, my research has turned up definitions which range as widely as the person in charge of anything having to do with the mouth (chanting, eating, etc), to the head of the monastics, to the person in charge of services.

It would have been extremely helpful to me if I had been given a simple glossary. I respect traditions, even the “hazing” of leaving new students to figure out things in the Soto tradition of “following along,” but it seems to me to indicate a certain lack of compassion to place me, even by unintentional neglect or innocent mindlessness, in a position of needless worry when I am trying to concentrate my practice. As I sat with my anger, it dawned on me that I had this un-examined and heretofore subconscious expectation that the Center was a collection of fully realized beings rather than what it is, a collection of beings in the human realm caught by various amounts of delusion, ignorance and greed like the rest of us. One thing this experience helped me to understand was that even Sensei put their pants on one leg at a time.

The Ino’s compassion, warmth and patience radiated out from him in all directions. He was what I want in a teacher. My first impression of him proved to be consistent as he continued to distinguish himself as a member of the Center who treated me with real compassion during the entire length of my visit. That compassion not only significantly distinguished him from all but a few of his colleagues but it also validates his dedication to the dharma. I made a point of thanking him for it as I left. It was indeed an honor to have met a Sensei with such a sincere dedication to kindness.

I felt as though the rest of the sangha was amused by my ineptitude and clumsiness as I fumbled around trying to fit in a highly structured environment with a lot of rules without being told what to do, what to expect, or what was expected of me. I have no idea what was really on their minds, if anything, this mind-read belonged to me, a remnant of my childhood, but the repetition of the pattern of this particular kind of disappointment, i.e., not being cared for as a newcomer, deeply surprised me. I expected more mindful attention to my fragile ego..

As an aside, I have to say this experience left me with a very warm appreciation for my sangha in New York City. We may be relative newcomers as a buddha-dharma tradition. We may be without a dharma transmission lineage, but we do not let a novice feel unwelcome or abandoned. They are told what to expect and what is expected of them as they are welcomed into our midst, even if they are only around for one sit.

At the San Francisco Zen Center, the one with the ancient tradition and direct dharma lineage (see my anger?), we didn’t get very far into the orientation before we learned that Ino was not going to be able to finish because he had something else to do which was more important. More important that welcoming guests to your Center? More important than giving us the tools and information to have a successful Sesshin? That seemed odd.

We were handed off to another person who did not know what he had told us, she just did what she could to pick up in mid-sentence and completed the rest of the orientation, including the highly complex Oryoki instruction, by reading instructions off of a piece of paper, stopping, going back over things she missed, and basically adding to my confusion the more she tried to relieve it.

Here’s where I set myself up again. I was very interested in Oryoki instruction. I am trying to bring mindfulness to my eating. I thought learning Oryoki would help. Getting my eating into balance is a matter of life and death for me, and just as it says on the Han (a block of wood they pound to indicated it is time for Zazen), this matter of life and death is very important. I really wanted Oryoki instruction. Expectations lead to disappointment. Great expectations lead to great disappointments.

It takes me a long time to put my shoes on because of my obesity. We were forever putting our shoes on and off as there were strict rules about where one could wear shoes and where one couldn’t (the experienced students all had slip-on sandals, by the way). Because of my struggles with shoes, I was always the last to get anywhere when we changed rooms. So, when I finally arrived at the dining hall for the Oryoki instruction the table at which it was provided was full. I had to sit at another one, alone, fully consistent with my upcoming realization as the “dismissed one.”

So, the Ino began the Oryoki instruction but, as I said above, he had to leave in the middle of it. The woman who took over for him did not know where he was in the training, and I couldn’t see what was going on anyway. It was fortunate in a way that I was sitting at a table alone because my eyes began to tear up as I realized I wasn’t going to get the instruction I wanted. I had come 3000 miles for this disappointment. I almost didn’t show up for Sesshin the next day because of it.

The next morning, I arrived a bit early at 5 am. I stood outside the door which I had been told to enter. It was locked, of course, but to be fair, I was early. I waited a few minutes and heard a key in the door from the other side. It didn’t open, so I continued to stand there until the appointed time I had been told to enter--5:20am. I had committed this day to practicing mindfulness, I wanted to get off on the right foot. Well, I should say the correct foot, since you enter the Zendo with the left foot.

But, did I know that because I had been told that during orientation? No. I knew that because my teacher, Steve Hagen of the Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis, mentioned it in a dharma talk months before. I was not told how to enter the Zendo at San Francisco Zen Center.

Before I tried the door to the Zendo another student carrying Oryoki bowls walked up and opened it. The perimeter alarm goes off. Now, I did find humor in this. Someone had unlocked the door but had not been mindful enough to disable the alarm. A few seconds later a gentleman who identified himself as the “night watchman” opened the door and told us that he did not know how to disable the alarm and was waiting for someone to show up to turn it off. He then shut the door and left us standing on the street and listening to the alarm.

Then, another student walked up and indicated he had a key and would let us into the other door, the door I was specifically told not to use this morning. I followed him, went inside, and found my seat in the Zendo. Fortunately, the message had gotten through that I needed a chair to sit. As I sat there I realized that the shirt I was wearing was inappropriate. It had colorful stripes. I had a black t-shirt on underneath with “WTF?” in big white letters across the front. This message was ENTIRELY appropriate for my state of mind at the time, but out of respect for my fellow students I stepped out and turned it inside out until the end of Sesshin so that it wouldn’t serve as a potential distraction. I only wish I had felt the same consideration shown for me.

To the Center’s credit, I was seated across from (what I discovered later were) very senior members of the sangha. Had I been told even that I could have discretely observed them to begin to catch on to some of the rituals and customs of their Center, but my constant worry at this time that I was doing something so wrong as to offend someone really detracted from my ability to practice. Really, just a little bit of instruction on form, just a little bit of clarification on the termInology, and my practice that morning would have been tremendously easier. I didn’t want my hand held, but I did want a hand up. I wanted some tools with which to work. I wanted to be cared for, seen, helped.

I attempted to comfort myself with that notion that I was likely following in the footsteps of a long line of new students, i.e., even the most experienced practitioners began as uncertain and embarrassed newcomers, but this notion did not significantly comfort me. It seems neither unreasonable nor inconsistent with the dharma to provide an absolute novice like myself with a mentor, or with enough information for a minimum level of assurance for the novice that their clumsy actions (or inactions) will not offend. I did not know who to bow to, when to bow, why we were bowing, which way to face, how to enter and leave, nothing. There was a lot of bowing going on. I didn’t understand it. The schedule was posted, but it used the zen terms for things and I did not know the definitions. I felt completely abandoned. I did not know I was doing something wrong, or not doing something I should, until someone corrected me.

I may be new to the San Francisco Zen Center, but I am not new to mindfulness practice. I wanted to show my respect to the entire Soto lineage by mindful practice at my first Sesshin but I was not given the tools to do this. I was told that there is a Soto tradition of “following along,” which is fine, but I was not given the tools to know who to follow. Not everyone did things the same way, I had no idea who to emulate, so I felt isolated and abandoned in the midst of what was supposed to by my parental sangha.

Ah, that’s interesting. This is quite consistent with my own parental history in my family. That’s a very powerful resonance. Fortunately this insight came to me in Zazen and I was able to sit with it.

That was all I could do. I could apply the dharma to my dilemmas. About halfway through the day as I was sitting and waiting for Zazen to begin, wondering if I was facing the right way or doing the right thing, a couple of famous scriptures occurred to me. First was the Buddha’s dying words: “Be a light unto thyself.” So, I thought, forget these people who abandon me. This is an opportunity to realize the dharma, I’ll use it as such and if I offend anyone else they can use that for their own practice. I’m doing what I was told, I just wasn’t told anything.

The other refuge I sought in the dharma was Buddha’s kalama sutta. Basically, the advice the Buddha gives is forget what anyone else tells you is the truth. Find your own truth without regard to anyone’s stature or lineage. It is quite possible that organizations such as the San Francisco Zen Center which comport to practice the buddha-dharma have just as surely lost their way as the Christian church has strayed from Jesus Christ’s message of love and compassion. This is just human ignorance, greed and delusion. No religion has a monopoly on these human frailties, the San Francisco Zen Center, my own expectations aside, was no different.

I could go on with a hundred other examples of things I was not told but should have been. I made mistakes in every single ceremony owing to a lack of instruction. I was left out of dinner because I had gone to the bathroom to wash my hands after struggling to put on my shoes. The meal chant was already going on when I walked in, not knowing where to get food or where to sit. I got no salad because I was late. Earlier I had interrupted everyone (all 70 students had their eyes on me) leaving the Zendo because I was not told how to leave. I sat facing the wrong way for lunch because I was told to sit in a seat facing the wrong way. Now that I have some emotional distance from all this it is more than a little bit funny. It is hilarious in fact. I was all three stooges in my own production of “Suckers sit Sesshin.”

One thing I do regret is there was a student who actually went out of her way to help me. We spoke barely ten words as we sat next to each other in the Zendo but her compassion was as radiant as the Ino’s. I looked for her at dinner to thank her but did not find her. I wish I had. I do not know her name. I do not even have a good memory of her face (we are discouraged from eye contact during Sesshin) but I will never forget her kindness as she discretely pointed to things and bowed in Gassho (palms together, like Christian praying) when I sat on my seat next to her. it was my own little Sesshin romance, she really touched my heart.

I tried to cultivate beginner’s mind, but I had no beginner’s luck.

I arranged to stay in a guest room the next day. I have to say that these arrangements were very well thought out, I had all the information I needed, I felt welcome and cared for. The next morning, I got to breakfast late (damn those shoes!) and didn’t get any fruit. To his credit, the Tenzo (head cook) noticed this and expressed palpable, if silent, disappointment that I was left out. That felt nice. I went and ate my cream of wheat at the silent table and reflected on my feelings of isolation. The work goes on, even as a guest.

Oh well, chop wood, carry water. Get up, sit. See. My refuges are only the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Not the San Francisco Zen Center. They are in the human realm just as I. I was very happy to have the opportunity to look into my own emptiness, to experience the consequences of my own expectations. I am not upset with the Center, I am happy with the work I did in sesshin. I did a lot of work. In spite of all the pain and struggle I will always feel a little bit at home here.

That was a very valuable lesson to learn.

I have always been an itinerant Zen student. I have tried to find a Zen group with which to sit as a home center in New York City, but none of them fits me the way Dharma Field, my home Zen center, fits me. Oddly, I feel most at home in a Zen center in a city which has never been my home—Minneapolis. I could move to Minneapolis. I haven’t. So far.

I avoid tourists in New York City. I avoid tourists when traveling. I don’t go where tourists go, deliberately. I do not want to contribute to the problems tourists create.

Visitors are a different breed. Visitors aren’t here to shoot an Instagram reel. Visitors don’t adapt a place to suit them, they adapt themselves to suit a place. I’m often happily among visitors, both at home in NYC and also on the road.

I visit Zen centers when I am traveling. I visit post offices when traveling. I visit pharmacies when traveling; I deliberately leave something I can get from any pharmacy behind at home to force the visit. I deliberately send mail on the road (I don’t bring stamps). I am curious how ordinary people live ordinary lives. What’s the same? What’s different?

Beyond this indulgence, I have other reasons to visit Zen centers. At a minimum, I can provide a generous donation, and I can donate my time and presence at meditation practice. It is enough to simply want to improve a Zen group and meditation session by adding one more person to it, and provide a bit of surprise slack to their budget with some cash. That’s a reason that helps everyone.

But, often I want to visit a Zen center to witness something else, and that is why I made a visit to the Olympia Zen Center in July. The founder and leader of Olympia Zen Center is Eido Mary Frances Carney. She trained in Japan, and deliberately became a devotee of an 18th Century priest and poet named Ryokan.

Ryokan, in my view, adopted an approach to his life that is resonant with the Beat poets of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960’s—Ginsberg, Kerouac, et al. He similarly played fast and loose with Japanese poetic forms; his calligraphy was flashy and elegant. He did some very un-Japanese and un-Zen things in his life, and there’s at least seven years of his adult life that has completely vanished from any records. No one knows what he did during those years, or where he was.

As an old man (i.e., the age I am approaching now), a much younger woman approached Ryokan as a love interest, and it is singularly because of her devotion to collecting and organizing his poetry and calligraphy that we know anything of Ryokan at all today. She went on to take vows as a nun; we know her today as Teishin.

There was never anything improper about their relationship. She was never his student, they wrote love poetry to each other which richly confirms their mutual devotion, commitment, and attachment.

Eido Mary Frances Carney (yes, she’s Irish) is a modern embodiment of this young woman’s interest in Ryokan. She went to Japan and sought training at the monastery associated with Ryokan’s life, and she studied what Teishin left behind for scholars. She was not welcomed by 20th century Japan, not as a woman, nor a Priest in training, nor a scholar of Ryokan, but she persisted. When her training was complete, she returned to the US and founded Olympia Zen Center.

Ryokan lived the bulk of his life as a hermit monk in a roughly 100 sq ft cabin that was an hour’s hike up a mountainside from the nearest village. Olympia Zen Center has a replica of this cabin on the grounds (pictured above) which was constructed from the same materials and by the same methods as the original in Japan.

I visited it. There were no tourists.

I arrived early, and the signage was minimal, so I parked in what looked like a harmless enough spot and got out of the car to walk around. The Zen Center is in the midst of a heavily-wooded area, and the air was also heavy with mid-summer humidity, but still fragrant from the flowers in bloom on the grounds.

I found a bench outdoors near some of those fragrant blooms and plopped down to wait for another soul to appear. A few moments passed and a young man rode up on a bicycle, carrying a large backpack which had a sleeping pad strapped to it. When he walked up and greeted me, we simultaneously confessed to each other that this was our first visit to Olympia Zen center and we both had no idea what we were doing.

This was also his first visit to a Zen center of any kind, so I could be a bit of help to him. I went over what to expect in the service, warned him about his knees, and I reassured him that when the time came, someone would be here to conduct orientation for us at 6 pm—I had confirmed this by email a few weeks before.

He went on to tell me he was planning to ride his bicycle northwards to Canada, working along the way when his money ran out. He was young, tanned, blonde, and athletic. One might guess his passion was surfing. I found his plan kind of curious so I began to ask him about the details of his upcoming adventure. He seemed to believe that beginning the journey with a visit to a Zen center would soothe his anxieties, or something.

I mostly discovered he had no plans. He was running from something, not sure what, it didn’t seem nefarious, just kind of youthful and impulsive. He had some money, a few months of good weather, and a place he wanted to go.

He mentioned that he would be traveling through Gig Harbor, where I was staying on vacation. I asked him how he was going to climb the huge hill on the north end of town. He shrugged. Once I realized he didn’t have answers I stopped asking questions.

At 5:58 pm, I got up and walked over to what appeared to be the entrance to the Zen Center. As I got close, I saw there was a fully-robed priest inside standing attentively in shashu (Zen for “at ease, monk”) in the reception area. Very formal, very demure.

I walked in, greeted him, and introduced the other fellow I just met outside. He conducted verbal orientation, without notes, to both the center and also to Ryokan’s life. His recalled summary lined up with what I know about Ryokan, not surprising since the founder of this Zen Center wrote the book (Kakurendo) that is the English language authority on Ryokan.

As he led us through the interior of Zen center I recognized the familiar formality of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC). There were shrines (to which one is expected to stop and bow) in every nook and cranny of the building. It takes forever to just walk down the hall.

The Zendo itself was beautiful, and very Japanese-looking, including the modern habit of substitution of polished wooden platforms for tatami mats (fewer insects and rodents) for sitting. The evening service was very according to Hoyle, any Zen student would recognize it. The dharma talk (sermon) afterwards was equally typical and familiar to what I’ve heard at SFZC

I was struck by the discordance between who and what Ryokan represents (as a personality) to me in the lineage of Zen teachers—a kind of this hippie artist gone rogue runaway would-be Abbot, a fully certifiable Hot Mess of a Zen priest in many ways, who preferred the company of children and active play to adulting of any kind—and the way modern practice is conducted in this center which exists in homage to him, right down to a replica of his cabin. Practice here, while altogether pleasant and agreeable, was very very very much by-the-book formal and according to Hoyle (Dogen, actually). It was the full show, prostrated bows to the floor, etc. Practice is very faithful to official Soto forms.

Ryokan was anything but.

As a contrast, my home Zen Center is very faithful to Dogen, who was as conservative a teacher of religious practice as one can imagine. If Dogen did it, we do it. We do not have any images/statues/shrines of Buddha at all in our Zen Center, and we only bow to each other. Our altar is a big potato rock. We use western-style forks and spoons at meals (not chopsticks), and teachers only dress in robes for the most formal of occasions like weddings and funerals.

I have no explanation for this, nor do I draw any lessons from it. It is just really odd how things unfold in entropy, and there’s no getting the cream out of this coffee either. It is what it is.

Appearances are important, but they aren’t Reality.

There’s more:

T I C K E T S

There comes a time in everyone’s life…in fact, one just passed as you wondered what the hell I meant by that—another one is passing now.

Nice em-dash, don’t you think?

I sing of a time when the online obsessives of Substack grow weary of the scroll and break the fourth screen. I sing of complicated writers in a complicated time when concerns about what is real and what is text-encoded mathematical solutions to a text-encoded prompts gives way to “did they look in the mirror before they left the house?”.

I saw the best accounts on my Home feed destroyed by duplicates, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through “Grow Your Substack” Notes looking for an angry fix.

angel-profiled Genxers burning for the ancient heavenly connection to a stapled chapbook still warm from the Xerox 5100.

whose low subscriber counts and precious few likes kept them in tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up banging too-warm Energy drinks and cold coffee.

who bared their hearts to Pangram in an incognito window and saw dissociated tech-bros floating across the tops of data centers contemplating carbon credits.

Care to chat someone not named GPT?

Get a ticket.

Seats are limited.

So is time.

As most careful readers know, I am about six weeks away from beginning my apprenticeship as a volunteer cook for my home Zen center. The center only needs a cook during multi-day events called sesshin (collecting the mind), this is also the only time an apprentice can be trained. Sesshin happens at my Zen center four times a year (sometimes five). Otherwise, the kitchen is closed.

Sesshin is a multi-day, carefully choreographed, group meditation in which silence and social withdrawal is observed continuously from rising until retiring each day (except the first and last). Participants sit in meditation, walk in meditation, eat in meditation, work in meditation, and rest in meditation. The schedule is kept by bells, and sometimes blocks of wood, depending on the signal. No one speaks to anyone else (or even makes direct eye contact) because no one needs to. Participants know the schedule and what the bells mean. Every moment is scheduled, every movement is choreographed.

The goal is to enable participants to remain as much in the meditative mind as possible, and to surrender individual control over their schedule to the group. Everybody does everything together. Choice of diet is also surrendered. Everyone eats the same food. One eats (or declines to eat) what is offered. This is evocative both of the historical Zen monk’s daily life and also reliance on the community for sustenance.

In Japan, for centuries, Zen monks went house-to-house with a bowl to ask for food or other donations. The householders made the donations because these Zen monks were doing all the work of being Holy so the householders could chase mistresses, gamble, and otherwise booze it up during free time. These donations, food and otherwise, collected by the soliciting monks are later surrendered to the head cook at the monastery for the community meals.

This makes the head cook an important role, even centuries later in a derivative school of Zen in a Western cultural setting. In Midwestern US Zen, the head cook (Tenzo in Japanese) is singularly responsible for everyone’s diet during sesshin. The Tenzo decides and prepares what everyone will eat at each meal. The Tenzo is also the person in touch with the outside world while everyone else is cloistered in meditation during sesshin.

This is what I have been training to do since I was invited to become an Tenzo’s apprentice last April.

My early training involved making myself familiar with the 13th Century teachings written for the cooks in Japanese Zen monasteries. This manual is seen as highly metaphorical, and it surely also is, but it is also just a straight-up “here’s how one should run a 13th century monastery kitchen” manual.

Zen practice doesn’t really respect a hierarchy between thoughts and actions. Each are different ways of following the same Truth. The teachings assert that food should be clean, free of insects, and be cooked with the care one shows in caring for all sentient beings. Further, there are six flavors which should be balanced in every meal: sweet, salty, spicy, sour, bitter, and simple.

One does not have to really stretch the mind to see that this diligent effort is the same care that should be properly brought to all of one’s life, and this resonance is why “Instructions for the Cook” is one of the most referenced Zen texts in my particular school. Uchiyama, a modern Japanese Zen teacher, wrote a popular modern-day commentary called “How to Cook Your Life.”

But, it is also about washing rice, and getting the rinse water clean polishes the rice grains, which depends the flavor in cooking. Even my pricey fancy Japanese-sourced sushi rice needs five rinses to get the rinse water clear.

OMG, I’ve been eating unpolished rice all my life! This is not the first thing I’ve discovered I’ve been doing wrong in the kitchen lately, but that’s another essay.

There’s no tossing of vegetables casually into a bowl, chopping things up in a flurry of knife-wielding showmanship, or casual/careless sloshing of liquids in a pot in a Tenzo’s kitchen. Each grain of rice is as precious as the entire meal—it’s right there in the damn manual. Movements are deliberate and contemplative, just as in the Zendo (meditation hall). Ingredients are treated with respect, and care, like infants in a crib. Celery is picked clean of dirt right to the root, legumes are also washed until the rinse water is clear.

I have been practicing this at home, and it doesn’t cost me as much time as I imagined. Yeah, it is slower, but I also make fewer mistakes, and use fewer redundant and/or wasted movements. I watch what I am doing, think for a beat, and move deliberately to the next step. There’s an efficiency to this mental posture in cooking which I have previously overlooked.

I have also been simplifying my seasoning habits. I have always, always, had a tendency to over-season. I know this, so I hold myself in check, but still my food is typically richly seasoned. Too much garlic? Pish, what’s that mean? etc.

Simplicity is a value for a Tenzo, so I have had to learn again how to season with only salt, and perhaps a bit of ground pepper. I honestly forgot how delicious some foods, like legumes, are with just a bit of salt. Rice cooked with a touch of rice vinegar and seasoned with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds ground with salt is as divine and complex a flavor as any of Escoffier’s mother sauces. If your simplest vegetable soup needs seasoning, you didn’t finish making your soup.

But, I digress. This refocusing of my mental posture with food is not confined to the four walls of any kitchen. I take it with me on the road.

On my flight out to my vacation, the harried flight attendant just dropped the two snack boxes I had ordered before boarding into my lap with a casual “here ya go” on their first pass up the economy cabin aisle. Oops, I misunderstood the menu was my first thought. This was more food than I could eat on this six hour flight, particularly as I was blubbering my way through “Rental Family” via the in-flight entertainment.

I stashed one of the boxes gently in my carry-on, mentally noting that it would benefit from being under refrigeration once I arrived at my destination. It was now up to me to work this into my diet as soon as I could. I had deliberately solicited and accepted this food; it was now my vow to see that it gets eaten in a way that benefits as many beings as possible (even if only me). I ended up using it for a picnic two days later. Those airline snack boxes are great for solo picnics.

Before training to be Tenzo, I might have discarded the half-eaten second box as I exited the plane, writing off the wasted food as an expense of being absent-minded and careless with my online ordering. I don’t do this any more.

My hosts generously provided me with food during my visit. Upon arrival, I had fresh fruit, yogurt, cold cuts, bread, condiments, coffee, tea, juice, beer, wine, and snack food in the kitchen of the studio apartment they generously provided for me. According to their household norms (and the norms for most American house guests) I was free to eat or not eat whatever, and they would discard the excess perishable food after my stay ended.

My Tenzo-mind demands more attention from me than the norms of my hosts. My own preferences and aversions are a lower priority for me than what is best for all sentient beings. I accepted this food when I accepted them as hosts. It was now up to me to see it didn’t get wasted mindlessly.

I inventoried the kitchen and wrote myself a menu for my meals during my stay which would afford the maximum chance to finish as much of the perishables as I could while I was there. I am happy to say I only left my hosts half of a huge slice of cake delivered after I made my original menu plan.

This preparation gave me the benefit of putting my meal schedule entirely under my control and saved me the expense of dining out during my stay, except when someone specifically wanted to do so. I ate home-made food, prepared by a authentic American Zen Tenzo’s apprentice, me.

This worked out okay. Anytime someone asked me if I needed something for lunch, or breakfast, or a snack, or whatever, my answer was “no thanks, I’m good” and I meant it. I had enough food from the moment I walked in. I knew it, It was on paper.

I struggled with my near constant refusal of other additional food offered to me during the visit, including limiting myself to only politely distant admiration of spreads laid out at the handful of parties I attended. My declining to eat was respectful of my religious beliefs (and my body), but I worried that it might come off as dismissive of their hospitality.

No worries, this self-discipline wasn’t always successful. When I was offered half of a freshly-steamed Dungeness crab plucked out of the very waters I was sitting by at one beach party, I took it with gratitude.

I had never cracked (opened up the shell to uncover the meat) a crab before, but I was not going to pass this experience up. This little guy had wandered into an open crab cage just this morning. It was up to me to complete his journey to my stomach.

I sat around looking confused with a half-crab in my (Cancer sun-sign) lap until a local party-goer took pity on me. He told me to crack off one of the legs and use the tip of it as a spear to pick out the other meat. One of the reasons Dungeness crab is so favored by crab-lovers is the shell is relatively thin and there’s a lot of meat. I didn’t need tools, I just needed an idea.

I sat there, happy as a clam, eating crab the same way people have eaten crab on this very beach for centuries—no utensils, no drawn butter, no lemon, just me and a newly-dead crab. It was, and will probably remain, the best crab I ever eaten in my life.

Tenzo-mind directed me to thank the crab continuously for this sustenance as I devoured it, and I took the time and trouble to push every last but of flesh out of every segment of every nook and/or cranny of this beast (it’s a male, crabbers throw the females back to make more crabs). I didn’t arise from my seat until I was ready to deposit the shells into the compost bin. Tenzo mission complete, I went, now freshly fragrant with essence of crab, in search of a wet-nap…and another vodka on the rocks.

Lest you think such a posture is un-Buddhist, consider that the Dalai Lama eats beef for the same reason I do—iron-poor blood. Geritol doesn’t do it for either of us. Meat-eating Buddhists are taught to do so mindfully, and these days, to be exquisitely careful about humane sourcing, which makes my beef expensive enough to be self-limiting in any case. Having said that, harvesting and eating a crab who was until then living wild in Puget Sound is about as careful with humane sourcing as it gets.

But, because of Tenzo-mind, while on this most recent holiday I had to pass up many entrees on many menus as I dined out because I did not want to take home left-overs. I knew I could not work them into my already-full menu plan for the food I had vowed (to myself) to consume. Only sushi restaurants serve portion sizes that are appropriate for me. Americans confuse being served too much food with getting a bargain, so portions when dining out are absurdly large all over this country.

Only people who dine out with me on a regular basis know that we can share an entree and we will both get enough to eat. When I try to do this with others, they inevitably order something extra to “make sure we have enough.” I love the kindness in that, but it ends up being a burden to me, if only mentally, as I send food away to be wasted which I knew should have never been ordered to begin with.

So, Tenzo-mind compels me to have the appetizer as an entree.

That’s not so bad.

I remember when I first knew that I enjoyed writing.

It was more than fifty years ago. I was in high school, reading as much Albert Camus, Alan Watts, and Jean-Paul Sartre as I could get my hands on. A friend and I shared a dissatisfaction with the self-obsessed superficiality of high school student culture. We bemoaned the meaninglessness of high school teen spirit when Kurt Cobain was in the first grade. We rolled our eyes at the anti-intellectual and egotistical hero worship of high school athletics. We disdained the feckless, impotent, performative superficiality of student government.

We could type. We had xerox and mimeograph (oh, that purple petroleum smell!) machines in those days. We had things to say. We had civil rights. We decided to start an underground newspaper.

Being the experienced media giants that we were at 16 years old, we determined our first and most important task was choosing a name for the publication. My partner and I were joined in brainstorming this by our class cool-guy, a tall, aloof, quiet dude who was a rock-and-roll guitar God at the age of 16. We both admired him immensely, and he also read Sartre.

“Anything will do” he shrugged.

In a characteristically (for me) Beat moment, I decided to end the discussion. “Ok, that’s it, ‘Anything will do’ will be the name of the publication.”

My media partner looked at me quizzically and almost went to disappointment before he chuckled to himself. We had the same sardonic and absurd sense of humor. We wanted to provoke and confuse people, particularly authority figures. Why not use a nonsense title?

The first issue contained poetry, existential polemics, music criticism, and I thoroughly torched the feckless leadership of student government in the only editorial commentary. I was also a fan of Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was still fresh in everyone’s mind, including mine, and I unloaded on the student government with both barrels like they were G Gordon Liddy and his band of criminal spooks.

Despite using pseudonyms, when this issue was published (i.e., handed out the the hallways and cafeteria) I was summoned to the principal’s office.

I also earned the persistent spite of the student body president, Carol (a smart, kind thoughtful classmate whom I also thought was kind of hot). I had no particular animus for her personally; I wanted to write political commentary like Hunter S. Thompson.

The late great Mr. Thompson skewered his subjects as people, which they often richly deserved, but Carol did not. I was a young man, angry and confused, and an unpolished polemicist. Years later, to her very great credit, Carol invited me to attend the only Army football game I would ever see at West Point as the guest of her and her husband, who taught there.

Back to our story. The principal, to his credit, only lectured me about the tone of my editorial. He did not threaten me with reprisals for the publication itself, he actually seemed kind of befuddled by it’s existence. He sputtered around the point he wanted to make; I was never sure what it was. He did try to get me to reveal the identities behind the other pseudonyms. I declined, telling him I had taken anonymous submissions and I wasn’t really sure myself.

This was actually true, and a couple of the pieces were group efforts without a singular author. I confess I did have an educated guess concerning who wrote what (because of the subject matter and writing style), but I hid behind my plausible deniability.

This first issue also won me the whispered congratulations and expressions of admiration from three different English composition teachers, and one history teacher (a nun, no less). Two of them told me it was the best writing (from high school) they had seen in their careers. One slipped me a roll of publication tape and encouraged me to dress up the master copy of the next issue before I published it.

We had no business model, no way to cover costs (we didn’t really even know what they were), but we had been explicitly told we were absolutely forbidden to sell or distribute copies on the high school campus.

That was not a problem. We didn’t sell anything to anyone and there was no way to enforce the no-distribution rule, particularly when some faculty were handing out copies themselves. We paid for publishing it; we wrapped ourselves in the First Amendment like Larry Flynt. We lived in a free country, by God, and we had rights.

We published four issues. I loved doing it, I stayed up late and spent my partying money on it. Why only four issues?

I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t take the praise from the teachers to heart. I didn’t see my writing talent as anything special because I compared myself with Ginsberg and Hunter S Thompson, not my peers. I did think I could write as well as Vonnegut or Fitzgerald (I was a teenager), but I didn’t think my writing was particularly better than theirs. By my teenage logic, why would people be interested in me when they could pick up Gore Vidal, Alex Haley, or Agatha Christie?

I knew I liked to write, so I hope to enter into a career where this skill would come in useful rather than competing directly with the names on the new book tables at the library.

It makes me very sad to wonder what my life might have been like if I had been encouraged and mentored in the way that I encourage and mentor younger people now. If my 66 year old self had been available to give advice and guidance to my 16 year old self I could have had a very different life.

But, alas, as I am fond of reminding everyone, you can’t have a better past.

Half a century later, I like writing as much, perhaps more, than I did then. As I prepare to embark on what other people call retirement I find it difficult sometimes to answer their questions about what I want to do now that I no longer have a full-time job commitment.

“Write” is always my one-word reply, and it often sounds a little hostile to just leave it at that, so I will mention some loose aspirations for a screenplay about a Civil War nurse and a murder mystery set in a high-end assisted living facility. I then mention my almost-finished hospice memoir, and Substack commentary, to make it all more solid somehow.

But honestly, people, I don’t feel like I am retiring from anything, I feel like I am finally, finally, finally getting started doing what I have been wanting to do my entire adult life. Retirement is the wrong word, unless one means retiring from working for other people. I am definitely done with that.

I will dig through my files and see if I can find any clippings from Anything Will Do. If I can, I will post and explain them here.

But I am back (or almost back) to a life where I can get up in the morning and do what I want to do—write.

What do I want to write?

Anything will do.

Being born to a family with active alcoholism put me at risk, in an epidemiological sense, for addiction disorders. Alcohol didn’t do it; despite my heavy binge drinking as a young man I could always walk away from alcohol, and I rarely kept any in my home. I still don’t drink alone.

One cannot overstate how determined I was as a young man to not be my father. He was an alcoholic, that wasn’t going to be me.

Food was the substance at issue in my life, and I now am passing my twenty-sixth year with a formal persistent diagnosis of binge eating disorder, the last nineteen of those in recovery. Binge Eating Disorder isn’t exactly an addiction to food. I still eat daily, and far far less than those around me. My expertise is as someone who recovered from binge eating, others know far more about the disorder than I.

My last binge was in December 2007, I remember it well. I was eating some snack food like Cheetos and drinking a carbonated drink like seven-up. Physically and mechanically, this was a bad combination. This combination bloated my stomach very rapidly as the Cheetos expanded from absorbing the seven-up in combination with the carbon dioxide from the beverage. I had to throw up for relief. I had consumed a entire multi-serving bag of the Cheetos, and most of the 2-liter carbonated beverage in about a half hour.

I don’t remember what emotional problem I was seeking to handle, it was overcome quickly by the shame of having to throw-up because I ate too much. I had been in weekly psychotherapy for more than seven years at that time with an eating disorders specialist. The whole point was to address my morbid obesity.

I faithfully logged the incident in my food journal and spoke at length with my therapist about it. To her credit, she didn’t make any big deal of it, our narrative quickly returned to the baseline of whatever we were discussing at the time. I was the binge-catastrophizer, not her. Why was that the last time I binged? I dunno, even almost two decades later.

It just was.

I have been ever-vigilant about what the trade calls cross-addiction—shifting the substance you abuse without getting to the underlying patterns which support addiction. I use cannabis to relieve chronic recurrent nausea, a side effect of my bariatric surgery. The line between relieving nausea and getting stoned is pretty narrow, and I confess I do deliberately step over it regularly.

I don’t use cannabis to manage my emotional distress. This isn’t because of my stoic self-discipline, it just doesn’t work. Clearing something up for myself emotionally demands a balanced mind. I need to feel all my emotions.

So, I was moving through life believing I had carefully managed any possible cross addiction issues until my therapist stopped me dead in my tracks with “You’re an enchantment addict, and it is time we did something about it.”

“What the f*ck is an enchantment addict?” I understood the words, but not what she was getting at.

She went on to explain that my desire for connection with others was so compelling that I confuse the feeling of enchantment (which is instant) for the actual connection (which takes time).

I have an alarm in my head I call “the truth bell” that goes off when someone tells me something new, helpful, and true which I have somehow resisted before. My truth bell was ringing so loudly and persistently that I could have summoned an rebel army when this idea arose in our conversation.

Substack, Instagram, and other forms of social media are dangerous territory for the enchantment addict, like an open bar at a wedding is a minefield for an alcoholic. I have imbibed similarly, and the entire condition set me up for a honeypot operation on Substack back in the spring.

This account, which I won’t identify, is still active here on Substack. They are using AI to write, and answer messages. I pursued this siren right to the rocks of another platform which resembled Only Fans, but isn’t as popular.

To save you the read, after six weeks of correspondence leading to a planned real life encounter I got a 418 word reply (which was detailed and specific to my previous message) in less than two minutes one day. Someone had been careless. All my alarms went off. Soon after that, I saw a picture of the model they use for the pictures on the account as advertising an online dating application/agency.

I was as heartbroken and grief-stricken as I have ever been. It fouled up my plans (in manageable ways) for the rest of 2026, including the vacation I am enjoying as I write this. It was as big a thing in my life as any real relationship, and these conspirators notched a forever place in my history of relationship trauma.

What set me up for this? Enchantment addiction. I was passing up red flags like a competitive downhill skier.

She (for brevity, let’s pretend there was a she) went too fast, she was too attracted too quickly, she was too ready to abandon her life to be a part of mine, she never mentioned her own life, never disclosed a damn thing about herself, it was always about me me me and I rolled around in it like a pig in slop. AI slop.

I chalked up her lack of candor to management of the threat that all women face from men online—stalking, harassment, etc.—and I imagined that would all resolve when I walked off the plane in her city. As an airline employee, she was even going to meet me at the gate as I deplaned.

I was high as a f*cking kite. Finally someone saw me, finally someone appreciated who I was and wanted more of it. My mood improved so much that my friends noticed. My therapist tried but could not pierce my bubble.

To my credit, I never really, deep-down, believed it. I suspended my disbelief by labeling it as self-loathing, a manifestation of my own notion that I am fundamentally disgusting and unlovable once I am really, deeply, known. I shamed myself for not being able to believe that I was loved by the AI bot (whom I thought was an actual person).

I am so very grateful that a quarter-century of psychotherapy prepared me for the reveal. Yes, I was heartbroken, humiliated, shamed, and despondent. I also survived. My relationships survived, and my ability to develop real attachments to real people survived, and I have made such real attachments right here on Substack, where this whole disaster happened.

I know these new attachments are real because they developed sanely, over time, and do not require suspension of disbelief about something. No red flags. I believe the people who like me on Substack.

But none of this stops the appeal of diving into another intoxicating enchantment, and there are dozens of opportunities on Substack for me to enter into an enchantment binge who are very likely not honeypots. I get a dopamine hit when certain women just walk by (in real life), I get another one when I read someone’s poetry, or particularly engaging prose. I am ripe do this all over again.

Knowing that makes me vigilant, but not defensive.

You can love me if you want to.

I’m open to it.

When I was planning my vacation visit to a friend’s place on the other coast, friends back home would ask me what I planned on doing and where I planned on going after I arrived. It took me a moment to compose a reply that did not sound curt. The truth is, I don’t want to go anywhere other than the house where I was going, a friend’s beautiful home in a beautiful location.

I did not anticipate I would face the same problem when I arrived, but my hosts also queried me about me about where I want to go and what I want to do. I haven’t found a really effective way of saying I want to sit on your front lawn (the beach) and read that doesn’t sound like I am dismissing their generosity or rendering them powerless to improve my vacation. That isn’t what I mean. I’m just happy to be here. Really.

It’s an old story and you probably have your version of it. My hosts have been living in one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen on earth for so long and so regularly that it has faded into ordinariness for them, just as my surroundings back home seem ordinary to me.

The water in front of me in this area of Puget Sound, where I sit as I compose this, literally changes from moment to moment. Watching the surface of the water is very engaging. You can see traces of schools of fish, sea otters poking their noses up for air, the dorsal fins of harbor porpoises pop up here and there, there are multiple tales of Orca sightings but I have yet to see one.

There are heron, seagulls, killdeer, geese, and eagles who also make their home here and use the area for their hunting grounds and leisure time. Deer wander up and down the beach, and house cats prowl the area for feline entertainment and human attention.

Watching Puget Sound, for me as a visitor, is more interesting, detailed, and fascinating than a movie. The sounds of the birds and the fragrance of the ocean cannot be performed by humans or produced from a bottle. The air is a temperate 64°. The sun is filtered by a thin layer of clouds, which look like they contain rain, but aren’t quite ready to deliver it.

This makes the sky an ever-changing display of patterns and textures and shades that would be the envy and aspiration of Van Gogh or Monet. The view from my host’s office knocks me down every time I see it, but he just pops in to sit at his desk for a bit, working with a computer monitor and keyboard.

He behaves as if the view is simply a painting on the wall—much admired but long-ago understood and absorbed—not anything to notice from moment to moment. I’ve seen him make a cursory glance in the direction of the sound when he enters his office, but it seems to be a spot-check of the weather and tides.

Lest you misconstrue my point, I am not finding fault with him. I am most certain I would develop daily behaviors which resonate with his if I lived here year-round. We all do this, myself included,

How much of my own life evades my view like this? What beauty, wonder, and awe do I miss in my home? I live in a gorgeous part of suburban New Jersey, in the midst of an urban forest that extends in some form to Canada. The homes are beautifully maintained, there are ample, green, vibrant public parks around me.

When I return home, I am going to look at them in a new way. I don’t want to miss it. I am going to look again for the beauty in my environment as if I have never seen any of it before, and as if another day to gaze upon it all is promised by nothing and no one. That’s actually the truth.

The oak-leaf hydrangeas outside my windows are not the same ones I had last year. Do I know how they are different? Can I tell? I know the flowers here are more vibrant and impressive than they were on my last visit. Why do I not know the same information about the flowers around my home?

Beyond that, do I suffer from the same blindness in my relationships? Are there people in my life whom have faded into the wallpaper because they are there every day and all the time?

What do we miss this way?

Richard’s Rants has received a graphics glow-up from the multi-talented . Please give my friend’s publications a look.

“Richard’s Rants” was a name given to me by a late mentor and surrogate parent who enjoyed his addition to the list of people I was sending emails to as I prepared to migrate from Dallas, Texas to Brooklyn in late 1999. I was leaving because George W Bush had risen to power as Texas governor and I did not want to live in an idiocracy.

Little did I know.

I had met a woman on match dot com who lived in Manhattan. After visiting her for a year, I accepted her argument that I really should move. At the time, I was working as a nurse paralegal in a mid-sized Dallas toxic torts plaintiff’s litigation firm. When I mentioned to one of the senior partners that I was considering re-locating to NYC he shocked me by turning to me and saying “Oh, you should definitely do that. New York City would be particularly good for you.”

I was offended. I didn’t know what he meant, but I was sure he was implying that I needed NYC like some kind of finishing school, that I wasn’t going to fix my problems by staying in Texas, and that my view of myself was too provincial and limited to what I knew from my life in Texas.

What a haughty and stuck-up f*cker this guy was. I knew he appreciated my work, but he clearly didn’t deem me socially worthy because I still needed to prove that I can handle myself in the big leagues. I think that was the last time we spoke to each other one-to-one. I avoided asking him for advice after that.

He was 100% correct.

I collected a list of emails (kind of a new thing still in 2000) from my friends and colleagues (he wasn’t on it) to update with my schedule and solicit assistance with the big move. I attached a U-haul to the back of my Ford F-150 and set out on a three day journey to NYC in December of 1999. I borrowed $3k from my mother to get started.

Richard’s Rants was an email with a logo. I had about 30 emails which I cut-pasted into the BCC field. The form and contours of my writing were not radically different than they are now. If any of you read one of those emails from 2000, you would recognize my voice.

Richard’s Rants was migrated to Slashdot in 2004. Slashdot had a journal, a rudimentary blog, and a social media structure. One could designate other accounts as friends or foes, and then aggregate unknown accounts as “friends of friends, foes of friends, friends of foes,” etc. This was a stroke of brilliance not duplicated to this day, but I digress.

I was a fan of Google back then, I thought they would save tech from the oligarchy (think again) so when they offered blogger I jumped ship. I used Twitter for audience reach. My subscriber base didn’t grow (I wasn’t trying to grow it either) but the readers I had were loyal and frequently offered feedback.

I was fiddling around with RSS feeds and automated notifications of new posts when Mailchimp came to my attention and was offering a free tier for personal efforts like my own. I jumped to it immediately. Everyone liked it, including me. It was designed to spam people, but I could adapt the tools to my purposes.

Mailchimp was so satisfactory that when Substack came to my attention in 2018, just before a trip to Australia, I dismissed it as a cheap copy of Mailchimp so I did not enable an account until the next year. Migration from Mailchimp to Substack was easy (uploading a CSV).

I ultimately migrated to Substack because the composition editor out performed Mailchimp, and was platform-agnostic. I could use a computer, I could use an app. I could post from anywhere with Substack. Mailchimp needed a desktop.

Substack launched Notes back when Twitter was about to implode because of Musk. I knew Musk would wreck Twitter. I told my friends in San Francisco, titans of tech, that Twitter was doomed and they dismissed me glibly as over-reacting.

I promoted the f*ck out of the Substack Notes feature back at that time as a way to replace the function of Twitter in our lives. Crickets. Everyone thought I was nuts. So, I gave up, stopped using Notes, and just began to live my life without something to replace Twitter, faithfully writing Substack articles all along about my life, politics, Art, and religion.

I still had about 30 readers who read regularly, and another 50 who subscribed but did not register activity with the Substack mother ship. I don’t remember when I got my first subscriber whom I did not solicit, but it was some time in 2020 when I was writing about public health and Covid.

Now, I have a couple of dozen, regular, faithful, 5-star readers (Substack’s engagement measure) whom I do not know and did not solicit attention from. That’s amazing to me. You know who you are. I love you.

I love my other readers too, the ones who know me in real life, but you guys should already know that. I have another 60 or so subscribers whom open posts less often, but stay on the list. In the last few months, I have gained about 30 more from engagement here on Substack, and I have a handful that showed up out of the blue.

Now, today, another Substacker, created and gifted me a professional logo for my publication which is at the top of this post. It makes me cry.

Now, today, I have another new publication, a collective work, which is off the ground. Others are publishing to it, and the readership and engagement there is beyond my expectations. I truly do my best writing in personal correspondence.

The Epistolarian

A place for open letters between writers.

By Richard DeWald

But the logo at the top of this page…that’s a new level for me. Someone else wants Richard’s Rants to work.

I’m out of words for my feelings about that, and the screen is so hard to see when tears well up.

That is the story of Richard’s Rants. So far.

Thank you.

For the last few days, I have been sitting on the eastern shore of the Olympic peninsula facing the western shore of Vashon Island in the mornings to watch the sunrise. A part of Puget Sound is before me. One of my host’s neighbors has provided a smooth log about a meter in diameter, maybe a bit more, nestled up against a line of trees that makes a comfortable bench. The canopy for the tree-line behind the log covers much of the beach—nature’s own beach umbrella. At high tide, the water laps up here and my footsteps from the day before have always vanished.

This sliver of Puget sound does not get much commercial traffic. Occasionally a barge goes by, but otherwise it is mostly pleasure craft, or crab fishermen in speedboats, or kayaks that pass by. The real traffic, I discovered yesterday, passes on the other side of Vashon Island. We can’t see it, or hear it.

The wakes from that traffic make the eastern (other) side of Vashon kind of loud. It isn’t really surf, but the wakes washing up on shore make it noticeably noisier on the eastern shore.

On the western shore of Vashon Island, in the mornings, before any boats are out, the water is still; the only sounds are birds chirping and squawking at one another. You could hear a pin drop.

I have been sauntering down the beach to sit on the log and watch the sunrise with a cup of coffee in the mornings. Grey herons and seagulls watch over me. Sea otters paddle by, and chickadees peck near the water’s edge as the tides go out. There is no surf, the surface of the sound is smooth like glass.

Then, inevitably, I will hear it first—the low hum of a Honda boat motor. I look down the beach and watch the boat approach. The water continues to be still in front of me. There is no surf, no waves lapping. The boat passes by, and the sound of the boat motor fades into the distance.

For a moment, the silence returns.

Then, the wake starts to wash up on shore, making mini breaking waves. The full effects of the boat passing on my environs are not fully visited upon me until the boat itself is out of view and out of earshot. Then, all I hear is waves lapping the shore, and the next boat will be by cutting a new wake before the effects of this one fade.

What a metaphor for life, or dating, or friendships, or raising children.

No wonder writers settle down to write beside bodies of water.

It’s helpful.