De-pressurized Theory

I've been feeling better. Or, as others might put it, I even feel good. We could chalk that up to meds or therapy or sunlight or simple fact of having a convertible car for the summer. But what I think it really comes down to is momentum, and not of the driving variety. I've been busy, I've been making progress, and perhaps more importantly, I've been under a bit of pressure.

There's a drive to finish up some self-directed projects. It might be my first meaningful addition to my portfolio in... too long. I'm also trying to get the mechanical side of a project car finished by the end of the season so that it can be safely tucked away before the snow starts intruding on my ideal daydreams of sunny, open roads. Truth be told, the car thing is starting to piss me off; I've been chasing a particular mechanical gremlin for months now. Today I might've made a soft breakthrough. Who would've guessed it a variable inertia charging system could cause (or exacerbate) a low-RPM stutter? But if it's as fixed as I think it is, it's more than enough to suit my purposes. That means I'm just left with a bunch of secondary, mainly cosmetic tasks. I can deal with that. Oh, and I can't forget to mention that my estate management gig is starting to heat up. It's slightly horrifying, but I have a team of lawyers that I don't need to pay out of pocket, so that helps me sleep at night. That whole shebang is keeping me on my toes and learning new things.

The main hurdle before me, though, is the fact that a week ago we discovered we had three weeks to move out of our current abode. To add some flavour to the situation, the permanent residence we'll be moving into won't be ready until near the end of the year. Cue the domestic chaos; our household has become a rhapsody of cardboard and tape guns, punctuated by an eclectic mix of plastic, air-filled packing materials. One set of belongings is being dutifully placed aside to see us through the next four months. A larger, more imposing set, is accumulating in our garage so that it can be picked up in a truck and put into storage until we're ready to take possession of the new, final destination. And somewhere in there we have to sign a lease for new tenants and prepare a basement suite in a relative's home. Chaos, true chaos. And I'm loving it. It reminds me of the last month of school in New York, when I found out I couldn't renew my lease and had to find a new place to live while preparing for the portfolio show. 

Maybe things would've turned out differently had those circumstanced been a bit different, but that's a musing for another time.

The point is that under the gun of light existential threat I'm energized, productive, and happier for it. So let's open up our field of view here a bit and transition from the personal to observational.

My uncle told me about this young woman who was big in the DIY community some years ago. Her parents aren't well off, but she shone through as a young talent in the hobby world, and was offered a full-ride scholarship to an Australian university. Instead, she decided to turn that down in favour of finding herself and her identity. Obviously this second pursuit is important - I think it's great that mental health is more important now than ever and that it can be a full priority. But it's odd, in a way, that it takes precedence over practical opportunities to secure one's future.

And thus my uncle's theory: as a society, we've become too far removed from the challenges of being alive. If you want to bounce back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's almost as if the basic needs (physiological and safety) are such a given that the psychological and self-fulfillment tiers become more dominant. We don't need to worry about where our next meal comes from our becoming the next meal for some other creature, and we haven't for generations. So now we take those mental cycles and focus them on the individual and subjective experience. People get bent out of shape over the casting of Jeopardy's host and political discourse is akin to morally opposed blood feuds. The lack of physical pressure creates mental strife. Humans evolved as bald apes, and now we've been spending too much time staring into our collective (hairless) navel.

Rewind the clock even 100 years, and what do we have? Farmers who toil in the fields. If the crop doesn't turn out, we die. If our homestead burns down, we die. If we get a fever, we die. Average people were living much closer to the knife edge that separates life and its end, in a very fundamental way.

I've recounted my anecdotal story of moving stress, a relative's anecdotal story of someone he doesn't even know personally, and now it's time for an anecdotal musing on something society is currently grappling with. I'm pretty sure that three subjective anecdotes equals one peer reviewed study, so buckle up. Are you ready?

COVID.

There is no way that this should be up to interpretation. People are dying. Even more than that, people are dying and denying the very thing that's killing them. Impressive, isn't it? Huge swaths of North America's population seem to fit into a mixture of delusions that either vaccines don't work or that the pandemic itself is a hoax. Fascinating. Something tells me that this kind of debate didn't exist around measles or smallpox, back when we were closer to focusing on living for a living.

Social media could make an appearance here. It's like a fantastic macro lens that enables whole world to look into your navel along with you. Maybe we see lint, or skin, or who knows what. But you bet it's dramatic and exciting and comes along with a clickbait title and cringey thumbnail to rack up those views.

Eventually, though, it boils down to the fact that we're spending too much time finding drama and threats where there are none. I can't decide if that's because our lizard-brain is hard wired to look for and avoid these fundamental dangers, or if it's a mentally-masturbatory activity because it taps into some kind of adrenaline-like fight-or-flight response. Either way, we create problems where there (essentially) are none in order to stimulate ourselves. 

The pandemic shouldn't be a debate in a rational world. Yet here we are, where it's a subjective and immovable truth based on one's political or sociological leanings. We're not fighting for our lives in any real sense, so we find other things to fight over. In this case, it's a fight over if the struggle even exists in the first place, despite any display of scientific evidence. Sure, many change their mind once they land in ER and are on oxygen for days on end, but up to that point COVID is an abstract matter that's up for debate. It's that physical, first-hand experience where one fights for their life that really changes minds.

What the whole COVID ordeal does for me, however, is grant solace in regards to what will happen with climate change. If we can't as a society get our collective survival instinct into gear over a direct threat to our well being in the shape of a pandemic... there is no way in hell we'll galvanize to prevent climate change. So rest easy, folks, in the knowledge that Earth is quite fucked. We're too splintered and petty to make any meaningful alterations to our course. Why save for our future when you can mortgage it today for those sweet, sweet likes and retweets?

And maybe once we cross that apocalyptic threshold we will again be aligned as a people and a race in an effort to survive. Maybe we'll all pull together and make it. Maybe we won't, and march in lock step towards oblivion just like all the other extinct species that have acted as a canary in our coal mine up until this point. The signs are there, but I guess we just have better things to do.

I've drifted around quite a bit here, so let me try and wrap this all back around with a thesis-like concluding paragraph. As a species, we've matured and strayed too far from the essential, every day pursuit of physical survival. This makes us kind of miserable and under-stimulated, so we seek out conflict in other areas of life like entertainment and politics. We're so good at finding (or inventing) that conflict that it's ultimately divorced from reality. That's why the concept of a pandemic is more polarizing than the reality of a pandemic. And as a real life threat is socially abstracted away from its physical manifestation, our resiliency as a species decays. Something has got to give, and I have doubts that we have the self-regulating threshold we need to recalibrate and save ourselves in time.

It's coming, one way or another. The oceans roll up the street to bathe us in our kitchens, dens, and dining rooms. Fields will turn to dust in an eternal autumn; Thanksgiving Day will have it's very last harvest, and then there will be nothing to give thanks to. The sun will beat us down with its heavy rays and make off with the glaciers and water tables that keep our lawns green and our thirsts quenched.

And all the while we'll be squabbling over if this is really just how the planet is supposed to work anyways. It'll have the same 'aw, shucks!' attitude as if it's just a TV we've long lost the manual for. But it's actually the manual for being alive.

-Cril

Reading Pornhub's terms of service, going for a drive
And obeying all the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto V
Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown
A book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone
Total disassociation, fully out your mind
Googling "derealization", hating what you find
That unapparent summer air in early fall
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all

There it is again
That funny feeling
That funny feeling
There it is again
That funny feeling
That funny feeling

Hey, what can you say?
We were overdue
But it'll be over soon
You wait
Hey, what can you say?
We were overdue
But it'll be over soon
Just wait
Ba-da-da, ba-da-da, ba-da-da-da-da-da

Bo Burnham - That Funny Feeling

Small Spices

Beyond Van Gogh was pretty neat. I felt like some of the descriptions and copy was trying a bit too hard to wow the audience, when they should've let the visuals do that. Artwork room itself was lovely and hypnotizing. It was like being inside a dream that sauntered through the artist's life. I liked how it was punctuated by instrumental versions of Vincent and Here Comes the Sun. Having the vocals would've been too much, and the restraint was appreciated. It let you soak up the visuals happening all around you.

And then there were teens and young women who just used it as a selfie opportunity. Snapping a photo in front of something cool is one thing, but the elaborate poses and angles just seemed to take things too far. It goes from being about you having an experience to I'm super interesting, you should subscribe!! Felt like it made a mockery of the artist somehow.

It would've been a borderline meditative and emotional experience otherwise. I don't know why I let those other people decay my capacity for enjoyment in the moment. Maybe because that was my first time in a crowded social setting in more than a year. But who am I to dictate how people experience an experience? Maybe the world is just one huge selfie booth and I'm lagging behind. After all, look at how many self portraits Van Gogh produced.

---

Went over to some friends' place for dinner. At one point that evening their oldest cat, Dexter, waltzed into the room and sniffed around the couch and an activity table for the kids. He's black and a bit chunky. When he first came home with my friends those years ago and I was still living with them, I laid down on the floor outside his small cat carrier and had a nap. He came out, crawled onto my chest and went to sleep as well. Ever since then, I've been the only one he'll get into the lap of for cuddles.

Fast forward, to that summer's evening a couple weeks ago. I made eye contact with him and the most extraordinary thing happened: In an instant of widening feline facial expressions I could swear he recognized me. Without breaking eye contact, he jumped down, came to my feet, and hovered in my vicinity for the rest of the visit. It was a happy reunion. It startled me to see just how strong his reaction was to seeing my face. Cats are quiet critters, and it's easy to take for granted what's going on behind the scenes.

---

I watched Bo Burnham's Inside. A lot of the discussion online seems to be reduced to "OMG he captures how much lockdown sucks lol!!!!!!" It felt more menacing than that to me, though. It's like he took a drop of modern society, and let it fester in a petri dish of physical isolation. Almost as if to see just how it'll morph and adapt and abstract with just the nutrients of our digital lives. The result is ugly. He makes it funny and catchy, of course, but there's no mistaken that it's a grim take on what makes us all tick.

I think about it often. It's like a pine needle in my sock.

---

There is something that lives in the shadow of Neptune, where fuzzy aliens and half-baked urban legends go to dance unsupervised. I dare not send a probe, let alone a five second gaze through a telescope. Let it stay in the far away darkness.

---

Doug Demuro has filled a niche. He has a great concept for a show, and clearly has the attention to detail required to execute it. It's brilliant - all standard car reviews only focus on the handling, acceleration, and livability. None of them mention the little details or idiosyncrasies that give a vehicle character.

But despite that and his success and subsequent ballooning subscriber count, why does his show suck so much? The camera work, editing, and general production is generally amateurish. You can tell he's a one man band trying to play something meant for a fifteen piece orchestra.

AND THE WRITING. Or the lack of it, rather. Oh man, what a pain in the ass. He is so repetitive. You can tell he jots down notes about a car and then just freestyles the delivery without much attention towards how shots begin, end, or fit together. It's so frustrating to listen to. I just feel like there's a total lack of journalistic and presentation craft.

Don't get me started on the DougScore. I see what he's going for in concept, but it's so obviously flawed at a rudimentary level.

I guess this is where concept is king - the idea is good, so we'll put up with all the other shortcomings.

---

Some of the Best

The Beatles Rock Band intro video hits the spot every time. And into the Spiderverse is brilliant. Did you know the same guy, Alberto Mielgo, worked on both?

Chicken Paprikesh from a local Hungarian restaurant and the Chicken Athena from a local Greek joint (don't forget the Spanikopita).

Reclining on the deck, reading a book, and Mozz jumping up. He rests his head on my chest for a nap, and I keep reading.

---

I think social media and targeted online content are the cigarettes of the 21st century. So good. So cathartic. I love taking those 5 minutes out of my day again and again to take a long drag. But deep down we know it has little-to-no benefit compared to the mirage-like benefits. 

---