Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Autobiography

Remembering: Part 2

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Previously, I mentioned the bizarre timing. 

Two years ago, around the end of October, I ran into a friend at the bookstore. He was bandaged and seemed rather disheveled. He was wearing a hospital bracelet. A few days or weeks later (I can’t remember), his wife called to let me know that he had disappeared. I figured that he was as good as dead. And so for the past two years, I listen to some of the music he wrote in November and I think briefly about our friendship, what I learned, what I could do better in current friendships, and pray for his family, etc. 

Now, his disappearance could have meant anything. He possessed a powerful intellect. His desk in his home was always riddled with strange old electronic devices he would repair: oscilloscopes, out of production media players, decaying monosynths, disassembled miscellany, and disorganized sundries, etc. But he also had great facility with learning languages, very difficult mathematics, music history/theory, and a vast knowledge of philosophy, theology, the occult, and Jungian psychology. He knew chemistry and sometimes did impressive tricks. And he had a knack for surviving in the wild. His never-ending curiosity was unnerving. But certain desires that drive people can becoming so consuming that they destroy rather than enliven, his was for knowledge. As he would say, unchecked desire could dissolve rather than coagulate.

He always reminded me of Andy Kaufman. He loved the eccentric and would happily take a joke too far just because he enjoyed it. In high school, the song “The Great Beyond” would remind me of him as much as of Kaufman. Part of why I became friends with him guy was our similar sense of the absurd. We were in a band called ECP, the Exploding Chaos Parade. With the exception for four or five people whose opinion he really valued, he was immune to group norms. That immunity to the opinions of others is very freeing.

While I was writing the other post, I had this sudden hopeful thought: what if he came back…what a train wreck that would be, but he’d be alive, be there for his kids (in some capacity) and probably have some wild stories. My natural pessimism reminded me that this isn’t a movie. Anyway, his wife called me a week later, to the day, to tell me his remains had been found.

But what was weird about it all was the day I ran into him, prior to his disappearance, we talked about Carl Jung’s book Synchronicity and potential overlap with Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance. Synchronicity is Jung’s term for coincidences which are not causally related, yet are meaningfully connected. That’s what made the timing of the phone call, the text, and the delayed moment of remembrance of my other friend all so bizarre.

Here’s an example of his music: 

 

Here is an absurdist collage he made for reasons he didn’t even know:

I don’t mean to romanticize my friend. He was a broken man. Everybody is haunted by demons, may God give us the strength to face them. 

Remembering: Part 1

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Every year, around the anniversary of his death, I sit and think about a friend. I’ve done this for several July’s in a row. This year I did not. My daughter had been born and I was utterly distracted from my normal habits. 

In high school he was an atheist. We often argued about God’s existence (despite being in debate class I found political debates boring). In college, he had a break from reality connected to several bad habits he’d developed in high school.

Before he graduated, classmates gave him a dose of real-talk about the probable results of his excessive drinking. He had been one of the brightest guys I’d ever met, and I tried to surround myself only with people I thought were very bright, he rose to the top. He excelled, especially, at music theory and debate. He was two years older than me. At this point we were not friends.

Anyway, out of the blue, he contacted me when I was in college. He claimed to have become a Christian as a result of his apparent breakdown. He wrote a bunch of music. He even offered to help my brother’s band produce an album, presumably as a kindness to me. His conversion experience seemed sincere, though some of our mutual friends told me that they weren’t sure he wasn’t pulling an elaborate prank.

We spent the weekend with my roommates and I. We attended some concerts, debated Scripture, and talked about stupid high school antics. From this point on, he would regularly call me. He eventually asked me to baptize him, so I did. This took place over about 2 years, with the baptism somewhere in the middle. I slept so little from 2003-2010 that anything within that time frame seems almost simultaneous. 

From 2008-2010, we stayed in touch, grabbed food a few times when he was in town. Sometimes, I ignored his phone calls. It was never personal and he knew he usually contacted me in what could only be described as hypermanic states.

In 2010, he died. Causes were never made public. I have my suspicions, but they don’t matter. Since then, I go to his MySpace music page and listen to the good songs once a year. I used to go to the funeral home webpage to reread his obituary, but two or three years ago, it went down. Eventually, the MySpace page will be gone. I checked it last week and none of his old songs would play. That’s a shame because my brother and I both lost his album. 

I don’t like being sad. I don’t reminisce to make myself sad. I accept the ancient belief that it’s important to remember the dead so that they remain active in history. I don’t mean animism, but that specifically remembering people brings their words and actions into history anew. That feels especially true to me if they never had children. There are men and women whose deaths go unremembered every day. Christ remembers them. But, it just seems intuitively right to try to hold those who were close to you in your heart if you can. And it’s not that I don’t believe in heaven or the resurrection from the dead. I do. I just believe that history matters and people are supposed to remain in it longer than 28 years or so.

I similarly call to memory two other friends. One died when I was in high school. My last words to him were when I was tutoring him in geometry and he was refusing to grasp the concept (we played soccer together so the harshness is playful): Don’t be such a f*cking idiot. Remembering him reminds me to be circumspect with my words. Going to a funeral for a Christian brother and soccer teammate while remembering that as your last conversation is sobering. 

The other isn’t known to have died, but he has disappeared. 

Now, I wrote this short reflection for personal reasons. I never meant to post it. But the months-off timing of my recollections was bizarre this year.

 

 

Reflections on Fatherhood

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This is just a stream of consciousness about the experience of fatherhood:

  1. When the struggles with Avery and Margot began toward the end of the pregnancy, I had never felt so defeated, alone, or weak. I didn’t handle it well, and I suspect I’m still recovering from that. 
  2. That’s not a complaint, it’s just a shift in perspective. Before fatherhood, I easily recovered from sorrow due to death or the fear thereof. Other things got me down. But rarely the near death or sickness of people I knew.(not sure why, I was just wired that way)
  3. The stresses of parenthood are like those of every life change. The passions of the body and soul find new ways to tempt you to sin.
  4. I’ve never been big on sleep, but my sleep is so shallow these days it’s finally catching up to me.
  5. I’ve always been very protective of children and been very aggressive to bullies. But with my own daughter that instinct has multiplied so vastly. When I read ancient literature, the insane lengths of revenge for hurt family suddenly makes sense to me (not that I endorse that). But I have rethought several aspects of my politics and ethics. 
  6. I do more fully understand wha Jesus meant when he said you couldn’t follow him without hating your family. Here’s how: if I had to choose between the whole world and my daughter, she wins every time. I’d build a space ship, turn the moon into the Death Star, and blow up the sun if it would keep her safe. Anyway, Jesus seems to be saying to put that sort of devotion beneath your devotion to him and adherence to his teachings.
  7. I find watching somebody sleep is now a deep joy.
  8. Few processes are more fun than watching somebody learn to be a person from scratch. 
  9. When Jordan Peterson says, “you have to know that you’re a loaded gun, especially around children, or you’ll harm them irreparably” is good counsel. It’s weird how you can suddenly and accidentally get mad at a person who doesn’t even have a will yet.
  10. I make up songs all day now. That’s weird.
  11. Since discovering the pregnancy, I’ve read so many parenting books and so much psychology and evo-psych literature that I’m actually forgetting author names (never done that before…could be sleep deprivation).
  12. Having a child wakens you, profoundly, to the value of a dollar and the beauty of nice neighborhoods. 
  13. Few moments are so heartbreaking as watching my daughter’s pristine worldview get shattered by bumping her head or suddenly getting hungry.
  14. She recently started emulating “I love you.” She makes a weird three syllable sound with her tongue floppping about. It’s the best.
  15. Unless you’re a terrible person who would definitely be a bad parent, you should get your life together and have kids in order to experience meaning in life.

Conservatism Conserves What?

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This is an edit of a post from October 21st, 2016
When I was in junior high I learned about conservatives and liberals.
I was really confused about the fact that liberals wanted more rules for business owners and that conservatives wanted to spend more money on war.
A couple of years later, I converted to Christianity and found several conservative political positions to line up with my emerging moral consciousness. But, I also found several of them to abhorrent.
  1. Pro-life made sense. Abortion is the most insane inversion of the order nature I could and can imagine.
  2. I thought prison sentences for most crimes made no sense.
  3. Keeping the government mostly out of the market made sense (though I was skeptical of conservative opposition to minimum wage increases and I thought tariffs made sense)
  4. I also thought that going to war all of the time seemed to be a “liberal” use of money.

My Skepticism Rose

During Bush the Younger’s presidency, I remembered thinking that the privacy intrusions of the intelligence agencies, the quickness with which we went to war with Iraq over 9/11? WMDs? oil? (how and why was that wise?) and the reticence to do anything about abortion showed that conservatives meant [based on observing their actions] neither to conserve human life in general, American lives, nor the constitution.
Now that I’ve realized how little conservatives care to conserve. I tend to think that Republicans don’t actually want to win the pro-life argument at the legal level because then they couldn’t use the platform to get elected.

The Five Stages of Conservative

Ed Feser expertly mocked the conservative way of being in the world here:
  1. Stage 1: “Mark my words: if the extreme left had its way, they’d foist X upon us! These nutjobs must be opposed at all costs.”
  2. Stage 2: “Omigosh, now even thoughtful, mainstream liberals favor X! Fortunately, it’s political suicide.”
  3. Stage 3: “X now exists in 45 out of 50 states. Fellow conservatives, we need to learn how to adjust to this grim new reality.”
  4. Stage 4: “X isn’t so bad, really, when you think about it. And you know, sometimes change is good. Consider slavery…”
  5. Stage 5: “Hey, I was always in favor of X! You must have me confused with a [paleocon, theocon, Bible thumper, etc.]. But everyone knows that mainstream conservatism has nothing to do with those nutjobs…”

Stage five describes contemporary conservatives thoroughly.

Christians do this, too.

“Those other Christians are bad, please like me now.”

I think I used to do it, too. Seminary trains you to want approval from non-Christians. Several professors I know are like this.

One of them is so condescending, even to people to whom he used to be a pastor, it’s difficult to imagine that he ever called himself a Christian. Usually hating Christians is the wine of atheists. But his main point is to signal to his academic friends that he’s not like all those low IQ rednecks he used to pastor.

No “Conservative Principles”

Even when conservatives claim to be using logic rather than rhetoric to make arguments against this or that idea or candidate, the same logic is applicable against them. Heck, I’ve heard conservatives rail against the tendency of populist movements to appeal to the poor and if anybody appeals to the poor they should be ignored. But that’s precisely part of Jesus’ appeal in the ancient world. Conservatives, in their effort to get people to see them as “not like those other conservatives” will make up principles they’ve never adopted before. This reminds me of when Publius Decius Mus opined that many of conservatives deep “principled concerns” aren’t even principles:

What, specifically, is good in a political context varies with the times and with circumstance, as does how best to achieve the good in a given context. The good is not tax rates or free trade. Those aren’t even principles. In the American political context, the good is the well-being of the physical America and its people, well-being defined (in terms that reflect both Aristotle and the American Founding) as their “safety and happiness.” That’s what conservatism should be working to conserve.

Examples

Mark Rubio said that he didn’t think conservatives should look at wikileaks materials because it might happen to conservatives one day. In other words, “It’s bad for politicians to be forced into transparency.” No moral principle such as privacy was evoked, but merely interest in power. Heck, it wasn’t even a, “Do unto others…” thing.

Elsewhere, on the Tweeter, Rick Wilson (a goober in love with family values rhetoric) asked Ann Coulter (who never claims to be polite) personal sex questions of a deeply disturbing nature.

In the National Review, Kevin Williamson exuberantly rhapsodized about how people who live in flyover communities deserve to die for no other reason except a “conservative” form of social darwinism which implies that politicians have no obligations toward the well being of their voters. No mention, of course, that it was bad trade deals supported by conservatives which sent their jobs overseas.

I’m Not Conservative

I’m not conservative by any respectably accepted definition. Conservatives, at least public pundits, are not interested in conserving principles, traditions, people, the economy, or the rule of law. They’re more interested in being the irenic but losing opposition to any of the forces bent on dissolving Western Civilization. The idea that sacrificing your view of the truth in response to social pressure is noble is unacceptable to me.

Sting and the unbearable lightness of sorrow

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I was born in the 80s. This means that I listened to a lot of the best music of the previous century as a child. But as you grow older, some music acquires new meaning, either because of your experiences or because you just finally became conscious enough to listen to the lyrics. When I was in junior high, I realized how creepy or sad his Sting’s lyrics were. Without fail, every song is filled with shades of the dark triad traits or utter remorse at unrequited love.

But what is so weird about Sting is that his songs sound so upbeat, pleasant, and even energizing that it’s difficult to associate them with negative emotions or immoral pursuits! He can sing about wanting to die, being the king of pain, having an affair, stalking a woman who ignores him, or being a creepy teacher with the same exuberant tone!

That being said, two songs from the current decade reminded me of the Police’s Can’t Stand Losing You (below). The first is Somebody that I Used to Know by Gotye and Kimbra.

Here are the most obvious lyrics, though both songs are about the same experience:

Gotye Sting
You didn’t have to cut me off
Make out like it never happened
And that we were nothing
And I don’t even need your love
But you treat me like a stranger
And that feels so rough…
You didn’t have to stoop so low,
Have your friends collect your records and then change your number…		 I see youve sent my letters back
And my lp records and theyre all scratched
I cant see the point in another day
When nobody listens to a word I say
You can call it lack of confidence
But to carry on living doesnt make no sense

If you listen to them both, they Gotye sounds deeply troubled and sorrowful about getting his records back. Sting sounds overjoyed even though they’ve been destroyed and he’s contemplating suicide!

The next is Chalk Outline by Three Days Grace:

Three Days Grace Guy Sting
You’ll be sorry baby, someday
When you reach across the bed
Where my body used to lay
You left me here like a chalk outline, etc

 

 I guess this is our last goodbye
And you dont care, so I wont cry
But youll be sorry when Im dead
And all this guilt will be on your head
I guess youd call it suicide
But I’m too full to swallow my pride

The similarities are striking. Both are using the spectre (as it hasn’t occurred) of their impending suicide to make the other feel sorry/guilty. The chief difference is, again, the character in the Three Days Grace song sounds angry and sorrowful, perhaps willing to end his life and just letting her know it’s connected to her. It’s a crappy thing to do, but obviously a call to help.

Sting sounds cheerful and pleasant like Moriarty or the Joker. [spoiler] In the Sherlock television show and in one of my favorite Batman comics of the 80s the villains commit suicide specifically to cause trauma to the protagonist (legal, emotional, existential, it doesn’t matter).[/spoiler] I think Sting’s character in the song above really would do it out of a sadistic need for revenge and a narcissistic desire to be a permanent fixture in the thought space of the other. In other words, the character in many of Stings songs is a villain on the level of Satan, the Joker, or Hannibal Lecter. And it is the case that the dark triad traits correlate with short term sexual success and those same traits correlate very highly with sadism. Now, I find the Police and Sting’s songs catchy and fun. On the other hand either Sting or the character he plays as he writes his music (he has a background in literature) is a dark triad expert, as this biography linked indicates he was a bad teacher.

Conclusions, no arguments.

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I had titled this post, ‘random thoughts.’ But many of these are things I’ve thought a lot about. They aren’t random, they’re just topics I’d like to write about/discuss with folks but probably won’t write about for fear of wasting my time (only about two of my posts here have comments).

  1. Matthew’s gospel really was written first.
  2. Sex differences are real, down to the molecular level.
  3. With respect to #2, sex differences should be considered a first principle when it comes to raising children.
  4. The Beatles are overrated, the Stones and even Fleetwood Mac are better.
  5. Other than occasionally being motivating on a hormonal level or linguistically intriguing, rap music is pointless.
  6. The typical Protestant/Evangelical articulation of justification by faith alone and ‘once saved always saved’ are incorrect and potentially dangerous to peoples’ souls.
  7. Capitalism, insofar as it means, ‘non-coercive commerce’ is not workable in nations where Christianity is not the publicly preferred religion and practiced with sincerity by a large visible minority.
  8. In connection with this, free trade agreements are a mistake.
  9. The average humanities degree in the modern university is pointless economically and intellectually empty.
  10. The New Testament simultaneously makes room for women as prophets in the church while maintaining the existence of some form of hierarchy in the household.
  11. Attempts at analogies for the trinity are bad most of the time.
  12. Fiction can be truer than history.
  13. The Old Testament has a lot more information about demons are fallen powers than Old Testament scholars tend to acknowledge.
  14. While deontological ethics (right and wrong are right and wrong regardless of consequences) is correct with respect to knowing morality, consequentialist reasoning is best for getting people to behave morally.
  15. The distinction between law and morality is important for interpreting Scripture.
  16. There are multiple true senses to Scripture, particularly the passages of poetry and the archetypal stories prior Abraham.
  17. In line with #16, many Biblical stories appear to be designed to promote inquiry from several angles rather than to promote a specific point of view.
  18. Dante’s Inferno is as much psychology as it is theology and poetry.
  19. The average school, if studied without presupposition, would appear to be designed to promote listlessness, ignorance, and inattention.
  20. Aristotle’s metaphysic is, at least with regard to actuality/potentiality, and therefore causality and the soul.
  21. Evolutionary theory contains several logical leaps, provides many satisfactory explanations of the life on planet earth, has no business in a high school biology class, and poses no threat to Christianity.
  22. Genetic differences between human groups are selected for environments over thousands or millions of years. (my apparently Scottish self has no business in south Texas, stepping outside is asking for a heat rash, sun burn, or worse).