I might want to write about optimism, but if look back on a few posts where I share thoughts on various things other than travels, I don’t know where I’ll come up with ideas that are optimistic.

Life is good, marriage is great, food has been terrific, and adventures are amazing, but looking out at society, I’m filled with dread. The simple solution might seem to be that I should turn away from society at large, but it is all who have come before me that have produced the art, literature, culture, science, and advances that I currently enjoy. So, why can’t I focus on those things that are currently at work and producing progress? For those things to propel us forward and my optimism to find traction, I require hope in some plurality of people that I believe are aiming for advancement instead of regression.

Come on and break out of this, John; you were supposed to write about some track of optimism that would launch us into 2022, and I just know you can bring this forth.

Well, for one, my health seems to be okay, but this is the last year of my 50s, and so I’ll admit I’m leery of what my 60s might have in store for me as old age will take on the serious appearance of what it is. All the same, I’ll be as optimistic as possible so long as my wherewithal keeps me walking 5 miles a day, eating healthy, and happy to get out of bed.

I’m enthusiastically still buying books, including Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi, Of Grammatology, Saving Beauty, Religion and Nothingness, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Dostoyevsky and The Flood of Language, Passions of Our Time, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, The Neganthropocene, and The History of Philosophy. All of these arrived just in the last 90 days of 2021.

We have planned 24 excursions out of Phoenix this year, including three visits to the Los Angeles area, Mexico City and Chiapas in Mexico, the Oregon Coast, Monterey, California, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon, San Diego, a couple of trips to Utah, Nevada, three visits to different areas of New Mexico, Colorado, Yellowstone, and finally no less than half a dozen locations around Arizona. Ambition that will require a bit of stamina to maintain such a busy schedule will certainly not allow age to intrude.

With a pantry full of Chinese, Korean, Indian, Japanese, German, Burmese, Thai, and Mexican ingredients, Caroline and I will continue our adventures into cuisines from around the globe. Having favorites in all of those foods, it can become difficult to deviate and add new dishes as there are only so many dinners in a year that two people can eat, but we’ll try. On the tried-and-true front, I’m happy to announce that for the first time in maybe half-a-dozen years, I’ve shredded over 20 pounds of cabbage and pressed it into a crock for making sauerkraut. A batch of homemade granola is in the dehydrator, and when we return from our upcoming visit to Los Angeles, I’ll take on the full-day task of converting 20 pounds of red onions, paprika, and cilantro into a huge batch of Burmese curry base. Almost forgot to share that I recently turned 12 pounds of ginger into fermented ginger for those Burmese ginger salads we love so much, enough to last us into the summer.

Neither Caroline nor I are short of projects that require tending to as we continue to work through a backlog of stuff that only seems to grow, kind of like our reading list, destination wishes, and culinary curiosities.

Something that’s been in short supply the past couple of pandemic years is local cultural events typically focused on live music, special art exhibits, and various talks, and on the current horizon, there still seems to be nothing but the good news front. The Metropolitan Opera in New York City resumed its live simulcasts last year, and here in 2022, we already have tickets for Rigoletto, Don Carlos, Lucia Di Lammermoor, and finally, Hamlet.

Somewhere in this mix of the known and familiar, we’ll have to inject serendipity, spontaneity, and the unknown, but I feel certain that our intention to discover new things will open our senses to those opportunities. Finding triumph in growth and deep experience from year to year has been a signature of long-standing in our lives and will hopefully carry forward for years to come.

This is a type of blog post I’ve never attempted before, as a review of my year can be had by simply checking out the many musings I’ve published here over the course of the last twelve months. What is drawing this out of me is both a reaction and a hunch. The reaction is due to the near incessant drone of pundits and headlines I catch here and there about how abominable the last year has been. My hunch is that Caroline and I have had an incredible year, but instead of making a value judgment by shooting from the hip, I’ll skim through the nearly quarter-million words published in 2021 and see what things looked like for the two of us.

Introspection and continuing self-isolation were in order for the month of January 2021. It’s difficult to mention the pandemic without referencing the majority of the prior year, in which Caroline and I were thriving in the quiet of Phoenix, enjoying the empty skies, the endless walks in circles around our neighborhood, homemade meals every day, and more time together than we’d ever been afforded before. Another year of being married was had, and an election upset gave some breathing room aside from witnessing the attempted overthrow of our democracy.

February came and went much as January did, except at the end of the month, we visited a museum for the first time in over a year and were able to join a drumming program at the Musical Instrument Museum. Earlier in February, after entertaining the idea of working remotely from somewhere near the Oregon Coast, we realized that America has become too expensive to afford any real comfort, so my attention turned to working from Europe. Sadly, Caroline’s company can’t support that situation, but that didn’t stop me from working intently on a year-long itinerary that would see us spending nearly a month each in Vienna, Innsbruck, Trento, Florence, Turin, Annecy, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rennes, Rouen, Ghent, and Groningen. Nothing ever happens if we fail to dream.

March was monumental, not because I stopped writing about perspectives and memories (I didn’t), but because Caroline and I both got our first shots of the COVID-19 vaccine. That wasn’t all, as March turned busy when Caroline not only returned to her office for in-person work, but I jumped into the car to head east, north, and south here in Arizona over a few days. Truth was, I needed to get away from home because, after a year in our apartment with Caroline nearby, I knew the place would feel empty without her presence.

April comes on with my 58th birthday, a junior ranger badge from Saguaro National Park for Caroline, our second shot of the COVID-19 vaccine, and plans for a road trip. After reading the news that the Monterey Bay Aquarium was planning on reopening for the first time since March of last year, we were going to head over to California if only I was able to snag a couple of tickets that were sure to sell out fast. Well, the website was hiccupping, and so, although the website said not to call the aquarium directly, with the site being hammered, they started taking phone orders. Not only did I get us in on an early morning reservation for one of the days we’d be in the area, but I was able to grab two tickets for the next day, too. On the last day of April, we left Phoenix for California.

Starting off May with a drive up Highway 1 on a beautiful sunny spring day couldn’t be more ideal. No matter what else would happen in May, it’s already perfect. Not long after returning from our ten days along the Pacific Ocean, we received a request from Germany asking if I could fly over to help deal with my mother-in-law’s effects and apartment. Before the month was out, I was on my way to Europe.

Nearly every day of June was spent in a mostly locked-down Germany. I’d never been to Europe without tourists found in every nook and cranny before and will likely never have the opportunity to see this again in my lifetime. Caroline and I didn’t miss a day talking with each other as she practiced her rusty skills of driving while also enjoying a ton of time to focus on herself and things she wanted to do, short of dancing around the apartment with her chonies on her head, though she might have done that too.

Home in time for the 4th of July with more than a few days to recover from the jetlag that comes with such long flights around our earth. Somewhere in that recovery, my daughter Jessica called, letting me know that not only was she fully vaccinated but that she had some free time coming up. With a minimal amount of planning, I was able to forge an itinerary that would have us heading north before July was over.

August started in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming with my daughter and ended with Caroline and me on a flight to Germany. Between those milestones, Jessica and I would hike in the Beartooth Mountains, drive to the Canadian border, and head south through the very middle of America for more than 1,000 miles on Highway 83.

September was all about family in and around Frankfurt, Germany. With everyone over there in their mid-80s, we needed this time to visit with them more than has been typical. With that our goal, there were no side trips to Paris, Italy, or Sweden although we did fit in a few days up in Binz on Rügen, Germany’s largest island off the Baltic Sea coast.

October was spent recovering from five months of extensive travels. I barely knocked out 2,500 words about things, but we did pick up our friend William “Willy” Mathers from Scotland at our local airport to drive him up to Flagstaff, where he’d be departing for a three-week trip down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon the next day.

Serb Fest, friends, restocking our pantry, the end of an era as we put to rest the Plum In The Golden Vase after taking nearly ten years to read its five volumes, more reading, and meeting author Pacifique Irankunda over coffee on a chance meeting; that was November. Before the month was out, I even got in a brief trip over Globe and Winkleman before heading into southern Utah for a quick hike in Bryce National Park with an old friend.

Now, here we are in December, Caroline’s birthday has passed, our visit with my daughter over in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge south of Socorro, New Mexico, was had over Christmas, and we have nothing at all planned for New Year’s as just a week after we welcome in 2022, we’ll be heading to Los Angeles to visit some museums, gardens, and a couple of Persian restaurants.

So, how was 2021? I have nothing to complain about, as this was certainly by no means a year of misery. On the contrary, anyone could read above that we are incredibly fortunate to find the greatest experiences in life, even when that is nothing more than making a meal at home, reading a book together, or donning a new pair of socks my wife hand-knitted for me. Yay for 2021 and all that it brought.

How appropriate that the name of the coffee shop in which I should finally find space to sit down has in it the word “ASS.” It was just the other day I was writing about my wife’s colon, and now I find myself in the far southwest of Phoenix, actually, a small city called Tolleson, which is out near Goodyear and Avondale. I hate this part of the Valley of the Sun. Who am I kidding? I hate almost everything in the Phoenix area.

Sorry, Bad Ass Coffee of Hawaii, for dragging your image into this as I don’t dislike you at all; on the contrary, I’m thrilled you are out here and open so I can sit down and get a bit of writing in while my wife is nearby visiting with a friend.

So, which axe are you grinding here today, John? An age-old missive that is tired, worn, and just a lot more of the grumpy old man shtick I show up with on possibly too many occasions. Hmmm, I’ll try to mix this one up here; what’s eating me today are those white people who are my age and older, especially those who live in these predominantly white neighborhoods where their generically bland existences seem to crawl right up in my ass to fester and cause me groan-worthy discomfort.

Yes, I’m that judgmental, and yes, it’s all based on appearances. These people who should be metaphorical books of at least some depth are badly written half-wit passages that hardly qualify as works in progress as much they are brief paragraphs and broken sentences of insipidness. If you are wondering how I come to that conclusion, it’s writ large on their doltish faces. Whoa there, why all the hostility?

This is not the only city I’ve lived in, not the first state, nor the only country. I think I know something about diversity and attitudes as worn by faces that offer a glimpse into the local attitudes. Just as you can’t venture into a concert by Napalm Death and confuse the attendees with those who were supposed to see the nearby Rick Astley show, you can see in people’s faces their tensions and their whiteness when they are insipid intolerant bigots existing in a sheltered corner of America where their kind congregates.

This all pertains to today’s post title, In The Ass, because that’s just how I feel as I mingle with these turds. You might want to ask, “But can’t you find anything nice to say?” The cold brew here is great, but venting some spleen can be cathartic as I have to reconcile that we still live here in Arizona. To allow my disdain to ferment in my heart and soul would make the pain of being out and amongst these troglodytes a cancer that risks stealing all of my happiness.

I should point out that we live in an economically diverse neighborhood on the edges of wealth, the middle class, and poverty. From Indians and Hispanics to black Americans and Africans, even a smattering of the homeless, we have it all in our little corner of Phoenix. From our area, I can easily make my way over to a part of the valley that’s becoming a Little Asia kind of place.

How do I address the question of why I think I can see this in the faces of people I pass? What could it be in the morphology of their appearance that screams, “I’m a small-minded backwoods fascist that would join the Whitey Jihadists to purify the world if you show me where to sign up.” Is it arrogance? Their haircuts? Hats? To be honest, I’d have to rely on my intuition after encountering this type of bulwark for stupidity after so many years.

Fortunately, I don’t have to shoulder this perspective alone: Bernard Stiegler, in his book, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, talks of the “Non-Inhuman Human,” well, I initially couldn’t quite understand the concept behind this description so I turned to Reddit and the r/askphilosophy subreddit, endeavoring to figure out what precisely this non-inhuman human is. Just today, someone shared this explanation: Human humans [Stiegler refers to them as “non-inhuman human”] safeguard (by transforming) knowledge, values, and other noetic things by reflecting on the consequences of their actions. Actions take place through technical objects (real objects, concepts, social organizations, institutions, etc.), which means the way “human humans” reflect is by criticizing their technical creations. All this noetic activity is a condition to the evolution of the species, keeping it from extinction… “Inhumans humans” [on the other hand] do not do this, and their actions are plainly stupid, destroying knowledge on a massive level. 

It is precisely these inhuman humans against whom I rail.

Who do we hate more today, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates? Let me spin the bottle so the universe can figure it out. Seeing how Elon Musk was just named Time magazine’s Man Of The Year and that he’s been flirting with being the richest person on earth, he’s the man of the hour to hate. Right behind him, though, is Jeff Bezos, who recently sat by playing with his rocket while 6 of his employees died in an Amazon warehouse during a tornado. And, of course, Bill Gates will always be hated because he’s Bill Gates, who started us down this path of cruel wealth while he piloted his Borg ship on a path that would end up delivering his 5G chips into our veins.

Does anyone out there really care that 100 people a day are murdered in America, that 100 people a day die in car accidents, or that 57 elderly people die prematurely every day due to poor care at private equity-owned senior care facilities? No to all of the above, but when six people die at a Jeff Bezos-operated facility (never mind that he’s not been the CEO since June), he’s still at fault due to his untaxed billions in cash that pour from the spigot on his bald head.

Why, America? How and why are we this stupid?

The wealth created by the fundamental shifts in the economy and technology benefits shareholders, workers, and the entire global economy as they change the very way we work and exchange our labor for food, shelter, education, health care, and transportation. But that means nothing when you have a wealthy class of propagandists who need to focus the public’s ire against a select few who become the lightning rods to attract the anger that might otherwise be directed at the entire ruling class that has failed to find a vision for the direction of humanity.

So, if you are a billionaire, you need to be prepared to have the weight of the world thrown upon your shoulders, such is the price for your fat wallet.

But John, it’s more than that. If these fat cats were properly taxed, I’d feel compensated and would be able to luxuriate in the knowledge that they paid their fair share, which would ultimately lift me out of my current difficult financial situation.

Consider this: the average rent for an apartment in the United States is $1,124 per month. Now, take the combined wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates (the majority of that wealth is mostly locked up in stock), which is approximately $535 billion (a considerable but fluctuating amount), and force them to divest themselves of every bit of stock they own. Your share of those three’s vast wealth would be $1,623 after dividing it between the 329.5 million people who live on our shores. Then again, if you are a homeowner whose average monthly mortgage payment is $1,487, you’d only have $136 left of your share after making a single payment, but wait, after the average electricity payment of $114 per household there’s hardly enough of your share of these billionaire’s wealth to buy your family a meal at your local fast-food drive-thru.

It seems that NOBODY considers or cares that the combined market value of the companies these three people started is now worth $5 trillion and that the $4.5 trillion owned by the public and other companies is wealth shared by those who are invested in these people’s ideas. How about these armchair experts/haters think about what would happen to the price of Tesla’s, Microsoft’s, and Amazon’s stock if their three founders were to suddenly dump all of their stock? Those valuations of $5 trillion could be reduced to not much more than $1 trillion, which to the average person would still be seen as a lot of money for sure, but…

Jeff Bezos’ stock is currently worth $3,400 a share, but if he were forced to sell his 53,000,000 shares, the price would likely tank down to below $1,000 a share in a fire sale, he’d still net over $50 billion as the price was run down, but you’d destroy the investment of all those who’d invested in Amazon and paid more than $1,000 a share.

Now extrapolate that to the fortunes of Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other tech titans, and let’s make them all pay their fair share, strip them of their untaxed stock wealth, and just yank some $8 trillion of wealth from investors so we can recoup $1 trillion from these billionaire despots.

I hope you see where this has gone; we are idiots and collectively have no real idea how much of anything functions on the scales that things operate. The wealthy certainly know this as they are smart enough to offer us the sacrificial lambs that can easily insulate themselves against the crackpots and stupidity of the angry horde. Just keep Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg in the headlines so we don’t blame the larger part of corporate America, our politicians, or the media that feeds this gas-lighting of the sheep.

Welcome to your place in the perpetual Rube Goldberg machine whereby, sharing your bias and uninformed opinions, you contribute to the greater stupidity of everyone around you just as though you were but one more piece of the machine that dazzles our imagination as everything is toppled in a succession of cascading disinformation, ignorance, and inability to see our own intellectual shortcomings.

Today’s Image: Copyright © 2001-2021 Cluley Associates Limited

Today, I offered my two cents on a question posted on Reddit in the /askphilosophy subreddit:

“Could constantly learning new things be a way to give meaning to life, or is it merely an illusion that we are trying to create?”

I cannot offer insight into studies or schools of thought regarding the question, but I can answer with regard to the insights gained by my wife and me, who are approaching our 60s. Both of us constantly delve into often difficult/complex areas of learning as we’ve noticed that for us, this is a form of play but, more importantly, a way of discovery. At various points along our journey together, we were asked what the “secret” to our happiness is, and what I came up with was that the intensity of exploration experienced at the beginning of our relationship never relented.

This led me to look at those around us who were falling into pre-relationship behaviors because the deep discovery and exploration of the partner that arrives with the early days of falling in love, were waning. Moving into routines, many seem to grow bored or unsatisfied with things.

On the other hand, we read a lot; as a matter of fact, when we travel by car, my wife, who doesn’t like to drive, reads to me. We do not listen to audiobooks; we’ve tried, but I insisted we turn away from them as I’d already grown familiar with my wife’s voice, and so it became the preferred choice of what I wanted to hear as we’d drive the 600 miles between locations. We also have hobbies that are able to evolve and require new skills. Add to this mix that we don’t watch television, play video games, or invest decades in the same activities we were doing 30 years ago, and the world seems to stay new.

We are not rich, we share a car, rent a small apartment, do not have university educations and yet we vacation between 3 and 10 times a year (some of those travels might only be a weekend out of state). We have time and the means to explore various cuisines such as Korean, Burmese, Thai, Indian, Chinese, various European, and of course American. I’m sharing the info about food as it, too, lends itself to the objective of constant learning.

I cannot tell you that this constant learning for the two of us has definitively given us greater meaning or happiness, but I am certain that without this “play” (when I was a child, we referred to discovery, exploring, and learning by the word “play”) we would be fearful of the situation that might curtail our ability to be in this constant state and maybe that would lead to lack of meaning and diminished happiness.

Happiness may not give meaning to life, but it makes many of its uncertainties bearable, and when learning becomes a constant instead of the inanities of modernity, I find that we have the drive to learn even more in order to discover meaning in that exploration of the unknowns still unfolding in front of us.

Photo of us volunteering during a recent charity food packing event held nearby.

The discarded sign of the homeless person who needed nothing else and so they left behind the only symbol that they were here and had existed for a moment. Of course, it could also be a situation where the fentanyl was disabling their motor skills, and in the process of lightening their load, the sign simply fell to the wayside. Or maybe their Uber driver arrived to whisk him/her/they/them to a new life not defined by begging, which also included the help to deliver them from the nothingness that afflicted them?

When we fall in love with celebrities, we are projecting ourselves into their role, be it sports professionals, musicians, actors, porn stars, or influencers. This obvious attraction due to our own desire to be seen, known, wealthy, and influential is an easy equation to relate to, but what is not so apparent is why we often have such visceral disdain for the homeless.

We can blame the trash and feces they leave behind, or the crime we perceive will arrive with them, or maybe we believe that they are capable of work but are too lazy to find the wherewithal to apply themselves. Not taking into account the specifics of what has led any one person or group of people to homelessness, I want to address where we, the not-homeless, are in this equation.

Witnessing success, we celebrate our hope that we might arrive there, too. The celebrity is the surrogate of our own ascent of the ladder to fame. The homeless person is the nagging ugly reminder that we, too, could end up in their tattered shoes. We need to hide these creatures away from our own neighborhoods as they represent a decay that plagues others but should not influence us or our children.

But this is the all too obvious and most apparent cosmetic delineation between us and them. I’d posit that there’s very little difference between the majority and this rarified margin of extreme success and failure. How many people are as empty as those they praise or despise? In this age of mass deterritorialization where ubiquitous media has insidiously stripped away the unique territory of the individual, many people are bereft of personality traits developed by their own explorations as opposed to those images and ideas of personhood pumped into them from the same hose that was feeding the rest of the herd.

The manifestations of the homeless are only the most obvious refuse of a society that no longer allows for a population of individuals sharing a common space but requires those of homogenous form and character to congregate in mass pilgrimages to consumption. When you fail to fit that mold, you have but a few options in American life: fame, destitution, entrepreneurial struggle, isolation on the margin, or expatriation.

Nobody is part of a community anymore unless you believe that belonging to nothingness is somehow a valid place and identity. Under most circumstances, the vacuous shell of political idolatry worn on a hat, the brand emblazoned on your computer, phone, watch, or your shared loyalty to some sports franchise are but junk food fed to you by the machine. The decades-long programmatic building of a population, according to a select group of California thinkers, has gutted individuality while they have been refining their tools to strip all semblance of meaningful character through social media and entertainment until we are left with the banalest citizenry of nothingness, reducing us to something less than the most useless of insects.

Consider that all modern industrial conveniences, including their environment and intellectual harm, arose from an age where everyone had different backgrounds with a multitude of environmental and intellectual influences from across all geographies and disciplines. From that dis-order, the age of machines brought humanity a bevy of tools and devices that would compliment the comforts of many people on earth, but as convenience pandered to our laziest inclinations, it simultaneously removed the need for us humans to venture out to seek what our minds were hungry for – new stuff. Novelty was brought directly into our homes, and now we can gather new information no matter where we are. Smartphones and the internet allowed the pipeline of intellectual junk food to find the vein into our very souls.

Stripped of individuality and embued with the ever-present need for societal/group acceptance, we work hard to stay current with the newest gossip regarding celebrities, boss fights in video games, conspiracy theories, dramas between reality TV personalities, or some other narratives designed by the powers that be in order to find the excited enthusiasm of others who are lost in this non-sensical trivia that does nothing to help define a person. In another age, it was the sharing of anticipated weather conditions or who was getting married in the community that held the glue of being present in one’s surroundings. Today, we must be atop the news of Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian dating, the verdict regarding a kid killing demonstrators with an AR-15-style weapon, the release date of the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, or the sexual orientation of a Marvel Universe character.

So, should we all be intellectuals? Not in the least, but one cannot be an authentic individual if they are merely a clone, fractionally different from those around them. Just as there are not a billion people on earth having conversations regarding deconstructionist ideas from Jacques Derrida, there shouldn’t be a billion people discussing the merits of a Korean TV show that snuffs out the life of those trying to escape crushing debt as is found in Squid Game.

According to Google, there are more than 135,00,000 million books written that they know of. Obviously, not all of them are in English, but even if only 1% of those were in English, it would relate to a boatload of books read by Americans with a million different stories to share. But, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), only about half of American adults can read a book at an 8th-grade level. Well, that means there are only about 130 million Americans who can reasonably be expected to be able to even read a book. Compare those who could read a book with how Squid Game reached 142 million households and that the average household measures in at about 2.5 members each, which could imply that 355 million people have watched this program. Possibly the best-selling science book of all time, A Brief History of Time, written by Stephen Hawking, sold over 10 million copies, but it took 33 years to reach that number, and you can easily see that we want our content to be easy to consume and about as mindless as can be.

Why does any of this matter? We are facing a crisis of civility, pandemic, and environmental chaos, but the societal cohesion and collective intelligence required to wrestle with what amounts to purely intellectual problems is sorely missing and likely cannot be remedied with any quick fixes as there’s no amount of money that can repair stupid. From the vapid heights of celebrity to the person shitting on our streets, we are living in the midst of a mediocrity brought about by our own idiotic doing, in large part due to our desire to be entertained to death. The strata of dumb we must climb out of to begin understanding our dilemma is likely insurmountable, so just throw away your signs, enjoy the rest of your nothingness, and realize you were never really at home within yourself. You, me, all of us, are already homeless, but at least we’ll be celebrated as the most uncaring, superficial species ever to wreck the good fortune we once had.