Things Will Change

JWise Life, Thoughts

John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

While I’m still enchanted as always with new technology, I’ve been reluctant to share that enthusiasm as it feels to me that our current obsession with hoisting ourselves upon the petard of stupidity requires the addressing of fundamentals such as education and acceptance of diversity as important precursors before we embark on explorations of complexity. But life is not just about the basics, and besides, who will I ever convince that the way forward and into the future is through the struggle with those things that force us to wrestle with our own ignorance?

In some people’s eyes, I’m old. With less than three years before I turn 60, I’m already eligible to be a member of AARP. This organization is the Association of American Retired Persons and one only needs to be 50 to join, and I, in fact, am a member. At first, I wasn’t very inclined to join as it felt like an acknowledgment of being old, which is anathema to being a participating member of mainstream America. Then, with some reluctance, I accepted that the discounts for hotels and rental cars were worth the price of admission. So, while I might be considered old by some, I’m not ready for a couch; we don’t even own one, nor do we own a TV. I’m not into golf, motorhomes, or grandchildren, as we don’t have those either. But I am still into the shit that blows my mind.

When I was younger and looking for the meaning of life and god, I turned to philosophy, science, sociology, music, art, technology, and various psychedelics to help illuminate a world that seemed hidden to me. That dark world was a place of curiosity that seemed shut off to the majority of people encountered. They wanted to mine what they knew and revel in what had been. They were archaic, empty shadows of the humans who, at one time, embraced the unknown and raced into adventures. Sure, we’d been to the poles, to the depths of the ocean, and touched the moon, but it felt like we’d been nowhere regarding our own minds. Today, I find confirmation of that bias all around me. Collectively, we are idiots.

This, though, isn’t supposed to be a lament of society’s direction and lack of focus or what propelled my curiosity. It is supposed to be a question of why, with so much opportunity to scale the heights of the impossible, are we, as a society, pandering to the lowest common denominators? The “LCD” humans that a famous politician once referred to as the “Undesirables” are all of a sudden dictating the rollback of progress, so their lack of intellectual gumption can earn a silver star, and they can feel good about their failure to evolve. Fuck that.

John, what’s triggering your anger? I recently received the August/September issue of AARP – The Magazine. Kevin Costner is on the cover with promises to talk about the American West, fatherhood, creativity, and old-fashioned values. There’s a story about pets, Carol Burnett, sunblock, home improvements, and the Geriatrics Crisis. Ah, you say they covered creativity in the issue? Nope, unless Kevin Costner being in a band and acting is inspiring others to explore their own creativity. This magazine is a window into older America, boring old shits fascinated with celebrity, spectator sports, TV, the Standard American Diet, their ailments from sitting around doing nothing, and occasionally being teased with the idea they too could master TikTok. But isn’t this all just a form of agitprop or maybe agedprop? What I mean is, isn’t this a kind of information conformity warfare meant to wrap people in the banality of comfort instead of agitating them to find new horizons?

Seven years ago, in 2013, the Oculus Rift DK1 was released of which I was a Kickstarter backer. By April 2014, I had started a small company to build a virtual world; it was known as Hypatia and was originally meant to be a casual learning environment for the exploration of the arts. Prior to my fulfilling a 20-year dream of virtual reality becoming a thing, I’d been diving deep into the world of video while learning Adobe’s Premiere and After Effects along with a host of plugins. This was a natural extension of my work with DSLRs that were all of a sudden sporting 1080p video recording capability that paired with nice lenses, were offering the kind of quality reserved for film. A revolution was at hand that would grow exponentially as smartphones embraced digital video, but I’d have to put that on hold as VR held greater sway over me. Virtual reality was where video, photographs, art, music, exploration, learning, meeting, chatting, and commerce could all converge and give me my own private SoHo or Left Bank in Paris. Well, I was too early, and the demand for computer “gaming” content that didn’t involve violence was too niche a market, and it was even smaller in a world where there were still very few VR headsets.

Along the way, I encountered more amazing software and started falling in love with Eurorack modular synthesizers. Crypto-currency was gaining traction, as was artificial intelligence, after more than 50 years in the lab and on the periphery of the sciences. Video was heading for mainstream adoption of 4k resolution, and Tesla’s Model S was going in the same direction in popular acceptance. The whole time these revolutions were happening it felt that there was a wider reluctance to fully embrace the changes these technologies were offering. It feels that these breakneck advances alienated so many people that by 2016, fear drove people to embrace populism to return the world to the way it was.

So here we are at the tail end of what will have been the Age of Fake. Fake concern, fake politics, fake worries, and fake people who snatched the Post Reality reigns of mass delusion and manipulated a frightened population into what is becoming a kind of mass suicide. Yes, COVID-19 was the catalyst for killing and maiming the old, but it is the policies of obfuscation that propelled the selfish to endanger themselves and everyone else. We are turning inward in a toxic war that smacks of Jim Jones’ efforts in Guyana that ended in 900 people taking their lives back in 1978; was that a dress rehearsal for 2021?

How in the world is this blog entry about my love of technology after dumping all this spleen on the reader? We need to course-correct this ship and move into the Post-Fake era of Super Enlightenment, and that requires all the tools of technological discovery that humanity can throw at our problems. From the environment, viruses, ignorance, poverty, racism, social and economic imbalances, war, and all the other malaise that threatens us and the other life that shares our planet, we humans must lead a charge of advancement or hope that far worse forms of plague are able to stop this reckless species. I, for one, want to see us do good and stop or at least slow down our slip into the abyss.

Shifting Routines

JWise Thoughts

John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

There have been moments when I thought I needed to get out, that my routine might slip into the overbearingly mundane and lead me into boredom. This plague situation, that demanded I stay home, stopped my wandering, as it has for so many others on our planet. In this confinement, I’ve lamented how restricted I feel at times, like the proverbial hamster on the treadmill. If only I could return to wandering, I wouldn’t feel so constrained, goes my thinking.

I’m at the point where I can see that the freedom to go where I wanted was simply a kind of illusion. My perception had me believing that the larger breadth of where I moved about was key to my happiness and that being at home was to be loathed. The reality is that my typical exploits were essentially no different than the moments I’m now living through. So, what changed? I stopped driving various and alternating streets I relied on to mix up the routine and was easily able to choose different locations where I’d shop, have coffee, eat breakfast, go to lunch, and share dinner with Caroline.

Now that I look at it, I was using the car to vary my direction and destination to prevent myself from seeing just how routine those actions were. In reality, I was on a quite similar treadmill built on my own delusion. I still have breakfast, coffee, lunch, and dinner, and, with less frequency, I go shopping. Without all the driving to add variety to my routine. In this sense, I was trying to avoid what Blaise Pascal had famously written back in 1654: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Yet, it is me sitting alone that brings me some of my greatest joy when I’m writing.

If I’m honest with myself, I must admit that aside from vacations and weekend getaways, my life was operating on well-worn paths that were just as plied as the smaller boundary our legs limit us to these days. So I must reconcile that my life, in fact, is not restricted at all but profoundly enhanced, aside from the vacation thing, as I now have more quiet time to spend in a room exploring my thoughts.

How else is it better? Caroline and I have been eating healthier for the past five months than during the previous 30 years. We cook at home, and besides bottled pasta sauce on our spaghetti squash, use nearly no processed foods. I even make my own cereal and vanilla extract, while Caroline has taken to baking various types of bread using dark rye, whole wheat, and even rye chops. We are spending an inordinate amount of time together compared to any other moment in our long relationship, and I can honestly proclaim that we are both incredibly happy about this aspect of being at home. Oh, in addition to the diminished ability to travel, our face-to-face social life with others obviously took a big hit, which is certainly a negative.

All-in-all, though, there is a silver lining to us being dragged out of the rat race, and that is we have this opportunity to explore how and why we are doing what we are now doing, and we are asking ourselves if the way we were living before actually had an advantage over our current situation. The longer this goes on, I think others will start to explore these questions on deeper levels and may also come to the conclusion that our time with ourselves and immediate loved ones is a kind of luxury that, in a different age was the norm.

Of course, this is nothing new as the existentialists were addressing these issues for the past 160 years or so, but now the concept is moving further out of the halls of academia and into our living rooms as the average person finds greater time to reconsider the purpose of things. Kierkegaard started the conversation about the futility of existence back in the mid-19th century, which died in 1960 with Sartre, coinciding with our graduation out of the post-World War II enlightenment, where social issues and civil liberties moved to center stage. The decline of education started around that time, initiated by those who wanted to contain dissent by effectively changing the conversation away from asking how and why to one of quiet pacification and finding meaning through consumption instead of exploring knowledge.

For 50 years, we’ve put the evolution of the mind on hold while we chased the dream of the 1% that understood that collecting ten cents each from 5 billion consumers who needed a pair of shoes or a VCR to be happy was better than trying to corral 200 million people who thought they desired equality. Now we are face-to-face with the realization that we’ve neglected a social and civil society which also means a ruling class grew ever more distant from fair governance. Our sense of community was replaced with fierce individualism as greed became our god. In this environment, we are now poles apart and angry with each other.

I have to wonder how many others are in this boat and are uncertain about where their happiness is and if this new existence can deliver the quality of life, they thought they were experiencing before. Then, once this new routine has been normalized and we are accustomed to making the majority of our meals, working from home, having our children learn online, and coming to rely on more online shopping, will we face the way things had been with dread should they threaten a return? Even after adjusting to these life-changing conditions, we still have to reckon with our dysfunctional government and education system that, at least for now, takes a back seat to our survival.

So, I don’t know how life can go back, but then again, there are those who are not adapting at all and are insistent that they will not budge from the routines in which they’ve grown crusty. But just because there is a plurality of a population resistant to change and their angst is being exploited by a media hungry for drama and a government desiring a fixed status quo, this hopefully won’t mean they are able to put the breaks on our next giant leap forward. Regarding my own personal leap forward, I still cannot see a clear path ahead, so I’ll just continue to plod along on this road of discovery as I try to sit quietly in my room while the plague rages on outside.

Beans – Cuban Rice & Beans

JWise Food

Cuban Rice and Beans

This was not what we were expecting as our first experience with the Cuban staple of rice & beans. While we enjoyed the subtle flavors of the dish, the consistency was similar to a porridge or congee. This certainly demands that we explore other recipes for the same dish as we feel there must be other substantially different variations of the ubiquitous meal. My version was a bit soupy as I never cross-referenced a photo to compare what I was cooking and the recipe was found over a month ago, so I had no recollection of what it was supposed to look like. No matter, the essential flavors were there but while writing this I checked on other preparations of Cuban rice & beans and I was pretty much in line with the first half-dozen recipes I looked at. Some recipes call for a splash of apple cider vinegar, many suggest adding some cilantro but one, in particular, suggested serving this with braised pork with mojo sauce, another Cuban favorite. This was the 10th bean dish in my Beanistan series.

Beans – Porotos Granados

JWise Food

Porotos Granados

How much beautiful food photography is actually found in the dishes and setting? Every time I take these close-ups of meals I’m making there’s something not exactly appealing about them. Just as I’m writing this I figured it out. When we are traveling and I take extreme close-ups of our faces when we are at some beautiful location, you’ll only see the pores and blemishes of my skin, not the ocean, forest, or mountains around me or Caroline next to me. We gain the context of being at an iconic place when we see the bigger picture. When ingredients are photographed as a bunch of elements of a recipe it is not a dish of food, it must be contextualized with the props that we associate with how we’ll approach the dish when we eat it. This feels so obvious now that I’ve wondered about it for a second but the first photo I took of my porotos Granados looked horrible.

Porotos Granados is a bean dish from Chile. The main ingredients are cranberry beans, butternut squash, fresh corn, tomato, onion, garlic, and marjoram. This is our 9th bean dish since I announced our culinary journey to Beanistan back on June 23rd and with 29 varieties of beans still in our pantry, we are far from completing our travels into the world of beans. I can’t tell you how these turned out as I only scooped a small portion from the crockpot for the sake of taking this photo. They remain simmering until dinner time. Then, before you know it, the late afternoon rolls around and those lamb chops that have been marinating all day in rosemary, garlic, lemon rind, and olive oil are on their way to the grill. Paired with the beans we are once again astonished at our good fortune to be eating so well, staying healthy, and enjoying our time.

Bean verdict? These are brilliant and will certainly be on our menu plan again in the future. Caroline is thinking they’d also be nice with some andouille sausage while I was thinking maybe some Filipino longganisa.

Nope and Nope

JWise Travels

Kirkland, Arizona

Nice day for a drive, we thought, nope. A wonderful day to visit a yarn store in Prescott, Arizona, nope. Great day to have confidence in my fellow American, nope.

Well, the drive was okay, but we were gone for six hours, and besides making headway into Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and having a nice lunch, we did not accomplish what we set out to do. Our intention was for Caroline to support the shop in Prescott, where she bought her loom, but their laissez-faire regard for having customers or their staff wear masks had us walk up to the door and turn around. With seven people in this small shop and six of them not wearing masks, we were not about to toss off five months of vigilance in order to spend money. So we left.

We took the scenic route this morning, heading west for a visit to this city north of us. Through Wickenburg, Congress, Yarnell, over to Kirkland, and past Skull Valley, we entered Prescott from the west side. First off, the traffic on this normally quiet road was heavy, not quite traffic jam heavy, but enough that impatience had a lot of drivers speeding over solid yellow lines in curves to race past the six cars in front of us. I guess this is what is being talked about when people are checking out the local area. Well, we did a lot of this in years past, so now, with this kind of traffic, the slow meander on the back roads loses much of its former appeal.

Prescott could be considered a small town in a nearly rural area, although, until 1899, it was the Arizona state capitol. That these out-of-the-way places have been missing out on the pandemic shows in the cavalier attitude of the people living there regarding the need to wear masks. As we stood outside the yarn shop, considering our options, I noticed what seemed to be more than half of the people heading into shops not wearing masks. Leaving the plaza with a serious amount of disappointment and anger at myself for not just “dealing” with it and going shopping after our two-hour drive, we went for lunch. We called our order in from the parking lot and waited 10 minutes for it to come up. Sitting there watching others, I was again wondering: where are the masks?

While here in Phoenix, I still see the reduced traffic, and the number of people at our local stores still seems light; up north of us, it looks like business as usual. A popular joint on the side of the highway in Black Canyon City was packed if the number of cars was a valid indicator, plague or not, people gonna have their pie. Once we were back in Phoenix, there was a pop-up “Trump 2020” tent hawking propaganda in the parking lot of a strip club, and while the two seem to go together, I can’t help but think that the association diminishes the reputation of such a place.

Mind of the Rabbit

JWise Life

Rabbit

I watch the rabbit, and it watches me. He or she is a small bunny sitting motionless about 10 feet away. It just stares while not moving a hair. But I’m only in a small fraction of its vision with that one dark black eye on the right side of its head pointing at me. What does it see with the eye I cannot see? What does it think while it watches the potential threat that wasn’t so threatening that, on my approach it held its ground?

I’ve seen this rabbit before, or at least I think it is the same one. It’s likely seen me more times than that as it maintains its stealthy position low to the ground and often behind bushes. Initially, I thought the rabbit somehow missed seeing me walk up to it and that I’d startle it to run away in just a second, but instead, it seemed to track me with that one dark eye. Maybe it knows I’m a predator as it sees this creature with two eyes trained on it while it has an eye on the other side of its head to maintain maximum coverage of everything around it. If I’m a predator and it runs, maybe I’ll give chase? Strange how it’s almost blind to what’s in front of it, but what need is there to see your food when staring at it might make you food for someone else. So there we are two creatures on two different planes of consciousness, just looking at each other.

I’m out on my walk and have nothing better to do than stand here and stare. Apparently, the rabbit is feeling likewise. It’s obviously not only looking out for food or a mate, as it has time for this encounter. Then I start wondering, how is this other creature seeing me? What is going through its mind? I know I’m supposed to believe that the rabbit is only operating on an instinctual machine-like mechanism and any other desire of me to imbue it with anything else risks anthropomorphizing it. But how can I be certain that there isn’t a kind of joy when the rabbit plays with another rabbit, or maybe it enjoys a type of weather more than another? Is there any gratification when finding a favorite food?

I wonder if, as we as a species become more proficient at electronically reading our own minds. we’ll be able to turn that technology on animals at some point and see what they are thinking? Could we handle their thoughts? What if thoughts and feelings among the various species were as complex as our own, but we’d discounted their potential intelligence due to the lack of having an opposable thumb? Would we enjoy knowing their fear of us? Are we their COVID-19? Are we the apex virus? What exactly is our intention of taking our species to other planets, and how will the DNA we carry alter those places and species that might be encountered? Do we ever begin to understand the larger arc of group-think driving humanity and what our ultimate intentions really are? Maybe our ideas of benevolence are a self-deception that only other species can really see.

Later, on my afternoon walk under the sweltering sun that boils the air to a languid 108 degrees of Fahrenheit hell, the rabbits are nowhere to be seen. Few birds are out and about; even the lizards are taking a siesta. They seem to be taking shelter from the heat; only the two-legged super predator is stalking the environment, in the form of myself. Maybe they want to venture out, but we’ve controlled their landscape and rationed resources, so with concrete, asphalt, and limited plant cover, they must rest from the struggle to move within our maze.

On the other hand, maybe they are just chilling out. Just as we move indoors to find comfort from the scorching sun, could they be in their burrows and nests, snuggling with their family and celebrating that the morning’s search for food was successful? We can’t know their life as we barely know our own. We go about much of what we do as a response to conditioning and the need to satisfy a whim, often induced by clever marketing that convinces us to head out for that drive-thru to collect a coffee or a Big Mac. How many things do we do over the course of the day as a kind of automatic routine that could be seen as being from a dumb instinctual animal?

When we are thinking about nothing in particular and our thoughts are wandering over a landscape with an uncritical eye, are we experiencing the mind of the rabbit? I’d like to say this phenomenon of the quiet brain is a new artifact of this older person carrying it around, as I do have distinct memories of a racket of thought that seemingly never shut off when I was younger. Strangely enough, this former version of John who certainly lends his observations and experiences to the current John, is nonetheless a wholly different person I can no longer reconnect with. It’s almost as though I see myself from the past with a single dark eye from one side of my head, and I’m only in the peripheral vision while the majority of my attention is taken up by the other 98% of what I currently see. Maybe we are not so different from the rabbit.