John Wise

More random thoughts collected over the course of my stay in the San Diego area.

Trying to make the most of my time here I took an early morning drive down the coast from Solana Beach through Del Mar, Torrey Pines, into La Jolla, and I’m thoroughly unimpressed. Sure there’s the ocean, but not many places to park and get to the water. La Jolla is incredibly depressing unless you are white and wealthy and enjoy your time on the coast playing golf, shopping in expensive boutiques, needing a spa treatment, and really enjoying your whiteness where you can spend your time undisturbed having to see or listen to minorities.

Do you like your women talking in sing-song, high-pitched, infantile voices so the women they are talking with are fully aware of their mutual enthusiasm? Then La Jolla, like Santa Monica, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Scottsdale, Arizona, which is now mostly a suburb of Southern California, are places for you. I think this is the voice of, “OH my fucking god, we are so white, rich, and privileged; can you even like believe this?”

It took an interaction between a girl of about 12 years old and a woman nearing her 50s to understand the dynamic: it’s vanity. As these women are aging, they are hyper-self-aware, and by bringing these voices out, they actually sound younger than a prepubescent girl. When you listen to an exchange between a 7th grader and someone who is a little more than a decade away from retirement, and the child sounds more mature, there is a problem.

Since when did the baseball cap go from hiding male baldness to being a coverup for women who didn’t feel like washing their hair? Why do I even care? I suppose I have no good answer other than it’s one of my observations of how we humans change behaviors over time and how they are in contrast between races, economic groups, and countries. Am I biased in my views? Yes, I am, as I see many of these traits arising in us Americans out of our idiocy to be seen as more childlike. Why so hostile, John? If I’m surrounded by banality, at some point, it will rub off on me; hell, it probably already has, and I’m blind to just how stupid immersion in American culture has made me.

Pride on the verge of fanaticism for the city you live in is like cancer, where the mutating cells threaten to take over the body. We see the same attitude for the home sports teams, where disagreement about who is best can result in a violent exchange. Why should anyone need to defend a city or region, their favorite TV show, or the local baseball team? What is it that carries over from childhood into adulthood that breeds this kind of loyalty? I don’t begrudge people for being respectful of these things and finding what’s to be appreciated, but the anger they display when someone points out elements they find unpleasant can propel the person to start listing the multitude of reasons why where they are is perfect. The same goes for their television show or sports team should you utter that you don’t like either. The need to be rabid in the defense of anything beyond love and education is the domain of the child’s mind, where enthusiasm is a developing immature passion.

Yesterday while checking on the readability of something I drafted a couple of weeks ago, I came upon some advertising copy that pissed me off. This all started when I couldn’t quite follow what my original intent was in my own writing as I was a bit obtuse. After running the text through a readability computer, one of the indexes said my writing was at a 9th-grade level while another index on the same page said it required 15 years of education or a junior in university. Why the disparity? So, I looked up the differences between the Gunning Fox and Coleman Liau indexes, which led me to Readable.

I’m already using Grammarly for real-time feedback on where I flub commas, hyphens, and such, but every so often, I like checking the readability of something I wrote. I mostly do this because there are times I’m astonished that my vocabulary and curiosity allow me to write what I’m reading. Well, today, I was slapped in the face with a thought that hurt me. I’ve known for a long time that much of what is on television and in books is presented at a 5th-grade comprehension level. What I wasn’t ready for was the following advertising copy:

85% – The increase in the number of people who will finish reading your content if its readability is improved from grade 12 to grade 5.

Did I read that right? My writing will be “improved” if I dumb it down? My first thought was already dumbed down enough as in my head, I blurted out, “What the fuck?”

There’s a recurring theme here on JohnWise.com about mediocrity where I’m far too often venting my spleen about things I’m hostile towards, but this idea that the average person is no more literate than a 10-year-old galls me. Add to this my two examples above about women speaking like children and people, in general, having this hubristic pride where both emanate out of our immaturity, and I’m left a bit distraught.

San Diego is Arizona without the morning sun. Everyone seems to sing the same chorus, extolling how great it is to live in San Diego while commiserating with Phoenicians about how it’s too hot over in the desert. Well, I’m not seeing anyone on the streets of San Diego after about 10:00 or again before about 6:00. Everywhere I go is air-conditioned, and everywhere everyone else is traveling, they are doing so by car with their windows up.

For a week now, I’ve listened to people complain that it’s too cold out at 66 degrees or 19 Celsius at 8:00. When the mercury hits 68 (20c), things are perfect. During this time, the humidity is changing too, going from about 90% at 7:00 to 60% at noon while the temperature climbs up to 72 degrees or 22 Celsius. After this, as the heat of the day bears down on San Diegans and the temps climb to 80, it appears that everyone is hiding in something air-conditioned – just like people from Phoenix. There’s one big difference here, though: the humidity hovers between 40 and 60% and makes you sweat all the time.

So by historical averages, San Diego is too cold for the people that live here from November through May, but for the perfect month of July when they get nearly 7 hours of sunlight a day compared to Phoenix with 13 hours of blue skies, they bask in the joy after dealing with a 12 lane wide freeway that becomes a parking lot for a good part of the day.

Simple math tells you that most of the people living here are not on the beaches either. San Diego County has a full-time population of 3.3 million and annual tourism that draws in another 36 million. I’ve now walked some miles along the area’s beaches, and I can assure you that the density of visitors on the seashore is not overwhelming or indicative of locals utilizing their primary tourist attraction. For example, Memorial Day is the busiest day for the 70 miles of San Diego beaches, and back in 2016, 91,300 people spent Monday next to the ocean. So if we only count permanent residents and exclude tourists, just under 3% of the population that lives in San Diego visited the beach that day.

Well then, what is the main attraction? The potential to enjoy a lifestyle here when not at work, on a freeway, or competing for a parking spot near the beach when tourism is overwhelming the few spots allocated for cars? Are the palm trees waving in the ocean breeze seen through windows deluding residents into believing they are experiencing life outside of a car and their home? I guess being here to take advantage of someday is good enough.

The best BBQ in San Diego belongs to Phil’s BBQ; that’s a chain similar to Famous Dave’s and so after driving 30 minutes inland, I ended up walking right back out after learning everything is drenched in sweet barbecue sauce. How about a search for the best restaurants near me? When In-N-Out is in the top five, you know there’s nothing here for me. I’m near Mexico, so there must be some great Mexican joints out here, right? Not within five miles. So, fifteen minutes up the 15 freeway, I’m in old town Escondido, and the Guadalajaran place is reminiscent of Garduno’s in Scottsdale (Mexican food for old white people from the Midwest). Now I’m at La Tapatia, which I passed along the way, and I’m hoping that since it’s been here since 1937, it has earned its longevity. My fingers were crossed. Alas, mediocrity squashed my culinary dreams.

Thursday was a blur. Walk the dog. Make breakfast. Go for coffee. Write. Go for lunch. Walk the dog. Play with the synth. Go for coffee. Write. Eat. Walk the dog. Play with the synth. Watch a tutorial about the Blender addon Tissue and using Vertex Groups together with Shape Keys to morph a component along a surface. While I didn’t hit the beach today or achieve a serious amount of walking, I was successful in clearing a couple more blog drafts that were lingering longer than they should have been.

How short-sighted I feel sitting here in San Diego in a coffee shop instead of outside in the cool breeze of the offshore wind, making this place a mecca for visitors. The sun, though, does not care for my comfort as it tries to burn me and usually wins. I look out the window and know that I’m missing a relatively cool day where I could be next to the ocean, but my skin reminds me of how much I dislike the pain of being taken to a crispy state.

I could just as easily sit indoors in Phoenix, where at 110 degrees out there, I have good reason to escape the blistering temperature. So I feel guilty here that I’m giving away this opportunity to do all things outdoorsy. I try to justify part of this lethargy by running around under the sun with the fact that Caroline is not here with me right now, but that feels weak. I work at writing, so it might convince me that what I was able to capture of my thoughts will have had value in making up for anything that was lost.

Much of what people do for work is now fundamentally counterproductive to humanity’s progress. Work absolves people of personal responsibility in that many of our day-to-day options are predetermined by others thus encouraging people to not rely on themselves for what they’ll do with their day. At age six the conditioning process begins, and so what others want us to do becomes our priority. As this carries forward into our adult years, we are able to give nearly 10 hours a day over to the requirements that revolve around work, including travel time. There is little ambiguity about what one will do besides working towards fulfilling the objective of the employer. While the individual might make choices of how they will accomplish the tasks at hand, they need not concern themselves with their own education or self-entertainment during this large block of their waking hours.

Monday through Friday, most adults have, at best, about 5 hours to themselves, significantly less if they have children. Even children find their time is limited as they sleep on average about 10 hours per day. Then we add school and homework, and soon, even our young members of society are only able to find about 5 hours a day to themselves.

I see this conditioning as problematic for our societies as the average person is not focusing on how to continue their education, have productive hobbies, or spend their precious time developing new skills. The need for these abilities won’t typically develop unless a life or career-changing event demands it of us, such as losing a job, health issues, or retirement.

This is on my mind right now because I was recently confronting my own need to figure out a new path after three months of focusing on things outside of my routine. Returning to my routine or constructing a new plan, I initially felt overwhelmed by the choices in front of me. Where do I start if I want to interject new stuff?

The thing is, I’m not only interested in what I’ll do after work or this weekend because I need an idea about a larger arc, as in what I might be doing for the next 3, 6, or even 12 months. How will I allocate time to the areas I believe I’m interested in or that I can cultivate?

Most people, in an effort to escape from and relax due to the demands of work, opt for things like mindless time spent habituating social media, video games, or television. I refuse this path as it feels like the easiest choice in the world to make, with none of them requiring any effort.

Why is the effort one of my imperatives? I’m running out of time to discover more of who I am and what I’m capable of, just like everyone else. I’m not content to sit passively and observe what comes at me; I need to see and hear what I create emerge out of an ambition to discover.

When people steal your time, they’ve stolen the most valuable thing you own. Now that I better understand the brevity of life, I can see that I have been throwing away a thing I can never earn more of. I’m left stupefied by my naive belief that I was doing the right thing by offering so many unworthy people my true wealth, but such is the price for learning about others and ourselves.

Why is time so precious to me and apparently of little consequence to others? The answer is complex, multifaceted, and maybe too difficult to answer. For me, I believe it started with a love of books at a young age and how they brought me to other eras and places. I enjoyed lingering with people throughout history as they shared their stories with me. I wasn’t so much interested in my own moment as I was in the discovery of experiences that were imbued with mystery, drama, and the exploration of exotic locales as written about by people across time. Growing older, I started cherishing the stories that were coming out of my own experiences as the book of John was being written.

I explored more aspects of my relationship with time and how I could experience it. The more I knew about it, such as its limitations and how much of it I was allocated under the best of circumstances, I grew increasingly protective of this diminishing resource. This doesn’t help explain my assumption that many of the people around me don’t seem to hold time in such high esteem as I do, so I continue to ponder the larger questions of how time is of value to the rest of our species.

What’s of value is a broad, subjective question that incorporates the breadth of human needs, and while I recognize those complexities and personal choices, they all seem to circle back around to the one asset that’s at the core of it all: time. So again, why do others seem to me to be frittering away their time or at least acting oblivious to its incredible value?

One answer might be that they are locked in some form of perpetual adolescence in which time is still infinite. When time is limitless and forever, the desires we have are not from the past, nor are they in recognition of what lies in the future; they are the immediate needs and wants that should be satisfied in this very moment.

In my perception, time is elastically stretching back- and forward, dilating and contracting, dependent in part on whether we are in routine or finding novelty. The past is the foundation of my knowledge, and the future is the possibility of any of the potential I might be fortunate enough to acquire or exercise. My potential rests on the tools I bring to the present that allow me to sculpt tomorrow. If I sacrifice using my skills so I can put myself on equal footing with those who do not care about anything more than immediacy, then I feel that I’m throwing away the honoring of myself and the investment made to see what life is offering other than simple observation.

There is a danger of going forward with the expectations of others having acquired knowledge-driven insights, as the vast majority do not appear to care or think about things beyond their immediate needs or, at best, being able to determine if something is cool or not. The weight of awareness is upon the shoulders of those who live in the full embrace of time and who try to encounter others living similarly. We risk vulnerability when comparing knowledge if we are still naive or embarrassing the other if they are still early in their search for what illuminates the mind. The bank of knowledge is only cultivated through the acquiescence of time spent investing in oneself beyond the banality of entertainment and the engorgement of the ego on conquering life instead of winning its luxuries.

How many of my moments are used for setting up architectures for creating providence while I witness others go about trying to find the next intrusion of mindlessness to ward off their boredom? In my circular discussion, looking at my idea of normal and being witness to other’s ideas of normal, I wonder how they fail to understand that boredom arises out of a mind unable to have a conversation with itself? They are the architect of themselves but have relegated that responsibility to mass media without any regard for well-being as they are driven only by animalistic instinct. I, on the other hand, want to believe I’m building a tower to some kind of intellectual and cultural pinnacle, even when I’m simply contributing to others’ efforts to propel humanity forward.

What part of humanity cares as to why they exist, and for what purpose or have they given that responsibility over to religion? In regards to their flavor of piety, I don’t see that they are able to experience real devotion. Instead, they demonstrate a kind of moral superiority by paying lip service with their attendance at a church service for an hour a week. There is an assumption that those channeling the sermon have already done the heavy lifting thus absolving the congregation of the need to be truly holy or having to live conscientiously within the realm of awareness. They, in effect, choose to live outside of time.

Our opportunity for being is brief, and the time of existence with some minor form of purpose is even shorter due to childhood and the risk of dementia in later life. This is a double-edged sword where the dilemma of awareness might focus us on how little we will ever experience or be able to own regarding knowledge and the tools of how to use it. Not exploring this essence of being human leaves people emotionally and intellectually destitute while remaining vaguely aware of the void that can require some form of medication to cope with the empty space.

The perception of permanence is built out of ignorance. In the bigger scheme of things, there is no forever in nature. While rocks, suns, and the universe might seem eternal, they, too, are a temporary occurrence that evolves over time, coming in and out of existence. The only possible thing I can conceive of that might persist longer than any form of matter is time. So when we are only afforded the briefest of moments to encounter time and learn about ourselves while in it, why do we act as though it doesn’t matter? We understand that water, soil, air, and sunlight are requirements for life, though even those precious elements that support life are mostly taken for granted.

A paradigm shift in awareness would seem in order, but I can see the necessity of that having been a requirement for the past 50 years. We’ve been ignoring the larger questions that ask if we can turn a blind eye to that which is obvious, such as the environment, how will we open our minds to that which is as esoteric and nebulous a thing, such as time and knowledge?

This is Drake, the dog that resides with Ylva and Dion in Solana Beach, north of San Diego; he’s temporarily under my charge. The reality I anticipated coming over is different than what I’m experiencing, though. You see, Drake is 11 years old and a bit cantankerous. I get it; he has his routines, but what I didn’t anticipate was that he’d be whiny about Ylva and Dion up and disappearing.

Due to a bum knee, he fatigues fairly quickly, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to go out. We go for walks with gusto, though I learned early that as soon as he hits about a half-mile, his enthusiasm comes to a crawl, kind of like his speed. The more time I spend with him the more I’m learning about the nuances of how Drake travels. Once he poops, we are at the halfway mark, and I need to point him in the direction of home lest he overexerts himself. Sometimes, he’s not ready to go home and belligerently pulls me in the opposite direction, so I have to hold my ground until he comes around. Patience is on my side.

Drake normally poops three times a day, but currently only twice as he’s cut back on eating after his depression set in. He’s the master of controlled peeing, maintaining a reserve that ensures he’s able to pee on approximately 30 locations over the course of our half-mile walk. The first two days, Drake pooped in places that allowed easy cleanup of his droppings, but as he must have realized that Ylva and Dion were not coming back anytime soon, he started pooping on bushes and in flowers that required me to nearly scrape his turds out of other people’s plants.

My exercise in being the buddy of a big dog is leaving me wanting my independence back. I don’t just start the day and do what I want; there’s a big dog that requires me to get dressed and go where he wants to go, or he gets stubborn. Our walks take about 20 minutes. By midday, if I’ve been out a while, I feel I owe it to the dog to visit him and let him ease the pressure of his bladder and spend some time with him so he might break out of his sadness. Around dinner time, it’s time for another jaunt around the neighborhood. Finally, around 9:00 or 10:00, he and I go for a walk around the complex where he lives, and if I’m lucky, he’s out of poop by this time.

I’m guessing he’s acting aloof because he’s trying to reject me as his caretaker. When he sits near me, he walks up, looks me right in the face, and just as quickly turns around with his ass pointing at me now and sits down like I should rub his backside. There’s nothing cuddly about this giant white furball that is shedding hair like a sheep being shorn. He loses so much hair that I’m vacuuming the carpet every day.

So, what were my original expectations? My buddy dog and I would go to the beach and coffee shops where he’d just chill with me while I would write, basking in the sun on these cool coastal days in Southern California. Instead, Mr. Unhappy Gimp Dog shows me his ass with a good dose of a bad attitude.

There are moments he seems to be coming around, so there’s that, but in the meantime, I’m at his beck and call working on his schedule so he doesn’t get so angry as to shit on the carpet out of spite.

I’m learning that I’m not a dog person. Cats don’t require people to dedicate an hour a day to their exercise and waste elimination routines. Cats can be left alone for a few days as long as the food, water, and litter supplies are deep enough. Dogs are like children with all of the emotional shenanigans that accompany a toddler. I enjoy owning my spontaneity and being unaccountable to everyone but my wife for as long as I want or need.

I know the argument that dogs are a man’s best friend, but I’m not buying it. The dog is happy towards its caretaker when it wants something. I think the dog has trained humans to respond to its needs by showing it things that make the person jump to obeying the dog’s needs. Then people anthropomorphize the dog, believing the animal is acting in a humanlike way, which only works to endear the person more to obeying their dog. This feeling like a person is gaining the dog’s affection is a bizarre gap being filled by an animal when snuggling and playing with another human is missing. People should learn to love each other.