John Wise

How long has it been since I dove deeper or, should I say, further into my mind? Aside from my expeditions into nature, which has its own psychedelic traits that can be witnessed through the filter of understanding the multi-dimensionality of our existence, it’s been more than 20 years since I peered behind the veil with the help of other complex substances. Sixteen years ago today, I started this blog with the hope of improving my writing skills, and while this entry will exceed the meager nine words I managed to include with a photo of a banana split back on that day, I have no sense of certainty that what I share has any more import or impact regarding what intention I might believe I have to give readers.

The photos that have accompanied these missives offer more than 10,000 glimpses into what our eyes have seen during the intervening years. Impressions of countless experiences had over those 5,844 days are laid out with all of the bias I carry within me to portray the lives of Caroline and myself. Throughout this time and particularly tapping into one specific date, November 19, 1993, there has been one constant in my life, and it has always been featured prominently here on JohnWise.com. Before I get to that, let’s check off the not-so-blunt message of what I hope comes across: love. It feels awkward to write about the generalized idea of love instead of my love for my wife, but that was just what I took from that date I just referenced, and it’s reflected in the allusion to something that has always been on my blog.

Well, that’s a complicated matter to just blurt out here on this page and shouldn’t be reduced to some singular all-important moment. Little did I understand as a child feeling unloved that the experience would put me on a journey looking at every externality for it to be revealed. I couldn’t comprehend as a boy, a teen, or a young adult that my curiosity was a reflection of where love sprang from. I believed it was something offered to you and nurtured by others, such as my mother, father, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. The problem was that they all were in my life just temporarily. In first grade, I was traumatized when I was told I’d never see the nun again who had been my teacher because I was going to live with my father. At this time, I can’t say I had a solid idea of what a family was; as I was shuttled between two sets of grandparents and various aunts and uncles, all I knew was that someone else besides my mother and father would be caring for me and my sister, until that day my mother arranged to have us sent to California where my father was living. Let’s allow that to suffice as enough background info about why I sought love from others; there was never a constant in my life reassuring me of my value.

As I grew older and felt more isolated, I wanted to learn more about what I didn’t yet know. I read, explored, and found myself more and more alone. The more I read, and the further I went from home, I learned that we are cursed to wander alone. Sure, some found God and insisted that this guidance was the panacea of heavenly love that moved their lives out of the tempest, but I found that to be some self-reassuring pap that likely fit a candy-coated perception of what life was supposed to be like. The life I saw on Skid-Row in downtown Los Angeles when I was 13-15 wandering around with my camera was raw, smelled of rot, tended to be crazy, and was visceral. This was a mirror of my life in the suburbs of West Covina, where life was unreal, smelled of coffee and cigarettes, was packed full of lies, and pretended to be normal. J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs had greater insights into truths and didn’t lie about the reality of the sad situation we thought was modernity. You gave in to carnal curiosity and masked the pain of individuality with drugs, alcohol, and escapism. That was the truth.

In this dystopian narcissism of negativity, I could validate my own self-loathing as the natural product of a society that preferred conformity at all costs and was ready to hand out meds to deal with the consequences of depression from living lies. Through these troubled years, I never lost my passion for wandering both physically and intellectually. What I didn’t understand was that by maintaining this curiosity, I was nurturing a latent kernel of love that was within me. I could not see anything that resembled passion from within me. The world was dark, tragic, and shitting on itself.

But deep down, I was still pursuing the dreams of discovery and invention I had as a small child while others in their works of literature were sharing their own with me. I was collecting moments through my experiences no matter how tragic and lonely, and I traveled from author to author and from city to city, first on my bicycle, starting when I was about 11, and moving to the bus system when I hit 13 before my first car offered me even more potential. It was right there in my dreams, moments, and travels though I couldn’t find anything other than mounting frustration that life was futile and needed something to blunt the pain. How could I have known that what I was trying to find was love?

Adulthood and the creep of responsibility brought me into the world of bills and a need for a steady income like everyone else. In dead-end jobs for dropouts, there were only more grim, broken souls surviving in anguish, and so I escaped to the worlds of fashion, architecture, and consumption. My low pay allowed me to buy some nice clothes with designer labels, read Architectural Digest, and dream about an extravagant home that might one day be mine. The crap beaters I drove were good enough as a new car felt as far away as owning a house. I still wasn’t happy, I wasn’t loved, nor did I know what I ultimately wanted. So I read and started to create art, except now I was always high or drunk. I felt like a real American.

No, I didn’t. I’ve never felt that other than when I was in 5th grade and dreamt of being famous like Joe Namath of the New York Jets. I felt lost and withdrawn. Something was missing, and that something had to be the love of others. If only I were loved, I’d be complete. What a farce, but how could a young man weened on the banality of the 1970s have an idea of what sense anything made? So I kept on reading. How come I couldn’t see that curiosity was right there at the core of self-love? It was because love had to come from others, not yourself. This, though presented a conundrum because how could I love myself if I was so weird, alien, foreign to my peers? You might rightfully ask, why would you have those ideas? Ask any nerd rejected by schoolmates how this happens, as it is the warlike nature of our culture to reject that which is different.

Okay, time to cut to the chase. On November 19, 1993, after thirty years of chasing my dreams, creating moments, and traveling to explore my world, I encountered an answer to my question of, “What’s this all about?” It’s about love. Everything that arises out of curiosity and exploration is about love. When those things die, we go to war. We go to war against ourselves, and as a society, we go to war against those we want to blame for stealing our potential. On November 20th, 1993, I was no longer at war with myself.

I was certainly in conflict regarding this about-face, as instant enlightenment is never truly instant. First, you must wash away the comfort of sense certainty that narcissism is a great companion. Secondly, you have to learn to live with the ugly contradiction that you were probably wrong about much of what you thought was right. Next, you have to learn that everything leading up to this moment was about satisfying something deep within; it was about loving yourself.

This is where Dreams, Moments, Travels come into the picture. That is precisely the thing that has never changed on this blog. Emblazoned across the top of the home page is just that: Dreams, Moments, Travels. There is a deeper meaning though, that relates to two things: 1. the date from 1993 I referenced at the top of this entry and, 2. and the title itself. Should you realize what I hid in plain sight for the past 16 years, you’ll come to understand what I’ve been trying to convey since then.

So why now? I’m tired of war and hate. We are a miserable wretch of a society that is in dire need of reinventing itself and finding the impulse of what drove our love before we found ourselves rejected for our individuality. We are creators and dreamers who relegated our most precious traits in order to buy popularity in a futile game of fear. It’s time for society to meet the machine elves, trip balls, and explore the far recesses where we might find a hint of what it means to love. Happy New Year.

It’s been 60 days since I last sat in a coffee shop, and here I am, stupidly taking up a spot at a table, knowing full well that Arizona is experiencing a COVID-19-related death every 20 minutes or 74 per day. Back in May, I launched into full-blown alarm when we were witnessing deaths hit almost 1 per hour or about 20 per day. Now, seven months later, South Korea is reporting a spike with about 17 deaths per day, while here in Arizona, we are playing like this is somehow normal. Has anyone else noticed that Arizona’s population is a measly 7 million compared to South Korea, with 52 million? Jeezus Christ, our population is nearly eight times smaller, yet our death rate is almost five times higher; what gives?

Now that I’ve typed this onto my page, I have to question why I am out in public, masked or not. Not wanting to be at home alone doesn’t seem like an adequate reason. I should stop and consider that the people that work here have not had issues and yet they deal with these people around them nearly every day. I shouldn’t panic, but there’s a part of me that wants to run right out of here back to the safety of home.

Looking at the calendar, I see that Caroline and I have been at this new way of life for 291 days now, and while the vaccine is finally being administered, it feels like we are still years away from whatever we call normal at some future date. We’ll certainly be entering 2021 under pandemic circumstances, presidential leadership uncertainty, and a looming sense that all is not well in the hearts and minds of far too many people on our planet.

I should admit a kind of defeat in that our vacation to Oregon that ended 30 days ago only supplied a month-long reprieve from the overwhelming concern that has been with me since January. In only about 30 hours, we’ll enter a new year, but the knife’s edge of irresponsibility and dangerous narcissism looms large in a way that I feel we are collectively committing suicide.

Intellectual death is a slow and cumbersome process where rationality starts to feel like self-delusional assumed intelligence and has me questioning just what Kool-Aid I have drunk that gives me the right to feel that many around me are clothed in a blanket of crazy. What a sad place to be after all the evolution our species has been through.

There is much to be thankful for, such as love, companionship, food, shelter, sharing, learning, and even the occasional traveling. Curiosity and exploration are still alive and well in us, even if not always well-disciplined. Recently, during a 5-day fast, I fell into a pit of Korean cooking tutorials and finally learned that the side dishes I enjoy with my Korean BBQ are called Banchan. I now have 24 recipes to prepare on the docket, including a few that rely on some exotic-to-me dried veggies such as aster, bellflower, thistle, Deoduckchwi, Daraesun, and Gosari, which is also known as fern bracken and might just be fiddlehead fern (which we’ve had before but not the Korean version).

Regular readers likely already saw that we are hopefully going white water rafting this summer, and if the situation around vaccines and the proof of having one gets to the point where we can travel internationally, we’ll aim for a December trip to Europe. If we don’t maintain a dream or two and figure out how to expand our exploration of life, I feel that we’ll be inching closer to a kind of fatal exit. I’m not ready to give up on aspirations of finding new adventures in this life, even while I feel a certain amount of collapse happening all around me. Oh, how I wish this sense of gloom was just my perception because then I could feel justified in visiting a doctor to prescribe something to keep the darkness away, but I am resigned to the knowledge that we are collectively losing our direction, and no pill in the world will turn on blinders to that ugly situation.

I can’t say I like the tone of this blog post, but then how does one write about suicide and not swirl around the bowl of darkness? Leave things on a hopeful note, I suppose? There’s enough hope shown above, and then again, why shouldn’t this writing session end on a similar grim note as our year is about to?

I was reading an article titled The Scars of Democracy from The Nation this morning. It was about Theodor Adorno, whose writing I had my first encounter in or around 1986. Back then, I was voraciously reading everything I could get my eyes on that was dealing with ideas of the “Outsider.” From Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to Bertrand Russel, Wilhelm Reich, and Elias Canetti, I was joined at the hip to the British Book Shop in Frankfurt, Germany, my lifeline to English translations of books I’d never heard of. One of the titles I picked up was Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This was my introduction to critical thinking by people relatively modern in my view. From that book, I first learned about Alexis de Tocqueville and his pivotal work Democracy in America.

Adaptation, forward movement, harnessing new paradigms, and willingness to change were what I took from Tocqueville as he explored the young United States in 1831. In The Nation’s article about Adorno, the words “…embrace the democratic ideals of self-criticism, education, and enlightenment” grabbed my attention and triggered some old memories. One thing led to another, and in a moment, I was once again thinking of The Outsider by Colin Wilson. Years before my encounter with German Philosophy, I learned of this author and his seminal thoughts that I felt pegged my feelings of societal abandonment due to my artistic, literary, and musical interests. During the intervening 40 years since this journey of the mind began, I’ve thought time and again about the bridge between the outsider and the conformist masses.

It seemed to me that acquiring knowledge was the only path of exploration in a world already found. As I sought out answers to what life might be about, I constantly returned to the question of how one cultivates curiosity. How will others search for new possibilities when conformity is dictating that society shares the same love of a narrow set of cultural paradigms that appear to limit what it means to be a citizen of a particular city, state, or country? The article I was reading this morning dealt with a talk Adorno gave in Vienna back in 1967, in which he spoke about the rise of fascism. Naturally, I was thinking of our own recent encounter with populism. I had to stop and wonder about how ineffective I’ve been in communicating a solution to the oppression brought about by intolerance. By bullying those not like the majority, we demand that the potential outsider join ranks or suffer isolation; I chose isolation. But I still believe that the only way forward for a society is to gather around progress and accept the bitter pill of change.

To that end, I’ve tried to refine my skills in writing to obviously mixed results. Six years ago, I embarked on creating a virtual world called Hypatia that was intended to offer those without the means to travel far and who lived in situations where museums, theaters, and concerts were difficult to attend a place in which they could explore the arts, literature, and creativity in general. Personal expression outside of mass culture was my intention; sadly, the desire to learn from the unknown has been squashed to some extent here in the United States. Parents are no longer interested in their children taking different paths in life as they only see economic security with a high-paying job as a future for their offspring. Parents trying to dictate the ambition of a generation to conform have produced kids and young adults who are confused about identity and, instead of marching into the possibilities of expressing one’s self, are more interested in mimicry of influencers who make life look exciting and purposeful. What they are failing to grasp is that those very same influencers are often those who are exploring new possibilities in a digital economy that is still evolving. The VR world I sought to bring into being was meant as a stage for those at risk of becoming followers to shine in their own right.

In 2016, circumstances on our political stage changed the direction I hoped we might be going. Instead of seizing the tools of sharing and learning, populist dogma dragged us to a halt with an appeal to all people who were losing their grip on control of their own lives. By whipping such a large segment of our population into a frenzy about the “Takeover,” the politicians and media who energized this circus were still profiting, and so any thoughts about democracy were placed in a holding pattern until we determined which way the wind was blowing and how populism would play out in early 21st century America. The country where I was born abandoned its ideals of self-criticism, education, and enlightenment. Instead, we embraced fear, hostility, and blame that changes brought by others were responsible for our alienation from prosperity or the perceived threat from lifestyles and cultures that didn’t mesh with ours.

Our country was founded on those very principles of different people coming from other continents, religions, ethnicities, and cultures in order to find a place in a wide-open land where horizons were broad, and self-realization was to be found in carving out your spot in the sun. In our technological rapidly evolving world of today, it is difficult to keep up with the pace of change, and when that change was rising on all fronts, from sexuality, job security, entertainment, music, food, and education, to ever-increasing diversity, some of our population lost their grounding in hope. Unable to adapt due to the poor distribution of financial resources, the trapped were only becoming squeezed between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Even those who are financially well off, which often means their education is lending itself to better opportunities, they too felt trapped by a culture of influencers, viral videos, music, fashion, and even the change in transportation to feel that they understood the world around them.

Humanity has always been changed by the need for adaptation to shifting currents. The turn to populism, a.k.a. fascism, is a way to dial back progress and, for a moment, freeze society in the familiar, even if it requires violence to do so. Today, we stand on the precipice, in danger of falling into the abyss of hatred due to our fear, and the opportunity to accept the outsider is more distant than ever. Intolerance is never the way forward and must always be atoned for, and while this message has been sifted into the minds of the few, it largely falls on deaf ears as to embrace change often is perceived as a dangerous step to embracing the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Far greater minds have had platforms that allowed them to reach a wide audience, and while my optimism has been slow to dwindle, I have to admit I see little hope that there’s an interest among our political and financial elites to see us drift away from the script of mediocrity, even at the risk of self-immolation.