For 83 days, I’ve pretty much stayed within 3 miles of home, and over one 8-day period, I didn’t venture more than a mile from home. What I’m learning about this decreased mobility is that my imagination is starting to have profoundly quiet moments where I’m not feeling very motivated to delve into thinking. I’m beginning to wonder what the impact of experiencing the larger world outside of the overly familiar is for feeding my creativity. This then triggers the question: how do poverty and not having the means to explore further than your own neighborhood impact our critical and creative minds? Or, how does illness that limits mobility negatively impact our recovery and mental health?

I guess this is what others call boredom. Seriously, privileged me can honestly say I’ve not been bored in decades, but after this extended need to remove myself from the public, I’m starting to suffer the effects of not changing up my routine and getting out to gather new experiences. I can appreciate that there was enough momentum in my life that it’s taken me this long until these hints of boredom have started making themselves known, and I can’t say I want to be too quick to put it behind me. With all experiences, there are lessons to be discovered, and while there are fleeting moments of urgency to stem this creeping unease, I also feel obliged to see where it goes.

If my brain continues to draw blanks and I fail to find inspiration or motivation, does this defeat that part of my optimism that propels me to want to grasp in all directions? Hmm, this starts to sound like depression on the horizon, and that’s no Bueno.

Well, enough was enough, and so I ventured out. Went as far as Mekong Plaza nearly 30 miles away. I took my notebook along with the idea that if I found a relatively secluded place, I might try sitting down to work on this blog entry, but instead found the place crowded and experiencing a minor bout of agoraphobia. So, I grabbed a few things in the market, which was a challenge, too, due to how many people were shopping, and then headed over to In-N-Out Burger for some junk food therapy before going home. All of a sudden, home isn’t so boring, well maybe it is, but at least I’m happy to be back.

Back to this idea about mobility and the brain. I’d posit that when we move away from the familiar, inspiration strikes. If you are growing up in the inner city and your life is school and home, going to a club awakens your dreams. If you are in the countryside and visit a city, your perspective may be so shifted that upon returning home, your rural existence will have lost some of its charm. On the other hand, if you discover drugs and alcohol along the way, you could become lost in the numbness of complacency as you opt to stay home or at the bar, where your routine is dulled by the fog of inebriation.

So it would seem that if the stars align just right and you have access to a requisite amount of disposable income, along with the wherewithal to push yourself into new experiences, you may find yourself craving the novelty and making efforts to ensure you can continue to discover the part of life that inspires people to accomplish something extraordinary. But why is this the way I think it is? We are pattern recognition machines meant to wander through life trying to understand how things work, but when on a treadmill of a simple routine existence without much variation, our humanity is dulled, and we become addicted to our habits. In that addiction, we grow intolerant of those threatening to move us out of our comfort zone.

We have to move, we have to go places, and when we do, our mind goes with us and then wants more. But there’s a danger with this idea, as much of our culture is based on repetition that brings society to complacency. We are conditioned to watch the same sports, the same themes in movies, iterations on a theme regarding television and music, and frequent visits to our favorite restaurants. These habits are the filler for those times when we can’t go out to the lake, to France, or up the mountain. When we fully embrace our intellectual and physical mobility, strange things occur in us humans, our tolerance expands, our desire to try new things grows, and our need to seek out others who are also on a path of discovery becomes more important.

I’d venture to say that I want to believe that this is part of the spark of life, meaning we have an inherent need to get out. If we reach that station in life in which age or illness hamper our desire, we start to move towards giving up the ghost. If we are excited by what tomorrow might bring, a kind of zest drives us into that day, but if we dread the misery it could bring, we kill a little bit of ourselves.

This isn’t good enough to recognize this possible situation, what could a solution be? Obviously, we cannot all get on a plane and head into the many corners of the earth, nor can we all simultaneously set up camp in the national parks and hope to have a pleasant experience if we are surrounded by 1oos of thousands of people. We can sign up for a cooking class, try a new restaurant, go to a concert by a band from outside our country, join a book reading club, visit a guild to learn a craft or commit to doing any number of many things we’ve never done. Maybe there should be a self-help book for adding novelty to our lives on a regular basis. A one-year plan where the reader must choose from multiple choices of the things they’ll seek out over the course of the year and then commit to experiencing it.

Photo credit: unknown from a streaming video clip.

A counter-protest in Los Angeles brought out two idiots who thought themselves brave enough to dive into the sea of protesters to stand tall for MAGA. The look of fear of the man in the Trump 2020 hat and the officer who understands that this situation might go somewhere horrific shows me they are in a place I wouldn’t want to be. The other man seemed oblivious and almost carefree at times as he was being shoved around, as though a “Caped Super-Trumpman” was going to fly in to save the brethren. There were a number of black and white protesters who were doing their best to shield these two rubes, and then the camera cut, and I can’t find the outcome of how this played out. The bigger point that should be made is that this is the face of MAGA, scared white people thinking they need to fear the foreign horde. But the horde they fear is simply other Americans and people who don’t look like them. The face of racism is the face of cowardice to confront one’s own fears and biases they’ve CHOSEN and adopted!

With Trump and Barr calling protesters “Antifa and Far-Left Criminals,” they will only fuel the situation as it demonstrates to reasonable people the total disregard and lack of understanding of how tired black Americans are of being targets of social, legal, and economic injustice. Our national leadership, as it is, continues to perpetuate the idiocy of labeling and sorting in the effort to polarize a country where the only real interest is the accumulation of wealth. I don’t mean to imply that I eschew financial security, but I’m aware that most of everyone around me is living in catastrophic financial insecurity with a crippled education without the means to do anything to fix it. Empathy from the right would be a good starting point, except that human emotions are not found in the definition of a sociopath who strictly believes in the survival of the fittest.

Photo credit: Slate.

Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein wrote the following on Twitter about the headline above:

“This headline a) attributes agency for the violence and b) attributes it correctly, to police. Agency: violence is, by definition, intentional. We rarely describe certain things that are destructive on a wide scale (e.g., wildfires, earthquakes, epidemics) as “violent” — we generally understand that those kinds of things don’t have agency & can’t be held responsible. Police responsibility: power differentials tend to mean that police, *not* protesters, really set the tone of protests. Especially important to highlight the role police are playing in escalating violence right now since the protests are in response to police violence. That is – police violence is the ultimate cause in any case. Obligatory bad headline example: the AP’s top headline right now: “‘We’re sick of it’: Anger over police killings shatters U.S.” In this take, the ANGER is to blame — not the violence that led to the anger. Imagine, instead: “‘We’re sick of it’: Police killings shatter U.S.”

Photo credit: Chris Brann

I was anxious as America started self-isolating due to COVID-19, but the sense of urgency that arrives with the protests over the brutality of what it means to be black in America makes the virus seem a whole lot less threatening and urgent. At least with a virus, there is hope that spending billions of dollars will create the incentive to earn even more if a vaccine can be found. Trying to contain the hatred of white Americans has no financial upside, so why should the country spend billions to take the target off black Americans? It appears that sooner or later, people are going to have to remove the knee from the necks of the oppressed, just as Americans had to do with the British oppressors a couple of hundred years ago.

And then news of spreading curfews, staged pallets of bricks that could facilitate looting, mysteriously parked old police cars in hot zones that can be torched, and possible agent provocateurs working to inflame the entire situation have me thinking we are all becoming the victims of some incredibly strange gas-lighting designed for an outcome that for the moment is beyond my level of comprehension. Are we being consumed by madness?

On Monday, George Floyd was murdered. The officer who facilitated George’s early exit knelt on his neck for 8 minutes while the man told officers, “I can’t breathe.” When they were done, George was done breathing forever.

Just two or three weeks before this, a bunch of heavily armed white men entered the state capitol building in Michigan without incident. Nobody challenged, nobody dead, nothing but the joy of white privilege.

A few years ago, Native Americans from the Dakotas were forcibly removed from protesting, so economic interests were allowed to go forward unimpeded by the people who had concerns about how their lands were being used. The powers that rule are allowed to bask in their white privilege.

I come from white privilege and cannot begin to understand the sense of what people of color in the United States must live with and fear. Maybe the threat of COVID-19 crashing into our lives gives us the briefest peeks into the tension of what it’s like to be hunted by an invisible enemy. The difference to people of color is that the enemy is hiding amongst all of us white people, is ever-present, and has followed them their entire lives.

America is not ironing out some kinks in the fabric of democracy on the rough road to freedom; we are nuking the highway to happiness with our incredible stupidity regarding the racism that runs deep in the bones of the republic.

Humanity shut down the globe to try to save itself from a virus; I think it’s time for America to shut itself down again until we find the vaccine for racism. This toxic hate is being propagated from the President of our country on down. Just look at the very top left headline on Drudge Report today: Trump retweets a video saying, “The Only Good Democrat is a DEAD Democrat.”

There can be no mincing those words, there is no apology that can be offered when a person in power makes suggestions for a “Good” American to make dead the bad ones. There’s a ripple effect in this type of messaging that if you are hostile to people you see as invaders such as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and they fit the description of the “Bad” ones, then they become the enemy. American soldiers are taught to kill the enemy using this psychology, and now we have the top leader of our military identifying enemies every day, except they are fellow Americans.

The fake news media is the enemy, Hillary is the enemy, science is the enemy, China is the enemy, social media is the enemy, Amazon is the enemy, our allies in Europe are enemies, and now if you identify as a Democrat, you are the enemy.

We are a killer virus where hate of the other is the molecule that infects our sick minds. Sad, but there is likely no cure, no vaccine, no hope that the rage that is being propagated by the leader of the United States is going to just go away.

There are no hopes and prayers and no apology that will bring George Floyd back to life. All of us white people are complicit in George’s death because we don’t hold anyone accountable. We’d better hope that the people of color on this planet don’t see the need to put their knees on our necks until we are pleading for our lives with, “I can’t breathe.”

Give me all the time I need to find my way to what I’m seeking, and you’ll have to offer me infinity. I barely know my mind since many of the skills I’ve explored came and went as they evolved to grow into something else once I had become acquainted with them. The constraints on my day are not rigid other than the limitations imposed by the mechanics that life demands. I must eat, defecate, and sleep, but besides that, I’m allowed to surf the boundaries of my knowledge. I don’t mean to deny the luxury of living comfortably in the West while being afforded the opportunity to dance with myself. I need not struggle to find food and shelter but draw my own map of where I want to take myself.

Time is the elastic perception of how we relate to a world and its constraints. When we rush into the next best thing, we destroy our ability to gaze patiently into the infinite. To slow down the passage of time, we must master the boring, allowing ourselves to slip into our unfolding reality without the struggle of an adolescent mind demanding certainty and immediate knowledge. That old saying, “Patience is a virtue,” is key to living a long life, even if it might otherwise be considered short.

Then, in a moment, I lose track of time in some form of novelty where the gravity of information breaks time, and my brain must bring its full focus to bear. This typically occurs when I’m dealing with a subject or situation that I wrap my undivided attention around to comprehend what’s what. On the other hand, the familiar panders to our lazy nature, and this is where people see time accelerate. The habituated, redundant, and well-known does not allow the structures of perception to be stretched, and time is simply lost.

I’ll share two examples of time dilation. First, today, I saw the announcement that a bunch of DSP engineers would be streaming a talk about coding plugins focusing on audio effects. One of the speakers was Sean Costello of Valhalla DSP who I’m familiar with as I own a couple of his VSTs for reverb and delay. It was through Sean’s Tweet that I learned of the “Drunk DSP” Zoom talk, but that was about the extent of my knowledge of what might be streamed. This talk was for serious nerds interested in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and the banter between engineers from Eventide, Ableton, Valhalla, Neural DSP, Newfangled Audio, and Edinburgh University. They discussed the merits of learning C++ versus Python. Universities teach Python but that is not used for creating products. The professor from Edinburgh explained they want to teach the physics of sound theory, not how to make products. Environments for prototyping, such as the JULIA high-performance language, which is supposed to be great for visualization and complex coding situations that might also require parallel processing, were spoken of. Another engineer touched on Bayesian inference, which is a statistical theorem looking at learning from experience for machines. And finally a short discussion about Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), where DFTs transform signals from the time domain while FFTs are concerned with the frequency domain.

For my second example, last year, we were on the Tara River in Montenegro, navigating rapids in whitewater. The rain was hammering down with a nearby thunderstorm hitting hard; the sound rippled through the canyon, causing a bit of anxiety. We are in a country in which we do not speak the language, deep in a forested canyon that is beautiful and new to our senses. While we are trying to take in the spectacle of this National Park we are also listening to our local guides who were assisting the Croatian organizer of this adventure as we paddled down the river. Earlier in the day, the sounds of Croatian folk music and a shot of Slivovitz before coffee and breakfast had started the morning. From the flooded muddy river to a shoreside lunch near a natural spring we were inundated with new information at every corner and in every moment of the day and well into the night.

What I’m trying to point out here is that both experiences, one a 2-hour long video stream and the other being 18 hours of an epic two-week journey, were both deep learning moments of relatively equal merit. The focus required to make sense of them doesn’t allow you to pay attention with half an ear. In the latter example, not paying attention risks losing your life, while in the first example, nothing may be at risk, but in a sense, there is. You see, to not look into the mystery of the unknown, you relinquish your right to peer into the infinite. Passive nonsense is the sweet we treat ourselves with after a hard day, except that we have somehow equated simple existence as difficult and always requiring the same old pablum to alleviate the pain of being alive.

In that sense, we have become a sad species addicted to our creature comforts, enslaved by the reliance on video games, TV, movies, weed, bad food, snacks, drugs, alcohol, religion, and the host of other crutches we believe we deserve due to what was just endured.

The things I experience and what I choose to entertain myself and learn from are not anyone else’s tools that will make their lives better, but neither are other’s groupthink coping mechanisms. We are programmed to find satisfaction and accomplishment in life when we are challenged at the edge of what we know. It is here on the frontier of our ignorance and our feeble attempts to conquer that darkness that time opens up, and life is no longer fleeting as though it’s in a race to find the finish line. In the struggle to find the unknown, time becomes expansive and slow but arrives with the risk of boredom. This boredom must be embraced by examining in great detail the intricacies of existence, information, life, knowledge, and maybe someday wisdom. Else, in a second, life will be over, and you’ll wonder, “Why didn’t I take the time to see the world as it is instead of through the filter of routine?”

I come to a blank sheet of paper, in this case, my online editing window, and quickly try to find something to write about. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think, “Hey, I should pen a note to my best friend and wife, telling her and the whole world how much I love her.” Then, without her right here in front of me, whatever distraction crawled into my minuscule attention span guides my brain down other paths and I’m off trying to figure out the cures for society’s problems.

Well, now I’m here and ready to start spilling sappy poetic musings out of my heart, but where does one begin extolling those passions with puny written words? I look to my blog, searching for how many other times I’ve shared this sense of Amore with my wife, and the results show me 430 out of 2,294 published posts having a reference to the word love. I don’t think the post about Crispin Glover qualifies for this list, but the WordPress search isn’t the smartest, and Glover does have the word love in it.

I then wondered: was there a thread that tied these references to love to her? Or was I speaking generally about her, the trees, oceans, and other things? It doesn’t really matter, I figure, as it was part of the subject matter, and I don’t have the time right now to read 430 blog posts of varying lengths to pull the context of a particular word out of them. The next best thing is to look at tags, and very quickly, by those and the titles of these entries, it becomes obvious that I use the word love a lot when we are traveling.

Off the top of the bat, the tag “Coast” appears 51 times, and “Oregon” shows up 37 times. What this tells me is that when Caroline and I are on the coast, we are maybe more aware of our love of one another than at other times. This is only sort of true as we know all the time where our love is and how it pulses through our days. The difference is that when we are traveling, especially in coastal regions, our time together is amplified by the fact that we are out at the edge of the ocean and not preoccupied with history, architecture, food, or other destinations that await us. We are effectively at the totality of what the day will be made of, looking at the sand and sea.

There’s another element at work when we are traveling: we are taking time for ourselves outside the routines of daily life. The time preparing for these travels and saving money for them all starts to make sense as soon as we are underway but really starts to resonate when we start to get close to 100 miles from home because, at that point, we are definitely going somewhere. With no work, chores, or the familiar to pull us into what we know, we turn our awareness on to full observation mode of what is different and what new sights and sounds await us.

The excitement of being with someone else who is enjoying this sense of adventure as much as the other makes everything all the easier. Every minute that passes builds the smiles and anticipation for what awaits us out there. We know that no matter what we find, we’ll discover something about the environment, weather, trees, surf, local eateries, history, street life, churches, museums, odd characters, lodging, or even a table we took a minute to sit down and knit and write at that will enchant us, convincing us that this trip is on track to be the greatest ever.

This comfort with each other is had at home, too. We are doing great being at home during the outbreak of COVID-19 because it’s given us even more opportunities to be together and be outside our routines. So, in many ways, this time is like a vacation, and as we get further down the road of self-isolation, I remain giddy in love that we are traveling into unknown places.