Go out for a day and take photos of everything that catches your eye. Photograph breakfast, locking your front door, the sign that welcomes you to a highway. Take a selfie, grab an image of your destination, snap a photo of something in extreme closeup, a detail you might have otherwise ignored.

Once you get home, sort them into favorites and toss the ones that need to find their destiny in the trash.

Reduce the image count to between six and ten, and now start writing what you did and what you were feeling when those images were taken. Or, write an imaginary narrative of what those images could represent and make it all up.

You need to write on the same day while the memories are fresh. Now, do this every day for a month as a writing exercise that will get you used to what it’s like to write every day. Having something to fix on that comes out of our routine and trying to find a way to explain things with a slight twist to avoid the same story over the course of that month just might be the thing to show you that a writing habit isn’t all that difficult and starts you thinking differently about each day.

I often lament how harmful television is, how banal sports programs are, the detrimental effects brought on by video games, and the absence of intellectual stimulation in people’s lives. Then, last night, while feeling well under the weather and unable to muster the wherewithal to do much of anything at all, I turned to streaming nonsense to find something, anything that I could consume with the mindless abandon I claim to despise. I ended up on Sanford and Son, a TV show I watched regularly as a pre-teen.

That show was a turd of stupidity, playing with stereotypes repugnantly aimed at white people such as myself and the adults around me who were not discriminating in any meaningful way. I only point this out because I’m trying to scream at people that the current crop of broadcast and streaming content is as horrific and detrimental as those shows were to a population back in the 1970s.

So, while I want to convince others of this toxic relationship regarding their dependence on media, I realized that, like me, as an immobile child, they have nothing else. Their electronic window to the world when they get home is their hobby, their travels, their intellectual activities, and their purpose. Between work and the routine of relative nothingness, they decide to have babies, grow their boredom, lose interest in cooking, regress their reading skills through neglect, slip into acceptance of their descent into a marginal future, and ultimately find total resignation.

On the other hand, I am lucky to have a source of disposable cash that allows me to find options. Though I travel a lot and am able to afford computers, photography equipment, and other electronic equipment (as it pertains to making music), I have the intention to do things, and I’m unwilling to give in to the path of least resistance and watch TV or play video games. Regarding the claim of “disposable cash,” almost everyone else also has that, except they can’t realize it as they live paycheck to paycheck as that’s what they know and maintain.

You might want to suggest that this is not a choice, but I’d insist it is as long as we are a society that extolls the lie that it is a virtue to live beyond one’s means and that happiness is found in consumption, many are doomed to slog through life on the margin of humanity.

This brings me around to the mindless entertainment I mentioned at the beginning of this post; if those I berate with my arrogance of possibilities and living with intention were to buy into my idea, they might go home, toss the TV, cancel their Netflix account, never watch another Superbowl, and dump their game console, but what would they have then? For most, they’d find a void of utter nothingness. With unattainable lives defined by a social image popularized by influencers, ads, and videos, how should the mere mortal live a Kim Kardashian lifestyle (or whichever celebrity du jour is currently popular) if they can’t live it vicariously?

My lack of understanding or sympathy of the vacuum I’d open if I were effective in convincing someone to abandon the center of their universe would likely have profound negative consequences on the person who all of a sudden would be staring at four blank walls where boredom would howl into their being through alcohol or drugs as the only way to dull the terror of being nowhere with nothing to hang their identify upon. The nihilistic reality of those who won’t and can’t.

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.

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