Always darkest before dawn.

Whoever said "it's always darkest before dawn" had a very poor understanding of optical physics. Anyone who's ever gotten up at four in the morning and stared at the eastern horizon knows what I'm talking about. In fact, anyone who's stayed up all night knows that it's darkest at the exact point when the sun is at its nadir; that is, the point at which the earth most completely occludes the sun.

Here's a picture:

Nature is not human-hearted. The sun is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium, fusing into lithium and carbon and eventually iron, on its very gradual way towards becoming too hot and dense to contain itself. Around five billion years from now, it'll consume itself and take everything in the inner solar system with it. The elements flung off from the death throes of the daystar will in turn birth new solar systems, and so it goes.

And the heart is not much more than an engine forged from the remnants of past dead stars; it too is subject to the laws of entropy, and will give out at some not-quite-certain point in the future. And the fortunes of most people are governed by similar laws: rise and fall, peak and trough, but the general trend is towards decline and extinguishment.

Point is: don't let some threadbare cliché fool you into thinking that hard times always come to happy endings at some predictable point in the narrative. This is real life, and not the stories we tell ourselves about real life. Anyone who's stayed up all night waiting for the sunrise knows what I mean: by the time the sun's rays begin to illuminate the upper atmosphere, you regret staying up all night and want nothing more than to go back to bed.

Practical lessons to take from this: (1) try to see a sunrise on a regular basis, because they're glorious and worth waking up early for, (2) get some sleep while you're at it, and (3) try not to sink into a pit of bibbering despair when things go south. Because sure, the universe is trending towards entropy, but it's no excuse to not try and make something of it in your brief tenure as participant and witness to the universe's unfolding.

2014: Let's do this.

It's been a wild year. I started the year off in the worst mental health of my adult life, a period I decided to call later on my 'psychosomatic rebellion' --- mind and body refused to cooperate. There were mornings I couldn't get out of bed, despite trying to leverage the last remaining shreds of willpower I had. It's easier when you're younger to just 'suck it up' and do it, but as we grow older, it becomes increasingly difficult, and that's partly because you begin to see that just sucking it up is not an end in itself: it's a means to an end. And I had lost that end.

How I lost the plot

The end was to do research and teach, but after spending two years in the belly of the academic beast, I realized that it would not lead to anything that I would call a meaningful or fulfilling life.

There's this myth that academia is a meritocracy: if you're smart and hard-working (and even a little creative), you'll get far, but the truth is that the vast majority of academic superstars came from advantaged backgrounds, and even though I'm a white male, coming from a poor family means that if I pursued a PhD, I'd be nearly guaranteed to be more than $100,000 in the hole after finishing, instead of the relatively tamer $40,000 that is my current and final debt load.

Let me restate: I've seen smarter and harder-working people than I am get sunk by academia, because they believe (despite abundant evidence to the contrary) that academia is a meritocracy, when in fact, it's anything but. Let this be a warning to anyone who thinks about pursuing grad school.

The grass isn't any greener on the other side

The corporate world isn't much better: I worked for a major educational corporation throughout my entire grad career, but the difference was that I could make a living from it. I watched as it went from a network of more-or-less independent franchises to centralized corporate control, in a business where the majority of clients and referrals come through personal networks that can't be managed from a corner office in New York. I watched as it was mismanaged into the ground by the investment firm that bankrolled the centralization and consolidation: as a contracted employee, I wasn't all too affected (i.e. I still made a living), but before anyone reading this starts thinking that academia is somehow uniquely shitty, I want to head you off at the pass and reassure you that there're many worse places to be than academia.

The audacity of hope

So here I am: only a thesis away from graduation, my future already mortgaged, and having spent the last two years of my life training for a career that I'm no longer willing to pursue. I'm increasingly self-employed, because I think having multiple hustles is far more practical than pinning your hopes on one career or another. I've traded my one big hope for a dozen smaller hopes: hopes that people will pay me to write and teach, hopes that I can learn from everything I experience (no matter how painful).

Hope is a funny thing. It's the backbone of my ability to suck it up and move forward. I lived on $9,000 a year for many years with the one big hope that my sacrifice and struggle would pay off, but after ten years of struggling, I've come to see it as the dead end that it has been the entire time. I don't hope that people will pay for my writing: people already have, and all I have to do is step it up big-time.

Regrouping and retraining

So I'm taking my degree and using it. By May, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I will be awarded a master's degree in anthropology. Many anthropologists have done fairly well for themselves outside of academia, but everyone I know who has done so has made it through a combination of luck, creativity, and perseverance. I am no different. I don't see my schooling as my education. The countless hours spent studying Marxian political economy, social statistics, global development, and human-environment interactions are hard to spin into a paying career, but that's not the point: unless the Internet collapses tomorrow, people who can think and write will always find some means of making a living.

So in conclusion: 2014 is going to be one hell of a ride. Let's do this.

What we have now will never be that way again

After I finished my bachelor's, I moved into and helped create an intentional community called the Birdhouse (so named because we were on Bird St.). We had weekly (and often more frequent) house meetings during which we created a sort of living mission statement, informed by our knowledge of and experiences with the negative side effects of consumer culture --- the American Dream having turned into a nightmare right before our very eyes in the aftermath of the Great Adjustment of 2008.

In practice, we modeled ourselves on an existing collective in Tampa called the Lakehouse, who were organized around the principles of engaged Christianity. Since we couldn't necessarily organize around religious lines, we instead organized on principles of minimizing our environmental impact and working for justice for socio-economically marginalized peoples. This was easy because we all were just out of college, under-employed, and living in a marginalized neighborhood. I jumped at this because it gave me a chance to practice the sort of engaged anthropology I had envisioned myself doing, and doing this put me in constant contact with other anthropologists working in Sulphur Springs.

So I went to grad school, and suddenly the time and emotional pressures of grad school proved to be too much to juggle in addition to my responsibilities to the collective. So I moved out, and I'm moving again, and pretty soon I'll be moved out of Tampa (if all goes according to plan).

And each move puts me at increasingly further distance from the primary relationships I formed during those years living at the Birdhouse. Because living in a community like that does wonders for propinquity --- the relationships you form when you sleep three to a room, share everything, and where front-porch discussions made for a much richer evening than the alternatives of isolation and numbing entertainment.

I'm kind of sad right now.

This time last year I was in the middle of one of the worst breakdowns of my adult life, radically re-organizing my life around the path that took me to where I am today, but in order to follow that path I had to give up something that I only really began to appreciate in hindsight: the propinquity. And I'm glad for the shitstorm that has been this year of life, because a lot of really good things have happened, too. For the first time in a long long while, I can say the laughter has outweighed the tears, even by a little bit.

Control fires and the art of letting it burn.

I've been bothered recently by how my Zen practice has changed. I haven't sat in meditation for maybe two weeks, haven't attended sangha in quite a bit more than that (part of that was because I was seeing someone who was only available on weekends), and have felt kind of 'caught up' in my off-the-cushion life: thesis research, paperwork, teaching, catching up with everyone I've fallen off the map from, and in general figuring out where to go from here.

And I think this is good for me, too. If I could label what's going on here, I could call it 'control burning'. You see, in forestry and managing forest fires, the prevailing wisdom for the first half of the 20th century was to prevent forest fires as they sprang up. This led to forests being choked with thick undergrowth and lots of flammable organic matter waiting for a spark.

But foresters realized that forest fires played an important ecological role in not only clearing undergrowth, but also setting the stage for another round of ecological succession. Ashes released potassium into the soil. Some species of conifer only release their seeds when their cones are burned by fire. First- and second-generation colonizing plants (like clover and other 'weeds') regenerated soils depleted by old-growth trees.

Source: texasagriculture.gov

Similarly, I realized that sometimes, you need to let go and let things burn for a while. This most recent round of psycho-ecological succession was not altogether unpleasant: I could hardly call it a 'burn', but the same idea applies. One of the things I burned was my attempts to make Zen into a replacement for the religion I was raised into (fundamentalist Baptist and evangelical Christianity), one that sees your existence as fundamentally problematic and offers the One True Way to make it right again. I remember writing in my journal a few months ago: "If I don't become a Zen master by the time I'm 50, I'll fucking shoot myself." That came out of an idea that everything that led to my becoming 'sane' was somehow external to myself.

Zen is fertile ground for all sorts of 'curative fantasies' to spring up. One of those curative fantasies was the idea that somehow, if I meditated long enough, if I followed the Five Precepts to the letter (refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and taking intoxicants), if I stopped at the sound of a bell and followed my breaths x number of times every day, then I could finally achieve that state of imperturbable calm and stillness that I was longing for.

But I quickly found that even on the cushion, it wasn't always possible to wedge my mind into that fantasy. When you're sitting, you're not retreating from reality: you're becoming a container for everything you're experiencing in that reality in that exact moment. And it's a lot: the clicking of the ceiling fan, the stuffiness of the room, the movements of your internal organs, the beating of your heart, the slight ache in your knees and shoulders, your racing thoughts.

It gets overwhelming, and you wonder whether you're doing it wrong. Enough of that and you realize that Zen is useless. Because it is --- if the goal you set for Zen practice is to become a marble statue, then you'll quickly find Zen useless to that goal. People by their very nature aren't made of stone; they're human beings, and human beings will never wake up (individually or collectively) if they keep loading spiritual practice with all these curative fantasies, when the purpose of spiritual and religious practice is to become more present and connected with life as it is. Or at least as it seems.

If it gets overwhelming, you're doing it right. Lean into it, or let it burn.

Follow your bliss and cultivate the opposite impulse.

It just occurred to me that I never improved in any measure of my life by focusing on the problems. I didn't become a functional human being after years of social anxiety and depression by fixating on the particulars of my anxiety and depression; instead, I constructed an image of self that wasn't in a constant state of existential panic over his dysfunction --- and followed my bliss.

By the way, concerning the phrase 'follow your bliss' --- this is credited to the late Joseph Campbell, one of the foremost scholars in the public discourse over religion and values. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that one of my supervisors at my tutoring job had read Joseph Campbell; Cracked.com had a video some time ago where one of the characters referenced the "Hero's Journey". He's got a deep public impact (but mostly the older and college-educated), and I think he's got a point: follow your bliss.

Following your bliss entails risk. It requires sacrifices in other areas of your lives, and sometimes it's a real dilemma to decide which parts get the cut, and which parts you work for. This sounds a lot like work, though, when it's qualitatively different: we in this society are often defined by our work, and before I drag Marx and the commodification of labor into this already-tottering thought, I'll just talk about following your bliss. Do it. I only decided to finish grad school because I was so close to finishing anyways, and negotiated an image of self that included having a master's degree, student debt, an increasing number of funerals to attend in upcoming years, and financial insecurity. And am following my bliss through that (not despite that).

'Bliss' may not be the best word for it, then. I'd just say 'growth', and remind the reader that you are responsible for your growth, and have more power to choose which direction you grow in than you think you have. Oak trees grow enormous tapering taproots which, through the particulars of biology and ecology, follow sources of water and soil nutrients over time, plotting the least energy-intensive paths to obtain what they need. So do the same. Often what we tell ourselves is more important than what is possible.

Fourteen Challenges to the Fourteenth Generation, Part I

In most ways, my story is much the same as those of my generational cohort: born into a world humming and crackling its way through the greatest economic boom ever experienced in living memory, and coming of age against the backdrop of unceasing violent asymmetrical conflicts over resources and geopolitical influence, burgeoning socio-economic inequality, and increasingly hard-to-ignore environmental and climatic instabilities. I was born into the War on Drugs and graduated into the War on Terror, and now it seems we're getting locked into a War on Each Other (but isn't that always how it's been?).

When I entered college, the state and federal governments threw money at me. I was the smart poor kid, the one who would have been a conservative's wet dream of pulling himself up by his bootstraps and making his way in the world entirely through his own gumption and fortitude. Counselors encouraged me to 'pursue my passion', because smart people like me tend to do well when they do that (that is not universally true).

But being the oldest son of a family hit hard by the bitch-slap that globalization inflicted on once easily-available entry-level jobs requiring no college degree, I initially set out to pursue nursing, because I never wanted to be poor again. Instead, I got my ass kicked in general chemistry and chose to pursue anthropology instead (which was what I read when I was procrastinating my way through my undergrad years). I decided being poor wasn't so bad, because I had managed to be both happy and poor at the same time.

The most radical act a young person can take is to be happy --- we live in a world that constantly pokes young people to do more, to aim higher, to work harder, underpinning it with the assumption that if we don't, we'll die poor and lonely. Being happy means not listening to those voices, and instead, doing whatever it takes to maintain and increase your happiness. For me, it had little to do with money and a lot to do with impact and life satisfaction. That's a big deal for me, since financial security and prosperity are increasingly out of reach for most people of my generation.

So I graduated in 2009, looked around, saw forty-somethings with years of experience in supposedly recession-proof STEM fields begging for entry-level jobs, said 'hell no', and did a lot of volunteering and protesting for two years before deciding that wasn't something I could do for the rest of my life (e.g. couldn't pay the bills and wasn't getting any satisfaction out of it), and so here I am, in grad school, and while the economy's 'picking back up', it's only really benefiting those who were already set-up before the Great Crash of 2008. I sometimes wonder what the fuck I'm doing in grad school, and remember that as a grad student, I am much better off than I was as a graduate struggling to make ends meet while sharing an old house with five other people. But part of that is thanks to my student loan debt, which while below the national average, is still keeping me up at night.

We, the teeming millions of young people trying to find our place in the world, are in a difficult place relative to those born even a decade before us: those older than us offer us thought-stopping chunks of advice like "stop feeling sorry for yourselves" and "manage your expectations", forgetting that we grew up under "chase your dreams" and "work hard and you'll succeed". It wasn't our peers who started that silliness; it was our elders, who conveniently forgot all that once the Great Recession of 2008 rolled in.

Let me get this straight: I worked my ass off, full-time while taking full-time course loads. I did not waste my early adult years partying. That was for kids who could afford to not work on Friday nights. Not me, and not many others. The only young people who have it easy are those whose lives are supported and subsidized by the inherited hard work and sacrifice of older generations. It's a mark of the privilege enjoyed by many among the older generations that they don't have to think about the struggles of the young, while we the young cannot afford the luxury of not thinking critically about our situation and placing it into context.

Context: we've been in this situation before.

The older generations need to stop painting the younger generations with a broad brush, because frankly, that kind of thinking is nothing more than masturbation: satisfying in the short term but accomplishing nothing over the long term.

But the same is true for the younger generations: I mistrust Baby Boomers because they were the grandparents who hurt my mother, the bosses who screwed my family over, the oblivious old farts in carbon-vomiting land yachts trying to run me over on my bicycle, the elected officials giving tax breaks to their peers while turning a blind eye to anyone who isn't part of their tribe.

In short, Baby Boomers are power, and I mistrust and resent power because I have more often than not been on the receiving end of abuses of power. I have particular contempt for the class of Baby Boomers who live their lives in comfort while offering shitty advice with a straight face, as though the economic climate of the US was in any way recognizably similar to the one we, the 80 million young, must contend with today.

So what do we do about it? I have a couple of ideas (a topic for a later post), but I welcome input from anyone else, both old and young.

I am grateful for white privilege.

So I've been obsessed with race lately. This is something I've been thinking about for a while, especially since I'm also obsessed with dysfunctional power and economic structures (particularly the ones we in the US live under) and socio-economic disparities. But this recent race kick I've been on was sparked by recent incidents of violence that crosses racial boundaries (like the Trayvon Martin case and the recent Charlie Bates spree in the USF area) and how the media covered them.

Let me just say this: I am grateful for the privilege I enjoy as a heterosexual educated American-born white male with no physical or mental disabilities. It's fucking great. I can walk into most stores with a backpack and no one bats an eye. I get good service in restaurants. The few times I've interacted with the police have never involved my arrest or physical harm to my person. I can marry the person I love. I can be myself and not be threatened, beaten, or killed for being who I am. The world is built for people like me, and I'm grateful for that, but I know damn well that most people don't live lives nearly as safe, secure, and supported as mine. And it eats me alive.

Source: Eastern Connecticut State University

So I almost got robbed tonight by two young black males. No harm came to me --- I waited until I was sure of hostile intent (I was damn sure), cut across traffic to block them, called 911, and clearly stated my exact location and a physical description of the two kids before they could come close. I then called the first person I could think of and waited at a 7-11 for a ride home. The adrenaline wore off when I got home. I started shaking, and when I got home I talked it out with my roommate.

This isn't the first time this has almost happened (it's the second), but this is the first time this happened, and I caught myself feeling compassion for these kids. I hope they were caught. I hope the officers gave them a stern talking-to, held them overnight to scare them a little, and then sent them home. But let's not bullshit ourselves --- this is exactly the way a cop would have treated me, a young white male, and if they were caught, they are fucked.

And this is a normative experience for non-whites. Society already puts several strikes against them: poor, black, male, young, speaking non-standard English, acting in non-mainstream ways. A criminal record (if they don't have one already) would almost certainly doom them to the same tragic and miserable life I assume  know most of their peers are mired in: frequent incarceration, economic instability, violence and physical danger that we the privileged do not have to deal with to the same degree. Yes, I was almost robbed. But I come from a place where if I were robbed, I would not be left swinging in the breeze. This is not likely to be the case with these kids.

Like I said: I'm grateful for my privilege. But it's a bitter gratitude, since I know these kids and millions more like them are never going to feel as safe, existentially secure, and supported as I do. May all beings be happy, safe, healthy, free from fear, and love easily.

SaMM: When to throw in the towel.

So: despite the advantages to motorcycles as primary vehicles outlined in a previous post, it has come to a point where I'm rather tired of sinking so much time into troubleshooting and repairs for the Noble Savage. I've also had the use of a car for the past few months while a friend is out of the country, and I've experienced the benefits of having the option of taking the motorcycle (or not).

Motorcycles-as-primary-transportation works well if your occupation doesn't require reliable transportation. When my primary occupation was that of a graduate assistant, and all I needed to do was show up on campus, but now that my primary occupation routinely includes trips to neighboring counties, cars win out for reliability and shielding from the weather.

I have begun the task of planning my next vehicle purchase, and that vehicle will not be a motorcycle. This makes me sad to say. It's as though I've traded my oil-stained jeans in for pleated khakis and my exhaust-pipe-scarred combat boots for loafers. I've put off owning a car for 27 years, and I would ideally like to never purchase a car, but my life is no longer set up to allow me to not own a car and still maintain that lifestyle (which is sweet and I am happy).

So this is Sven, who will still do motorcycle maintenance and blog about it, but for now, I'm signing off and  setting up a new blog about the trials of one young man with $4k in the bank taking on the project of purchasing the best possible used car for that money and doing so within two months. I'm basing this project off a similar one done by staff writers at the used car consumers' website Edmunds.com, called 'The Debt-Free Car Project'. Check it out --- it's exactly like what I'm trying to do.

I have money and time on my side. I'm already better off than most used-car buyers. I'm gonna replicate that experiment here in Tampa, epicenter of shadiness and lax consumer protection, where scammers descend upon unsuspecting car buyers like locusts from Hell and there ain't a damn thing you can do about it. I will pass through that Hell unscathed, with the compassion and perspicacity of a bodhisattva, and in two months' time, I will join the ranks of people who have to make the following decision every morning: take the bike, or take the car? Stay tuned.

I can still wear my gear, and just say I'm pretending to be the Stig.

Sven and the Art of Spiritual Materialism.

So a while ago I asked a few friends of mine whether I should take the Three Refuges in a formal ceremony, because that's the pattern I'm familiar with when one adopts a religion. You convert. It's a discrete moment marked by recited words and it's all very sober and dramatic. You cry. But instead, I learned and recited the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts alone in a hotel room. In my sweatpants. Typical Sven move.

Taking refuge is a process, not a punctual event. You don't have a flash of insight and suddenly become overtaken by the dharma. We're all up the same creek, but we have oars. We take refuge in a lot of things: friends, lovers, jobs, drugs, experiences, solitude, exercise, food, sleep. None of these things really brings any lasting happiness, thanks to the hedonic treadmill we all run frantically to keep up with. And so we think that rowing harder will gain us happiness. Not so.

Image credit: "Americosmos" by Darrin Drda

The entire world system as it is right now is powered by that treadmill. Entire industries, trillions of dollars per year in aggregate, exist with the promise of alleviating suffering. Advertising, marketing, education and credentialing, the American Dream, the idea of a soulmate for everyone --- all promise but don't deliver, because you build up a tolerance to happiness, and need ever-greater highs to achieve the same degree of happiness as you go on. The hedonic treadmill, in a nutshell!

So --- what's been occupying my mind lately is how to negotiate this rather dramatic set of choices and changes with the consequences of my past choices. It's too easy to slip into binary thinking, and to summarize the fallacy I'm committing here, I think I can either be a 'good Buddhist' and have to forsake everything in my life, live in lonely poverty, be a victim. Or pursue more worldly things, abandon any hope of lasting happiness, be drawn back into cynical anhedonia, but manage to achieve some status and what little security is to be had through that path.

But binary thinking is a trap. Those are not my only two options, and I'm limited only by my courage and imagination. The dharma, after all, is performed to the best of your ability. I'm not likely to wake up one morning and find myself a bodhisattva. That doesn't happen. It takes work, and the kind of work it takes helps me to become a better person --- more loving, more on the same wavelength as others, more compassionate, more honest, more humble, more generous, more focused. I'm never going to soar to the heights of academia or politics or the corporate world, but I'll take my chances and try to make a comfortable living doing something useful, and give to the world that way. That is dharma. Roll with the punches. Leave power to the squabbling gods, and be defiantly human: vulnerable, fragile, bound up in both suffering and happiness but not intrinsically marked by either state.

But what I don't want to do is become someone for whom the dharma is a neat accessory. Have an Alan Watts playlist on Spotify. Wear malas and dress in all white. Find any excuse to bring up some exegesis of a Pali term. Pursue the material and wear the spiritual as yet another part of my identity: Sven, ginger, motorcycle rider, grad student, anthropologist, dharma bum. After all, I took refuge alone in my sweatpants, so any attempt to try to make this improve my perceived sex appeal is futile.

I'm very reluctant to call myself a Buddhist, because linguistically, it doesn't work for me. There is no 'I' to be. I'm a collection of molecules organized in such a way that I can move under my own power and make more of me. I have thoughts and feelings that can be explained in terms of those physical processes. There is no permanent and unchanging 'me' --- personality and habits are all conditioned by realities outside of yourself, but understanding and ultimately freedom comes from within.

But I own my actions, past, present, and future. I do both good things and evil things, but I am not those things. These actions, however, mold who I am, and that's where choice comes in. And so I choose.

Gremlins appeased and thoughts on motorcycle commuting.

The electrical gremlins that have been keeping me from riding seem to have been appeased for now. I replaced the regulator/rectifier unit, and now the charging system works. I'm still breathing a sigh of relief every time I hit the starter button and the engine rumbles to life. I was riding the other day to Home Depot, and a fuse blew, but I managed to walk to a gas station and get a replacement set. I looked at the blown fuse when I got home, and it was just corroded because the case was cracked. It probably hadn't been replaced since the bike was manufactured.

That's the thing with old bikes. Mine's a 2002, and it's been stored outside for a significant portion of its service life. So I worry about things like corrosion on electrical leads, frayed insulation, dry rot on tires and belts, gaskets degrading. Rust. You live in Florida, you're gonna get rust.

There's a persistent oil leak from the head that I've been keeping track of, since I don't have time these days to take off the tank, remove the head cover, and poke around in the engine. Fortunately, I know where the leak's coming from, and I've done this kind of thing before. I'm not going to sell the bike until everything's fixed.

After a year of riding, both as a means of commuting and as a means of recreation, I can say this: a bike is not a car. If all you need to do is get yourself and very little cargo around, a bike is a great way to meet your needs. If you have to be on time anywhere during the rainy season, budget fifteen extra minutes and make sure you have rain gear. I have a full set (pants, jacket, boots) and I keep everything in my backpack in a set of waterproof camping bags. I've ridden from Palm Harbor to Tampa in a thunderstorm and stayed dry.

But if you need to (1) commute long distances, (2) carry more stuff than can fit into a backpack or pair of saddlebags, or (3) carry someone else, a motorcycle is not an ideal commuter vehicle. I've made it work, but your mileage will most certainly vary.

Asking the Internet for answers

Sometimes I'm pretty sure the only reason I keep writing this blog is because I want to make up for years of typing my questions into Google and hoping it comes up with answers. This was a habit that I picked up during a particularly bleak time in my life, and like smoking, it's been hard to shake.

This isn't a question of the time wasted in trying to pick signal out of the massive noise that is the Internet; it's unhealthy because you're never going to find satisfactory answers from other people's questions. No one asks exactly the same questions.

The most important tool in motorcycle maintenance

A notebook.

Fixing motorcycles is an exercise in deductive reasoning and hypothesis testing. Failure to carefully observe and record your observations can cost you hundreds of dollars and long periods of time without the comforting thrum of a motorcycle beneath you. Your moves are only as good as your observations, and recording your observations has a multiplier effect, since you can watch trends. This is particularly true for electrical work and compression tests.

For instance, I've been puzzling my way through a mysterious electrical issue on the Noble Savage, in which the battery would slowly drain out, which would leave me stranded at any number of gas stations in the Hillsborough County area until I could get a jump start. Very frustrating. Fortunately life right now is simple enough that I can ride a bicycle to all my engagements.

Electrical issues on motorcycles tend to involve the following components/systems (in increasing order of complexity/cost-to-fix/pain-in-the-ass):

1. frame grounds
2. battery
3. wire connections
4. regulator/rectifier
5. stator

And electrical problems don't necessarily have to restrict themselves to just one thing. My observations suggest that my issue is a combination of battery (appears to be damaged) and rectifier (one of the wire connectors is fused and probably shorting the system). So my first step is to order a new rectifier and load-test/replace the battery. Fortunately the latter is under warranty, and I save receipts.

The problem a lot of people have in maintaining their own motorcycles is lack of efficacy. Motorcycles are relatively complex machines, and for people not familiar with the principles of internal combustion, electricity, fluid dynamics, and chemistry, cracking open a motorcycle for the first time is a scary experience. You're afraid of screwing up. Understandable.

Safeguard against that by purchasing a good service manual for your exact year, make, and model of bike (for reference and step-by-step instruction), and record everything you do in a notebook. Most service manuals leave a few pages in back blank for note-taking anyways --- so there you go. Use them wisely, so that even if you do screw up, then you phone a knowledgeable friend, you can say something more substantial than 'OMG I SCREWED UP HELP ME'.

The regulator/rectifier is supposed to arrive in a few days. I'm going to (1) bypass the fused wire connector block to eliminate any possibility of a short at that point, (2) check my connections and grounds one more time, (3) replace the battery if it doesn't pass the load test, and (4) install the new rectifier. If none of that fixes my problem, then it's the alternator --- expensive and a pain in the ass to fix, but doable with the tools and time I have available.

The problem with English.

If there's one thing I can say with some authority (as an anthropologist's apprentice, amateur linguist, and sometimes lover), it's that for all the words we've adapted from other languages, the fact that we only have one word for 'love' tells us something distressing about ourselves. Not that speakers of languages who more finely divide the semantic space occupied by 'love' are in any way more likely to be kinder, more compassionate, or selfless than speakers of English, but it makes you wonder about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and how much it might apply here.

For those of you who aren't huge into linguistics or the cognitive social sciences, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language we use shapes our reality. It's overly simplistic to claim that because the Inuit allegedly have fifty words for snow (they don't), they somehow are more finely-attuned to the reality of snow than the experience of this Florida boy, who has only one word for 'snow'.

The word 'love' means a lot to me, but only because I'm so fascinated by it. Its semantic space --- the range of possible meanings --- is nothing short of breath-taking. I love my motorcycle. It doesn't mean that I'm somehow committed to it. But it does mean that I devote a lot of time and energy into maintaining that relationship, since it plays a large role in my daily life (it's my car, basically). And that's one possible case where I can use the word 'love': the result of having sunk a lot of time in keeping something up, and being glad for having learned something by that process.

More to the point, love means about a dozen different things. I love my mother, but not in the same way I love those who I call 'friend'. I love myself, but not in the same way I love the women I've smooched. I love having money, but not in the same way I love knowledge and wisdom. Love is tied up in questions of attachment, status, power, support, dependency, psychopathology, and biology, and yet we only have one word for it.

Weird, huh? We have to resort to borrowing words from other languages. CS Lewis did that when talking about the ancient Greek use of words like eros and agape. Pema Chödrön does that when she's talking about metta. Or using elaborate circumlocutions to describe the different kinds of love: I just did that in this post. Or transferring meanings to other words in our language: the New Testament does that a lot.

Love is all around us, but we can't easily describe it.

Give up your goals.

Give up your goals. You'll find that even if you do reach them, you'll never feel like you've arrived. It seems that we replace one goal with another as soon as we reach it, and that in part can be explained by how the reward systems in our brains work: in effect, it's an addiction. You need an ikigai, but that doesn't necessarily imply that you have goals. It just means you have a reason to get out of bed.

Give up your goals. Focus instead on directions. One benefit of that way of thinking is that you don't feel quite the same need to torture yourself because you set out to do something and continue to do so well past the point of meaninglessness. I liken this to the Buddhist monkey trap parable: a small hole is drilled into a hollow log, a piece of fruit is placed inside the hole, so that when a monkey grabs the fruit, he can't remove his hand from the trap without letting go. And he won't let go because he's attached to the fruit.

Another great thing about direction is that you can always change it when it no longer proves growthful. Or you can keep going down that road, even though you're suffering for it, because you recognize it as a growthful process and not some symbolic measure of your worth as a human being. Journey, not destination. You cannot fail when you abandon your goals and instead seek only directions.

Slash and burn.

I'm in Denver, mountains in sight from the hostel window. I've spent a lot of time lately in the peaks, since it's healthy to go there once in a while and shake off the dust from the valley. I've changed my social environment and my residence, slammed the door on a lot of unsatisfying relationships, and have not made any particular effort to foster new ones. That's fine. But I have to return to the valley sometime.

I had a thought just before I sat down to write this, so I went outside for a smoke. Ran into an old colleague I almost never see. The fact that she was happy to see me, someone she only sees once a year at most, lifted my spirits, and I walked back upstairs. An image came to my mind on my way back up: a meteor punching through our thin eggshell of an atmosphere at a window-shattering 40,000 mph, a small boy standing on a mountaintop with a baseball bat, poised and ready to knock that rock back into space.

I asked myself: whatever happened to that boy?

I call it 'slash-and-burn agriculture of the soul'. Akhilandeshvari, a relatively less well-known Hindu goddess whose name means something like 'never not unbroken', would likely appreciate this metaphor: what I mean by it is that people like me tend to push themselves very very hard in frantic hot-blooded pursuit of a goal, an ideal, a target, and burn their souls to cinders in the process. But like the ashes from acres of macheted and burnt scrub, these are times in my life that ablate everything that needs torn down and rebuilt. Friendships that need to fade, jobs that need re-defined, plans that need re-drawn.

When I got on the plane yesterday, I felt like my entire grad school experience was an unmitigated failure. And, taken from a certain set of standards, it just might be: I have no publications to my name, no awards won, no exotic adventures gone on in the name of ethnography. Anthropology was interesting to me for a while, particularly since it answered some key questions I had when I first pursued it, but dammit, I want to slay some fucking dragons, and anthropology hasn't inspired me to slay any dragons lately. It did when I first moved into the Birdhouse, and I wanted to be Philippe Bourgois. I played chess with drug dealers and shared shitty beer with people who have it way way worse than I do, as a white male (albeit from a less than economically privileged background). It was good. But that time has been over for a while.

As for what's to come now, who knows? It's exciting, like looking at your hometown receding in the distance from under the wing of an Airbus. I might see snow here tomorrow. That's exciting. I didn't bring my boots. That's fine. I'm here with the all the cool-headed detachment of someone who's already broken up with someone, but just hasn't pulled the trigger yet. I'm slashing and burning like crazy these days, and marveling that such green shoots can spring up so quickly from between the still-smoldering cinders. Let it burn.

Unlearning masochism.

I'm feeling myself slide into that all-too-familiar state of burnout. Like an engine run at redline a few miles without oil, I went from drumming along fine last week to being absolutely drained this week. A few weeks ago I began to notice this sinking feeling every time I sat down and planned out my week: "Who am I gonna screw over this week because I overcommitted?" My students? My advisor? The students she charged me with organizing undergrad research? My friends? It's almost always the last. Because it's a positive feedback loop: you cut social engagements because of your workload, and disappear from the lives of your loved ones for long periods of time. They learn that it's futile to call you because you never answer.

This is where you fight back.

Last semester I experienced full-blown psychosomatic revolt --- one weekend, my body refused to let me get out of bed. This semester, the rebels are threatening to burn down the presidential palace and execute me by firing squad if I don't concede to their demands.

It's too easy to replicate the way that your fellow grad students, co-workers, and bosses valorize burnout, as though it's proof you're a hard worker. It's not. It's proof you're a spineless idiot and a poor planner. Ironically, it's the grad students who served in the military that have the least masochistic attitudes to work. One I know works 30 hours a week while pursuing a doctoral degree, and still somehow finds time to bike across the country. Utterly, unspeakably badass.

The biggest valorizers of the burnout cycle seem to be those who still have something to prove. You know, like me. No more. No more.

Perfectionism and failure.

Hi. I'm Sven, and I'm a perfectionist.

Looking back, I know why: I got more validation from what I could do than from who I was. Key figures in my life made it clear to me the costs of being less-than-perfect. My grandmother was one of those people, and though I've cut her completely out of my life (for better or for worse), I still act in ways that originated in my frantic avoidance of missing her expectations. Not just her: teachers praised me for being really fucking smart. My peers too. That was all I heard when I was a kid, and I still wince when I hear that.

So perfectionism is why we fail. We internalize the abusive discourses of this society that compel you to avoid failure at all costs, and I don't know about you, but it's cost me dearly: I've run from relationships, turned down jobs, cancelled my grand plans, and am ruining my health. This cannot be my life anymore. Even if I 'fail'.

So what Buddhism has to say about my condition is that I'm suffering because I'm attached to striving. You can hardly blame me: my culture undervalues compassion in favor of efficacy, and tells us that without the approval of others, we are losers. Buddhism gently disagrees and offers a third way between mindless self-indulgence and the self-inflicted suffering of asceticism. Life sucks, and it's mostly because we make it suck for us and for others.

More on this sometime later, but I had a good birthday, and this string of bad days is really hammering some things home.

Of oil slicks and overreaction

The past three weeks have been very trying, and I feel I've learned some serious lessons, chief among which is 'calm yo shit down, motherfucker!'

Yesterday I installed a new brake caliper on the Noble Savage. The brake pads were worn down to the metal backing plates, and fortunately, I caught the problem before it could do serious damage to my front brake rotor. Because if there's a procedure I'd rather perform on a motorcycle, it's replacing brake pads over replacing a brake rotor. For one, I don't have to take the front wheel off, and for another, I only have to remove four bolts, and not those four bolts plus those for the axle (at least one huge bolt) and rotor (about five of those suckers). And if there's any truth I can impart about motorcycles kept outdoors, is that you're gonna have frozen bolts.

Lesson #1: (more like a reminder) a little foresight saves a lot of time and frustration. If I caught the brake pads before they started to blacken my brake rotor and make weird skiffing noises when I tried to stop, I could have avoided damaging my old caliper in an attempt to change the pads, and I could have enjoyed some seriously awesome riding over the weekend, instead of being cooped up at home waiting for my parts to arrive via USPS.

Now to overreaction. My brakes work well. Very very well. I not only put fresh pads in, cleaned the rotor, but also bled the brake fluid and put all new fluid in the master cylinder. So now my front brake responds to input with considerable alacrity; it's way easier to stop a motorcycle with brake pads than without them.

Riding to Kaleisia today, I was caught in the usual five-o-clock weekday traffic snarl on Bruce B. Downs. The thing about traffic snarls is that they tend to deposit oil on the roads: thousands of cars an hour leaking a few drops here and there tends to leave wild purple-and-blue splashes of motor oil on wet roads, and the intersection of Bruce B. Downs and 131st was something out of Timothy Leary's wildest hallucinations.

No good, I thought, frowning underneath my helmet as I coasted towards the intersection. I cautiously applied my newly-functioning brakes on the rain-and-oil slick roads, and felt the bike lose control. The front wheel locked up, and I started skidding. Fortunately, I was only going about 10mph, and I could arrest the motion with my boots. If it happened at 70mph, I would be typing this from the emergency room. Because if there's one thing that gives motorcyclists nightmares, it's losing traction, particularly with the front wheel.

Source: hellforleathermagazine.com

Rear wheel traction loss is a relatively easily recoverable situation: just release the rear brake, apply a little throttle, and the bike sorts itself out. Failure on part of the bike to sort its own vector out usually results in a 'low-side' crash, in which the majority of damage occurs to the bike and the rider's extremities.

Front wheel traction loss, on the other hand, is really bad. The solution to this is to release the front brake, and hope to the gods that the bike sorts its shit out, because failure to do so results in a 'high-side' crash, in which the rider is thrown from the bike and goes skidding on the road. And if there's one place I don't want to end up, it's skidding on a rain-and-oil slick road in the middle of rush hour traffic, 350-pound bike skidding right behind me.

Lesson learned: with enough training, you can be remarkably calm in life-threatening situations. The worst damage I could have sustained from that crash is some seriously bruised legs and maybe a broken bone or two. The part of my brain prone to overreaction didn't have a chance to put its vote in before the polls closed: my training took over and its only goal was to regain traction. Ten feet later, the front wheel stopped castering wildly and I was back in full control of the motorcycle. My pulse didn't go above 85 until I rounded the corner and realized: I could have been seriously hurt back there.

This brings me to training: in emergencies, you almost never rise to superhuman levels of competence. Instead, you fall back on your training. Training interrupts the processes inherent in us to overreact. It instills in you a reflexive sort of reaction that builds off of the experiences and reflections of those who trained you. We practiced locking up our brakes in motorcycle training, and I've almost never had to fall back on that training, but I'm glad I can access that training when it's necessary.

So, consider this: think about a time recently when you overreacted, and think about how you can train yourself (or be trained by someone) to not overreact next time. For me, it's largely in social situations when I overreact, particularly in dating, where my usual response is to hang on tight, even well past the red-flag-bestrewn path to misery and mutual resentment. Or to not react at all, because I emotionally get off on aloofly disregarding signals. Both arise from the same egotistical defensiveness I'm trying to train out of myself, one day at a time. Because it's just like riding a motorcycle: sometimes it's wise to hit the brakes, and other times, you're better off trusting to ballistics and friction.

Time tracking v. 0.9 (beta)

So, in line with the adage 'what gets measured, gets managed', I've resolved to rein in the sheer amount of time I spend uselessly fucking around, and squeeze as much quality time out of each day by tracking my time.  This is just a beta, by the way: I want to see how it works out in practice, and I'll post the aggregated weekly numbers up on this blog to keep a measure of public accountability.

I hope this will be of some use and value to anyone who wants to better manage their time, particularly for anyone who wants to maximize their productivity while reserving enough time to do other things with their lives, like have friends and hobbies, without unfairly prioritizing one over the others.

Here's an example of what my time tracking template looks like:

Today was a bad day. Normally I spend much less time fucking around, but today I was in kind of a weird mood and didn't need to urgently get anything done. My goal is to get that number in the middle, the 'Fucking-around-to-getting-shit-done' ratio, as low as possible. Today it was 2.1 --- two hours and twenty minutes of fucking around for every one hour spent productively. Yesterday wasn't so bad; that number was more like 1.8. The day before was good until I got derailed: that number was 1.1. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can't at least achieve at least parity.

Ikigai

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese word that basically means 'why you get out of bed in the morning'. I've been searching for mine ever since that word became a part of my lexicon, because without ikigai, life becomes a series of disconnected moments that don't make much sense, except in distantly removed hindsight, and usually then with some considerable regret.

I'm turning 27 soon: three times three. Three is a very significant number to me, because it reminds me of the uselessness of dichotomous thinking. Good and evil, love and hate, black and white --- these categories almost never apply in the real world. There's always a third option.

So, I submit to you, dear reader, my ikigai, a couple of years in the making: I want to map foodsheds. I want to be a net benefit to everyone around me. I want to love without expectation, care without judgment, give wisely but freely of myself in the service of those who come after me. All of this is linked, because all of this is my life.

Source: Columbia University

So back to mapping foodsheds: the reason I think this is a worthy reason to get out of bed in the morning is because we've always lived in a world of limited resources. I'm getting rather tired of hearing people talk about relocalization and alternative economies as though they were unmitigated goods for everyone. They won't be. The future will suck for almost everyone, but it'll be worth the fuss, because the alternative is Malthusian misery for all but a very vicious and lucky few --- and that's not the kind of world I want to see for those who come after me.

Peak oil and climate change have gone from warnings to realities. If you're under the age of 27 (and most of my readership is), you've never experienced a year that wasn't abnormally hot compared to the last hundred-fifty or so years since climate records started to be consistently kept. That's sobering.

These are realities, people, and this is what I'm going to do about it: I'm going to contribute to projects already underway to assess the agricultural capacity of arable land in the United States, and I'm going to come up with a figure, even a rough estimate, of what kind of life we can expect on what amount of arable land we have left. I can tell you right out: it's not going to be a pretty number. The seven billion humans on this planet only exist because we're afloat on a bubble of cheap energy, and we're coming to the end of that cheap energy. If others want to talk about relocalizing, then the least I can do is give them solid facts and figures to substantiate their discussions.

My work in food waste? Connected --- we want to minimize waste and maximize our use of what we discard, in order to support more localized and less energy-intensive food systems. Motorcycles? It's an unfortunate reality of American existence that unless you happen to live in New York or San Francisco or Boston, your life without motor transportation will be considerably limited, and I choose the less-expensive and riskier option. Growth and destiny in interpersonal relationships? In a resource-limited world, all we truly have is each other. No thought, word, or deed is isolated from context, and nothing is every truly futile. Good night.