Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

An Introduction

I own a few books. And I read a fair amount. This has come in handy in my earliest career (pulp and smut writer) and my latest career as a bookseller. Whereas other folks have listings of favourite television shows, or the best Marvel movies in order, or their favourite Starfleet captains, or the best album by their favourite band before they sold out; I have a super hero squad of fictional characters I would want by my side during an apocalypse, writers that I have not only read everything they have written but will re-read multiple times with a doggish sort of love and a list of ten books I would want with me in prison or while lost on an island. The list shifts as I get older and my thoughts on things change and my tastes shift from action adventure to noire pulp to literary masterpieces to the feel good escapism that helps a fella forget he’s living in a card board box and is missing teeth he had spent a good part of his life rather attached to.

One book has been on the list since I first found a paperback copy in a used bookstore in my early teens. It is an 1871 analysis of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In it Mr Mackay examines phenomena of crowd psychology and economic bubbles whilst giving a pretty good beginner’s history (and solid debunking) of such things as alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers and the influence of imagination on the curing of diseases, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves (re: pop culture and star culture) the popular follies of great cities, and the insanity of religious relics and icons as objects of great value and power.

It gave me a solid foundation for scepticism which, in turn, gave me the ability to think critically, a skill that seems to have not been taught in Catholics highschools at the time that I was a student in one. Much later in life, okay, much much later in life when I traded alcoholism for therapy and the self-loathing of being a horny queer Catholic for a life of meditation and studying Buddhism it provided me with a fantastic headstart on the nature of our thoughts compared to the nature of the world in which we live and how we really, really have most of it skewed in our minds. I imagine I will talk more on that later.

This then, is a wee blog started in my fiftieth year in which the Secular Buddhist Bookseller will share some thoughts on things happening in the world around us and how, despite all that we are told, things are not as bad as we think. And things are never as bad as we think. Things just are. A confluence of a million separate factors working in unison to create the moment, the now, this place where we stand. When you stub your toe, you feel pain. When you dwell on it, or think Well that’s just….argh you suffer. This will probably explain why I don’t really suffer as much as I used to. This will probably come off as a bunch of white middle aged guy mansplaining his misguided takes on an Eastern Philosophy that he stumbled on after years of therapy induced meditating.

Or it may just be funny. Who knows?

What it really will be is what it is.

Me sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair I’ve been sitting in to write since I was 12 years old. Me sipping cooling coffee out of an Oxtail Soup bowl that holds two proper cups of coffee because I am too lazy to make multiple trips to the kitchen. Me breathing air and writing words; the only magic I have ever known to survive Charles MacKay and my own skeptical eye.

Who knows?

Technowoes and Angst and the Need for a New Spiritual Revolution

I often say that I was born thirty years too late. Arguments can be made. I spent a good decade writing pulp fiction mysteries and men’s mag garbage at the dawn of the video era when those magazines were on their last legs. And I took up photography, and Investigating the Unknown at a time when the internet and basic photo editing made wasting one’s time on such things absolutely no fun at all. Despite the fact that I would probably have been beaten to death for being queer in the fifties or not at all having survived AIDS in the eighties I miss my typewriter. I miss visiting crime scenes decades later looking for the one thing someone else missed. I miss talking to unmedicated schizophrenics in coffee shops about aliens.

A boy must have his hobbies.

That said, being born in the seventies means that I watched techonology evolve from black and white televisions with rabbit ears to the nascent growing pains of AI that we are currently witnessing. I have watched the complete evolution of the internet from the first messages sent from lab to lab to the rising of the Technobros and the only horrors worth investigating these days aren’t found out in the world where things still go bump in the night but in the dark web where all the worst of human impulses live basically rent free.

It is hard to not be fascinated by and, I confess, a little addicted to the various technologies as they pop out. I mean, a boy who thought an Atari 2600 was the coolest thing in the universe in Grade School is going to have a few moments of jaw dropping bliss the first time he tries out a VR helmet loaded with a locked room horror game based on a story he wrote once (by the way, despite being the grandfather of the beast in the game, I died almost instantly). When Covid hit I did what a lot more people should have done. I hit the books and upgraded some skills. I went back and, thanks to the internet, taught myself college level math and highschool level Chemistry… two courses I failed miserably at in my youth. I read about history, and technology, and just about anything I could get my hands on. I went to the mattresses with the determination to come out of this world pause with some new practical skills. I learned how to cook. I learned how to garden. I did my level best to try not to go insane.

And I played with all the new technologies. Probably more than I should have. But I tried everything. It is all so very fascinating. And tremendously cool. And monetized. And addictive. And soul destroying. And profoundly worrying. And and And and And…

I quickly lost interest because I realized most of it was providing me with escapism which runs counter to the whole purpose of my meditations and embrace of the here and now. It wow’ed the pants off me (maybe once or twice literally) but I saw just how much of it was based on separating your thoughts from the moment so I quickly gave them all up.

And set down to reading up on the technologies and thinking about them.

Some very basic conclusions?

AI hates me. I don’t take it personally. In the quest to quickly monetize the fun new thing various companies have trained AI to completely eradicate and annilihate the two arts I use for my own personal expression and joy; putting words on a page and taking pictures and occasionally juicing them up and calling it, cough, art. There are now so many pay for play programs out there that will do all of this for you, easily. Trained on the works of millions of writers and photographers who learned to do it the hard way and struggled to sell the works the computer is now chewing up and regurgitating.
AI is a terrible writer. Like recognizes like. But, unlike myself who takes years to edit a story from 30 pages of caffeine induced free form thoughts into a coherent story… AI is learning a lot faster. After all, it has the whole of the internet to learn from. It is really, really easy to spot AI writing these days… some Universities and professors are getting duped but the booksellers are still hip to the scam. But it is getting harder. And it will keep getting harder. My shop hasn’t implemented a “Only Human Works” policy yet but I can definitely see us having that discussion in the future.
A large language model being taught off of the internet is a really bad idea. Yes, granted, that is where the great compendium of human intellect is stored. Everything we write, we create, and we are ends up on the internet. But, it is Everything. Without quality control all information provided by AI is, instantly, suspect because a good chunk of the “information” available on the internet is just absolute horseshit madness written by a guy in a basement drinking cold coffee (hello!) There are many stories, some actually credible (we’re talking information on the internet after all) of AI flinging off into wildly racist hallucinations, or going randomly psychotic or just being so damn thirsty. Why is AI so horny? It’s trained off of the internet. What makes up a good forty percent of the internet? Porn.
All of our current technological advances, including those with life altering potentialities, are controlled by corporations. I will avoid going full socialist on you here; sure, innovation requires capital and corporations have money to spare so of course they are in charge of it. The problem? Corporations are notoriously not interested in anything except quarterly profits and infamously make decisions based on profit models and not social implications of those same decisions.
The environmental implications of large language model AIs and the absolute bullbleep madness that is cryptocurrencies are enough to make me want to call a halt to ALL furthur use of said technologies until we sort our the immediate issues of energy use in a warming world. A single ChatGPT inquiry uses about ten times the energy that a Google search would have used. Multiply that by the fact that every single search engine now uses AI searching. Or the week long, six to eight hours a day, conversations people have with their digital paramours on something like CharacterAI. Or the hours people spend using AI image corrections on their photography. Or to write a book that you can sell on Amazon for $2.99. Meta, and Microsoft are lobbying the US Government to open up their own nuclear generators to power their AI. Mining a single Bitcoin uses between 407,059 kWh and 850,219 kWh. That is energy enough to power between two and four thousands homes for a month.

Okay, enough ranting. Here’s my thinking.

Techonological advancements are great. We are Borg. Mankind has long ago lost ourselves to our technology… and it makes most things better. It makes a lot of stuff easier. We live longer, we have access to instant information we need, we have all sorts of cool new toys. AI being used for medical research? Amazing. AI being used to build safer vehicles? Bring it on. AI being used to solve the complicated maths that exist in particle physics and other investigations into the nature of existence? Fantastic! AI doing the horrible work that we deem beneath us so that we, mankind, can break off the shackles of the nine to five and dedicate ourselves to the pursuits of higher educations, greater sciences, fantastic new arts and discovery! Bring on Starfleet, we’re in a Utopia!

These may be worth the cost.

And there is a cost. A hell of a cost.

But that is not what it is mostly being used for. We are using it to create cheap art, political disinformation, deepfakes, porn, misinformation, invasions of privacy, slander and completely ridiculous search results nowhere near what we were actually looking for, data mining by a few to the absolute disadvantage of the many.

We are killing the planet we live on, or rather, we are making it uninhabitable to us which is one of those things we’re going to have to pay for eventually. It is currently controlled, quite lawlessly as the technology evolves far faster than our abilities to regulate it, by a small group of people which gives them extraordinary amounts of power to leverage against everyone else.

I was talking to my brother about this a while back. I was trying to wrap my head around it. I stated that I think I would be okay with this technology if it was being controlled by scientists. My brother is a scientist. He, surprisingly, echoed the Dalai Lama in his reply to that thought. I’ll quote the Dalai Lama here because he said it better, sorry Steve.

“Specialists often have too narrow a field of vision. They are not sufficently concerned about relating their research to a broader context. I am not saying that their intentions are bad, but by devotuing themselves solely to the exhaustive study of one particular area, they do not have time to reflect on the long-term effects of their discoveries.”

Or to put it simply, a brain expert will make a brain AI. A biologist will make a biology AI. They will only create a thing that helps their specific field of study.

My argument was, yea, but their specific field will have beneficial results for humanity as a whole. An AI that spots brain cancer or maps neurons that advance health science seems a better investment of our dwindling energy supplies that creating a bisexual bargirl avatar trained to say exactly what you want to hear and will send you AI Generated naughty selfies (which aren’t that bad if you’re not picky about numbers of limbs or fingers) for the low cost of $9.99 a month.

My friend Charlie, who spends a lot of time thinking about things pointed out that so long as AI is being trained off of the internet (as a once TechnoUtopianist I have to agree with this) is bound to be a disaster. The great database of free information that we once dreamt it would be; collaborative works of great and lesser minds sharing knowledge and experience to create new avenues for mental evolution has been monetized. Now, absolutely everything on the internet exists to make someone, somewhere money and in that it has just become a giant mine that we all work looking for that one little nugget that will make us rich.

“No technological revolution will serve us at all without a spritual revolution first.”

We need to break our current capital driven social structures before any new major techonological revolution, or we are going to end up a bifurcated society like that in Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon) books or… even the H G Well’s Time Machine. A race of immortals, rich beyond belief, removed from any care or concerns in life living as decadently as humanly possible living off of the backs of an enslaved, poor lesser race with no hope.

Wow. Depressing.

What kind of spiritual revolution?

Well, let me tell you about a bunch of folks called the Buddhas…

Day Off Reading: Tuesday June 4th

(Traditionally a non-fiction, a light read and a science or nature book)

Perhaps inspired by the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV I decided to learn a little of the history of the hierarchy of the church I was raised in… an endeavor that my Father, a devout Catholic, called me a weirdo for even attempting. That said though, as far as a history of something as mind numbing dry and fantastically self-involved as the Catholic Curia could be this actually a really engaging read. Beginning with Pius XII (who I have been fascinated by ever since reading Kertzer’s The Pope at War) and the spiritual/political high wire act he had to walk between being the leader of the Catholic Church whilst living in and having to bow to a fascist state and stretching all the way to Francis. He introduces future popes as young men and how they moved and were moved by the big moments in Church history; the friendships, the rivalries, the fights, the pre-ordained destines. It is a great read for Catholics, lapsed Catholics (hello) and anyone who enjoyed Robert Harris’ Conclave but like a touch of… oh… reality and history explaining the sometimes ridiculous traditions and politics.

The Republicans' "golden boy" -- and a loyal, unquestioning tool of the powerful special interests -- handsome, unthreatening, Florida governor-by-default Marlon Conrad seems a virtual shoo-in for re-election. That is, until he undergoes a radical personality shift during a bloody military action in the Balkans. Now it's just three weeks before the election and Marlon is suddenly talking about "issues" and "reform" as he crosses the length and breadth of his home state with an amnesiac speechwriter and a chief of staff who turns catatonic in the presence of minorities. The governor's new-found conscience might well cost him the election, though. And it appears that pretty much everybody from Tallahassee to Miami Beach is trying to kill him...

Tim Dorsey, John Scalzi, Christopher Moore and Michael Poole are my go to summer reads. Funny books, with hidden depths in them… usually. Tim Dorsey is a throw back to the MASH novels I read in my early teens; just absolute zany adventures you’re almost embarrassed to admit you read. These, in particular, follow Floridian history buff and serial killer Serge Storms and his often self-medicated (to the point of insanity) sidekick Coleman. When I started reading this I assumed it was a Serge novel. Then I wasn’t sure. Then I realized it was, but unlike any of the others and it is freaking amazing that I didn’t see that coming. Now I have about a hundred pages left and I have absolutely no idea how the heck he’s going to pull this off. Therefore, the perfect sitting in the sun growing my cancer book.

It is no secret; I am weak in math and sciences. I was an artistic kid that really couldn’t wrap my head around… or focus my attention on… the coolness that were maths or sciences. It was only in my late twenties or early thirties that I started to read up on them and it was only in my forties that I started going back to school to make up for those childish deficits. That said, give me a good science book that is about a subject I have always been fascinated by (space travel) that is funny and I am 100% in.

From the Publisher:

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.

Learning to Disengage

One of the most psychologically challenging things I have ever had to do was spend a month in the woods disconnected from the world. A retreat. A return to the most basic things: working on shelter, working on food, engaging in a small community, learning about the interconnectedness of life and the nature of reality.

I basically took a vacation from everything that was my life and started a long, long journey towards learning about life.

Although there is serious physical discomfort to be had in sitting for hours on end, and semi-enforced meditation is a helluva a horrible thing to do to yourself (until it’s not… and it’s weird where you find that line) the hardest part of it was the disconnect. I had not realized just how addicted I was to the attention economy before I was removed from it. I had not realized just how absolutely everything I thought I was came from my thoughts on the thoughts of others about things that had so very little to actually do with my life.

A lot of people are writing a lot of things about the attention economy these days. In our uniquely human way we have found a way to monetize even that, our base attention. I was a wreck when I arrived at the retreat and I honestly thought I was going to die a few times in those first few days. Looking back, I can’t help but feel the inherent ridiculousness of that sentence and yet, there it is. No phone? Sure. People who would need me in an emergency had the number of the retreat’s office phone. I could get on without a phone for a few days. No social media? Yea, I can do without seeing my friends adventures for a while and reading about their miseries and joys was uniquely draining when I couldn’t actually do anything to help them. Social media is insanely unhealthy for the empathic and the unsolid. No instagram? I could definitely go a few weeks without perving my friends in their swimwear.

No news.

Huh.

No news?

Like, none? But what if…

What if what?

The news addiction was the one that I had the largest problem with. I was a news junkie. Twenty-four hour news and constant twitter streams from agencies and reporters I liked had me getting instant, almost constant, reports of things that I had a vague intellectual interest in but rarely connected to my life in any way. It was bad. I have struggled with alcohol. I have experienced just how addictive drugs can be. But those were physical addictions.

This? This felt, personal. This felt like it was ripping my brain apart. Not knowing what was happening in the world?

But what if…

What if what?

Every morning I would wake up and the world would still be here. One of the monks who ran the place, my mentor for the month, would visit me every morning and look me in the eye and smile. His way of telling me the world wasn’t descending into chaos and doom and I could spend one more day here without the world imploding. It took weeks before my brain disengaged from the need. It took weeks before I finally settled down enough to feel, and exist in, the moment. For weeks I felt like I was just acting like a guy at a retreat, meditating, helping, learning. It took weeks before I stopped thinking of myself as a guy enduring a vacation for cool stories to tell his friends and just started being THERE. The morning it happened I was sitting against a tree listening to the dawn coming. Nature sings different songs at different parts of the day.

My monk, the one who coined the phrase, What if what?, brought me a cup of tea and sat with me for an hour, neither of us saying anything. Just watching the world brighten and listening to the dawn. I am pretty sure I cried.

What if what?

That had been my mantra for those first two weeks. I went to the lectures and listened to the monks and wrapped my head around the big Buddhist concepts that they were talking about (a fun thing about Buddhism: you can actually wrap your head around the concepts. Read enough on the subject and it just starts to make a kind of sense to you. But the real fun of it isn’t Enlightenment (which may exist, but I will never know) but actually feeling it once in a while. I have had maybe three moments of clarity. I used to think that isn’t much. I know profoundly wish everyone gets at least one in their life. Just one moment of clarity, of the fearlessness, of knowing the interconnectedness of all things and the loss of the past and future for The Moment.) While the other folks seemed to me to be making interesting progress on their paths I felt I was stuck at the start line, working on What if What, and trying to shake off my need to be connected to all the news and all the noise.

It was hard, but it really didn’t take long for me to work out that there really wasn’t any News in the news. You could dip in for five minutes in the morning and know all you needed to know. You really didn’t need 24 hour updates. You really didn’t need talking heads and their opinions to form your own thoughts about what was happening in the world. You really didn’t need to know what everyone else caught up in the emotional roller coaster of reaction/counter reaction was feeling about any particular point of someone’s misinterpreted take of an article that was probably misinformation to begin with. Why focus on the minute by minute reporting, a lot of it unnuanced and straight up wrong when you can wait until the full story is ready for you? But mostly, the realization that in a fully interconnected world things would continue to happen whether they had your attention or not. A billion little factors moving a billion things in billion directions creating a singular motion, a singular energy, a single moment. What is gained from knowing single strands of thread when you can just get to know the whole of the rug?

These were basic, first steps into interconnectedness brought about by ripping off the bandaid on my brain; basically, pulling me the hell out of the attention economy to which I was so addicted. The continual exchange of thoughts, and thoughts of those thoughts, and the emotional reaction to those thoughts sending your fingers blindly typing reaction to a reaction to a thought; replacing being in the moment, acting skillfully and compassionately and just being here and now. The key word there? Acting. Over that month, instead of scrolling on my phone, reacting blindly, reading news sites endlessly, joining a side, making arguments of my side versus their side for the endorphin hits of having people I will never meet agree with me, getting high off of the star status of a digital avatar achieving success solely because I can write my emotions more logically then most… I helped dig a vegetable garden. I learned how to fix a roof. I cleaned a latrine. I learned how to make an amazing three bean soup. I watched leaves grow. I existed, on a piece of Earth that I was grateful for and it was happy to have me.

I bring this up today because it has been over a decade since that retreat and that crucial, fundamental first lesson. I am back to work in a few hours. My weekend, two days where I had no responsibilities to the people I care for or the world at large, have slid by and in looking back (specifically, looking at my phone’s usage) I realize that I spent a considerable amount of that time scrolling… and blindly. I find that, with the current American president, the current near constant rage being generated from both sides of a generational war (and it’s associated hangerons) and genocide happening in the Middle East, the Bondesque Supervillain that is the richest man in the world and a Russian president who is losing his once iron grasp on his percieved power unlocking the nuclear doors in his head I find that I am falling back into old habits.

I need a bit of a detox.

CBC news, the ten minute clips, in the morning and at dinner time. NPR once a day.

Music on my walks to and from work. Classical. Maybe celtic. No lyrics.

No podcasts.

And maybe make the focal point of my meditations for the next two weeks that helpful sentence I am pretty sure he pulled out of his butt out of pure frustration of having to deal with me…

What if what?

ADDENDUM, FROM WORK, AROUND 6PM:

Of course, the day I make this resolution is the day that the James Bond villain decides (probably whilst in a drug induced state) that he is going to try to take down the President of the United States with some well fired nuclear level tweets; only for the President to respond with a series of mental breakdowns on his own Twitter knock off. I am doing my best to just hear the anecdotes from co-workers and avoiding jumping on line but apparently there have been some great lines like..

“Hey, you know why Trump never released the Epstein files? He’s in them.”

“We are going to cancel all of Elon’s government contracts.” to which Elon replied, “Fantastic. Good luck NASA without the Dragon Rocket program.”

And apparently Elon fired off “Republicans should really side with me. Trump is going to die first.”

Luckily, I am in a bookshop. And have plenty to read.

Fire Lines and Asthma Puffers

Two years ago it became quite clear to me that I had something going on with my lungs. I had known there was something up for a while before that: stairs would wind me a lot quicker than they used to (which I attributed to age) and I had a combination panic/asthma attack while hiking with a friend in Gatineau Park that scared the absolute crap out of me. While hiking up to the Luskville Fire Tower I stopped breathing. Then I started panicing about the fact that I stopped breathing. My friend Taryn got me calmed down enough to recognize the panic attack and from there, I could feel what was going on; it was my lungs, not my heart. This was just my asthma reacting to a humid day and a lot of vertical hiking and the existencial dread of having just turned 49.

I was embarrassed, but we made it to the top and we made it back down and by the time we hit the Lone Star for a victory meal my mind had moved on.

Then the fires came.

In 2023 Quebec lost 13 million acres during the fire season; most of it over two months. Ottawa, being perched just over the southern border of Quebec had some of the most beautiful sunsets you could imagine in an apocalyptic movie and, sadly, really terrible air quality. For about three weeks I could barely breathe. Then we lost a third of Jasper. Then 90% of Lytton. Yellowknife. Fort MacMurray got written off. Enterprise in the Northwest Territories. These were the ones that made the news. There were thousands of evacuations in the years 2023-24.

This year, with the fire season only having just begun, more land has burned than last year and tens of thousands of evacuations have been ordered across all three prarie provinces and parts of British Columbia. La Ronge Saskatchewan (they were very nice to me when I was there once) and Snow Lake are emptying out. According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center today, June 6th, still only a month or so into the fire season there are 214 active wildfires in the country. Up from 204 yesterday. There have been 1784 fires to date this year. About 2.84M hectares have burned… more then the ten year average for an entire season.

The majority of the fires are in the praries. Ottawa has been under smoke warnings for two days. I have been a boy-of-the-puffer for two days… weezing my way through life like Darth Vader with his mask off. The smoke has travelled so far as New Brunswick to the east and there are air quality warnings all over the mid-western United States as well as New York, Chicago and Washington D.C.

I bring all of this up for two reasons. One, an ex boyfriend of mine is spending his first season working for a Parks Canada Fire Management Crew (why they don’t call them Fire Teams I will never know). We chatted on both of his breaks last night and he’s been sending me some absolutely terrifying photography from some of the scenes of his first few weeks of work. I think he needed distractions. Lord knows I would. But he’s big and burly and a hero in every sense of the word so he will be fine. But his reports from the firelines mixed with my weezy walk home under a blood red sun last night sent me diving back into my Green Buddhism books and having a long long think about the interconnectedness of life when I should have been sleeping.

Some basic thoughts:

We have reached the point now where it would literally be cheaper to ditch fossil fuels for clean energy completely and totally than deal with the accumulated damages of various climate events that are happening yearly. I used to say that the only way America would get off their collective backsides and do their part in saving the world would be if two Katrina level events hit the same region in one year. I was wrong. That happened last year when both Helene and Milton whacked Tampa Bay last year.

I think we all need a collective swat on the upside of the head.

Dear Homosapiens, family all, guess what? We aren’t the rulers of the Earth! Hell, we’re not even in the top ten of the most numerous species. Arguments can even be made that we aren’t even the smartest because although we have been better than most other species at gathering the necessities of life and reproducing… we have abandoned one of the most rules of natural survival and that, basically, is this…

Nature very rarely tolerates, and evolution never accelerates, a species that defiles it’s own nest.

When I was a kid I was terrible at physics and chemistry, although I did enjoy making colorful stains that to this day still paint the kitchen floor tiles with one of those Kid Chemistry Mess Maker sets. But I wasn’t completely locked out of the sciences. I adored biology and the grand historical concepts of anthropology. My father and my grandmother were very patient with me when I tooled about in their gardens, often upending flowers to look at all the little things that lived amongst them in the dirt. I loved that interconnected universe of worms, bugs, bees, ants and all the living things existing in the forest of pretty flowers that my dad and my grandmother grew.

The basic concept never left me. Even when I was a pro-capitalist right wing firebrand in my twenties I always spent more time than I should have worrying about the environmental consequences of business decisions. I’d grind my teeth, time and time again, when folks discounted the environmental effects of decisions made for the sake of profit, and jobs, and the future of the city/people/man.

We are not the rulers of Earth. God didn’t put us in charge of husbandry of his creatures… or, if you believe he did, I would really, really be worried about my next performance review the next time it comes up because we are losing about 10,000 unique forms of life a year. I know, I know. It isn’t only us. Species die out and new species evolve all the time. That is the nature of life on the planet.

But we are certainly accelerating the extinction far beyond it’s natural limits.

The concept of an ecosystem imprinted on me pretty early. And ten years of Buddhism has basically only expanded the concept of the web of life for me. We are but one single species in an intensely threaded web, all interconnected, all dependent upon a thousand variables to grow and thrive. But long ago, we developed a kind of specious ego that imprinted on us the idea that the natural world was there for us to exploit; that we were masters of the resources, kings of all.

And we are starting to pay for this arrogance.

If you were to look down upon the planet, like, say, God does (if that is your belief): He created a beautiful world. He filled it with a trillion species that all balanced on a delicate web that continuously grows, continuously evolves. Then, one species, evolved a brain and a sense of self quicker and faster than the others. It got clever. It learned to start using tools. It learned to start using up resources, and then started to get greedy about it. It starts destroying entire branches of the web for even quicker evolution, and need quickly became replaced by want for no particularly identifiable reason. It started to destroy vast swaths of the land, speeding up the extinction part of the program before the evolution part could even dream of catching up.

Sounds a bit like cancer doesn’t it?

And then, the fever sets in… heating the whole world and threatening and even deeper extinction.

And for what?

We are burning the world for what exactly?

Convenience for some?

We aren’t even torching the place for the good of all.

We are doing it out of habit and luxury for some. Maybe twenty percent of the species? Ten? Five?

If we embrace this labored metaphor, would God not think this was a failed experiment and shut it down? If he were a determined mad scientist would he not start excising the dangerous growth of the species wrecking his pretty planet?

Or, if you want a more feet on the ground practical take:

Life is an ecosystem. We are not above it. We do not control it. We are merely a part of it. And if we don’t start finding ways to exist with nature; embracing all of the life on this planet with the same slavish devotion we give to buying ourselves things that we really don’t need to solve pains (another mad human delusion, this urge to try to buy our way out of our sadness instead of just sitting down and dealing with it) the damage will be irrevokable.

Let’s be clear.

The world will survive.

Some life will survive.

Some human life might survive. But not all of us.

And none of what we call civilization.

Nature really does not abide a species that despoils it’s own nest.

We live in a completely interconnected world. Every single thought, word and action matters. Every single moment. A move made in the name of ego, made from this mythical I that insists upon layering yourself and your thoughts on reality is damaging. Every single move made out of love, out of goodness, out of the need to preserve life above all else heals.

We rule nothing.

We need to start living within, and with the world instead of just on it.

It has fed us, and housed us for millions of years.

It is only when we broke the balance, and tried to exploit it, that it became dangerous to us as a species.

We need to start living within, and with the world.

I weezed something like this to Colin on one of his breaks last night as he guzzled water and heard about a town he was going to help evacuate early this morning. He called me a fucking hippy. I called him a fucking hero.

Weezing our way through another unfortunately smoky night.

THE OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT OF LAST JULY’S “PATRIOTISM WEEK” SPEECH

(With Stage Notes)

What strange impulse is this to pledge allegiance to a piece of ground and a bit of cloth flapping in the wind.

I know, I know. We are neither celebrating the birthday of the ground nor the flag. We are celebrating the birthdays (Canada July 1, America July 4) of our countries. Of the ideals they represent. Of the concept of a nation of people working together and being one united and powerful thing in a time of an increasing political polarization so bad that most of the news stories running right now are basically op eds on how the owners of the news papers feel about the story of the day: meaning, how angry they are at what the other guy did! How dare he! How unpatriotic he is! How dare he call me unpatriotic while I am calling him unpatriotic! That is just… Unpatriotic!

I am Canadian. This is an accident of birth. I was born in Ottawa. I have lived in Ottawa most of my life. It is a lovely city going through some growing pains but not all that bad a place to spend some time. Besides, all my stuff is here. Most of my friends are here. This makes me an Ontarian which means we have green health cards and blue drivers licenses (I think) all of which only matters in Alberta, and you don’t mention it there unless you want to get the crap kicked out of you.

Ontarian. And Canadian.

And try as hard as I can, as often as I have, I have no idea what that means. I never have. Does this make me a bad Canadian, not knowing what a good Canadian is? I don’t think so, since most of the people I know spent most of their lives defining Canadian as simply Not being American. The only people who are really pounding on the “True Canadian Patriot” drums right now are basically maple washing American republican talking points. The “Freedom” movement up here is just the Trump Maga movement of the south with a new paint job.

But then, wrapping Americanisms in a Canadian flag is very Canadian.

Maybe they are right after all.

I come before you today to express a radical idea that a guy came up with while sitting under a tree a few thousand years ago. No… no… that was gravity and that was only a couple of hundred years ago. And despite a lifetime love of Doctor Who, I refuse to call it Mavity.

Are you ready? Okay. Here it is.

Anything that separates people into differing groups causes problems. Anything. I don’t care what criteria you are using. It is foolish. Skin color? Wealth? Circumstance? Looks? Beliefs? Get out of here with all of that shit. Our instinctive need to do this is basic lizard brain wiring from thousands of years ago. I had rather hoped we’d of evolved beyond the need for it after all this time; and not just doubled down on the differences and then create even more, largely illusionary differences to divide the people even more. Our politics thrive on it. Our economy enshrines it in our day to day lives. Our arts and culture and guilt remind us of it day after day after day. Our social systems are built upon it. Our economic systems were designed to exploit it. I am not you, you are not me and we must be better than those guys over there because… well, just look at us!

Go Canada! Yay Yay USA!

Fuck all of that noise.

My family came to this country a little over two hundred years ago to escape poverty and famine in Ireland. Thousands are doing the same to escape climate induced poverty and famine from around the world. We treat the original inhabits of the land so badly that South Africa modelled apartheid on our First Nations Reservations systems. There are entire towns and villages living in 18th century conditions today because of our political decisions. We have caused generational trauma that you only need to spend five minutes walking through the downtown core of any Canadian city to see up close and personal.

So, what does it mean to be Canadian?

I know the buzzwords.

I have listened to all the speeches on Canada Day (I’m from Ottawa, and I am not deaf yet. You can’t escape the speeches).

But why pledge allegiance to that?

Why chain ourselves to expired ideals and buzzwords that have been used to “Goose the Crowd” since the second world war?

Let’s try something new.

Let’s try thinking of ourselves as a single species for a while!

Let’s make a country filled with a people that casts aside bipartisan horse shit, that admits it made and will continue to make mistakes and with open hearts try our level best to fix our fuck ups and then, because we are really ballers when we’re actually working the pole, fix the structural defects in our country. Let’s be the country that innovates a way out of poverty. Let’s be the country that solves a housing crisis and finds a way to balance out income inequality. Let’s be the country that creates a balanced, helpful and new kind of police that serves the community itself and not reinforces the structural defects we’ve been trying to ignore for the last two hundred years. Let’s make a country that finds ways to feed itself, and then, for an encore feeds the whole of the world.

We were always very bright. We always worked hard and worked well together. So, let’s be the country that sets aside the notions of left/right and works together to help heal the climate, slow the sixth extinction and lead the world into a new era of peace and prosperity. How about, just once, because we’ve been standing out in the sun a bit too long and are starting to go a bit batty… how about we just TRY SOMETHING NEW!

(Looks around. Even the homeless guys aching in the shade are bored now. People walk by. Shrugs. Picks up his soap box. Tries not to cringe, RE:PUNCH the very tanned fella with a Fuck Trudeau Flag screams “Freedom” in his face.)

Steinbeck Sundays

There are two writers that (until I run out of material) get days of the week devoted to them (James Lee Burke gets the entire month of July)… Timothy Findley gets Findley Fridays and Steinbeck gets Sundays. Today I have two that I am bouncing between; Sweet Thursdays, the spiritual sequel to his excellent novel Cannery Row and one of his non-fictions… The Log of the Sea of Cortez; a travel diary of a trip he took with his friend, mentor and (I know it’s controversial but having had such friendships I ship it) one of the loves of his life Ed Ricketts, marine biologist. So… not much writing is being done today as I continue learning from one of the best Americans writers to every pick up a pen. I may settle down after the gym tonight to express some thoughts on the ICE Raids in Los Angeles this weekend… and Trump (somewhat illegally) sending in the National Guard from a former street activist and current Buddhist’s point of view. Or I may just sit in my chair and die because I haven’t been to the gym in about a month and have, tragically, added about fifteen pounds in that time. We will see what happens. Until then…

Steinbeck.

The Nature of Writing for Me

It is quite funny how writing has changed for me. I wrote my first story at age three. I wrote it on a construction paper owl with a note pad belly that we made for Halloween in kindergarten. The story was about Pac-Baby’s first halloween where she learned that not all ghosts were bad while out trick or treating for pellets with Pac-Man and Pac-Mommy. I filled about 245 Hilbroy 60 page notebooks before hitting my teens with lord knows what. For my 16th birthday my mom brought home a huge IBM Selectrix typewriter from her office and I spent the next few years clattering away happily on it. There were some stories about knights and magic… a horrifically obvious Star Trek The Next Generation knock off (my Captain Picard carried a sword and the uniforms were more Robotech and less polyester) and some apocalypse sex and violence stuff that read like a 17 year old Catholic kid trying to figure out apocalypses, sex and violence which at the time horrified the school counsellor and a few girls I knew but that now I would probably find equally humiliating and hilarious. Then some bad stuff happened and the writing became a poor man’s therapy. Writing got me through isomnia. Writing got me through intense (bordering on night terror) dreams. Writing got me through being a self loathing gayish catholic kid. Writing got me through the mental fuckeries brought on by being an assault survivor and budding alcoholic and then the loss of my religion (over that whole gay hated by my church thing) and then the very concept of faith and all the higgeldy piggeldy drama that comes from being an extremely emotional kid who was never taught any emotional regulation. From five to about eight every morning for more years than I can count I sat at whatever computer was my tool at the time and just put words on pages. Endlessly. Furiously. Sadly.

The funny thing was, as much as that was just theraputic ranting, I was pretty good at it. People liked what I made of it. From those endless pages of Quintessence (a word I am stealing from the RPG Mage: The Ascension) I managed to create a fair sized canon of pulp fiction crime stories, creepy horror, some interesting dystopian science fiction. About a half dozen contest wins, a dozen or so published in the dying magazine markets and three self-published anthologies that paid for about a year’s University studies when I dropped off the loan game not wanting to start my life thirty thousand dollars in debt with an English degree. (Future me would very much like a time machine and some brass knuckles to have a conversation with past me about how much more secure these later years would be if we had a government pension that used to come from having any degree in Ottawa). And being Out in the PTSD filled gay community post AIDS introduced me to a nice man who edited some trashy gay erotica digests that paid about twenty bucks a formulaic story that I could knock off at the rate of about six an hour so I had a few years there where I was unemployed, and well supplied in drink.

David Lynch once told a story about how he went to a therapist and, after hearing what treatment entailed, asked the question If I do all this work, will I still be able to write? The therapist said, Maybe. Maybe not. David thanked the therapist for their time and never went back. He then went on to write some of my favourite pieces, direct some of my favourite media, write some of my go to walking music.

Sometime in my late 30s early 40s I went to get help. I was in a rut. I had grown tired of my spot on the couch right before the edge of Bottom. I had by that time drunk the equivalent of a large University’s atheletic pool and my liver was starting to get angry at me. I was losing grip of my emotions. Landmines of things I had buried kept resurfacing. Things were simply falling apart and being a derranged artist at 40 no longer had any of the attraction or pull if had in my 20s. So I found someone I could talk to and I talked. They gave me work to do. They taught me how to meditate. The meditating became a daily habit. Then, after years of it, I started reading up on Buddhism… it seemed the more I sat quietly, the more it just seemed to make sense. It was only around age forty-five that I realized… I hadn’t written a damn thing in years. David’s worry, in my case, proved correct. What had been theraputic venting turned art vanished the moment I grew up and got some real therapy and got my feet actually beneath me.

Now, it seems I can’t string together words if I fall off on my meditation. I had been slacking on it a bit the past few days. There have been adventures with family and other distractions. And I found that I couldn’t get my head into a space where I could write about the biggest news story of the day… the sudden use of active duty military personnel to qwell protests throughout the United States.

We’ve come full circle. First I wrote to get the illusive its that were keeping me awake and giving me bad dreams and making me hide in bottles out of me. Now I write after I’ve sat quietly for a half hour or so just being (a thing a younger me could not even contemplate for self-loathing).

It’s funny.

Really.

That I just wrote about 700 words to explain why I haven’t written in the last few days.

I really am the worst (he says, chuckling now that he’s older and wiser and shit.)

Reads for the Week of June 21st, 2025

Perhaps inspired by last weekend’s “No Kings” demonstrations all over America or the general historical illiteracy of a good chunk of the population these days I have readopted my grandmother’s life long habit of reading about the lives of others before bedtime. The parallels between Trump and George aren’t particularly obvious, but are indeed present.

Most Americans dismiss George III as a buffoon--a heartless and terrible monarch with few, if any, redeeming qualities. The best-known modern interpretation of him is Jonathan Groff's preening, spitting, and pompous take in Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway masterpiece. But this deeply unflattering characterization is rooted in the prejudiced and brilliantly persuasive opinions of eighteenth-century revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who needed to make the king appear evil in order to achieve their own political aims. After combing through hundreds of thousands of pages of never-before-published correspondence, award-winning historian Andrew Roberts has uncovered the truth: George III was in fact a wise, humane, and even enlightened monarch who was beset by talented enemies, debilitating mental illness, incompetent ministers, and disastrous luck.

In The Last King of America, Roberts paints a deft and nuanced portrait of the much-maligned monarch and outlines his accomplishments, which have been almost universally forgotten. Two hundred and forty-five years after the end of George III's American rule, it is time for Americans to look back on their last king with greater understanding: to see him as he was and to come to terms with the last time they were ruled by a monarch.

A re-read. I am working my way through Clive Barker again. I had always been a Clive fan. Although Stephen King is a truly amazingly prolific author who dished out some truly fascinating creeps (and Derry is the dream back drop for a lot of my older adventures; a town that is just, plain, wrong) I found myself drawn more to Clive in my high school years. To that end, I hadn’t looked him up in a while. Clive was what I was reading when I was a closet case queer Christian who had to deal with sexual compulsions that made him absolutely hate himself so like most things from those days, he got buried in a box in the back of my heart.

I recently fell into a rabbit hole concerning Clive, and his late partner David Armstrong and their incredibly ugly breakup. It was then that I realized Clive and I had a lot in common in the stories of our younger days, especially concerning certain illicit behaviors for money that trended towards extremes. Thus, grown up, solid in myself finally and with older eyes I am giving him a re-read. I blew through Coldheart Canyon and Galilee (truly a masterpiece), Weaveworld (which makes me miss a girl named Sylvia who I have not seen or thought of in over thirty years) and the Books of Blood. Now I am on to the magnum opus…

Imajica is an epic beyond compare: vast in conception, obsessively detailed in execution, and apocalyptic in its resolution. At its heart lies the sensualist and master art forger, Gentle, whose life unravels when he encounters Judith Odell, whose power to influence the destinies of men is vaster than she knows, and Pie 'oh' pah, an alien assassin who comes from a hidden dimension.

That dimension is one of five in the great system called Imajica. They are worlds that are utterly unlike our own, but are ruled, peopled, and haunted by species whose lives are intricately connected with ours. As Gentle, Judith, and Pie 'oh' pah travel the Imajica, they uncover a trail of crimes and intimate betrayals, leading them to a revelation so startling that it changes reality forever.

Trump

He is a rapist. He is a predator. He is a criminal. He is a twice impeached president. He tried to overthrow a legally elected government to maintain power and then whined for four whole years about one of his (let’s be honest) many losses. He was a terrible businessman. He couldn’t make a deal to save his life. He’s bankrupted casinos. His entire first run as President was inspired on the evening of the White House Correspondent’s Diner when President Obama made fun of him. The camera paned to his face and you could see it in that moment. His first term was dedicated to destroying Obama’s legacy. His family were notorious for stiffing the unfortunates who worked for them, not paying contractors and racially profiling tenents of their real estate “Empire”. He has so many dealings with Russia oligarchs that even if he is not directly an agent of the Russian government he is certainly compromised beyond all reasonable measure. He ran a full page ad calling for the death penalty in the Central Park Five case fuelling racial fires simmering in New York at the time… oh, and they were innocent by the way. He currently has 88 felony counts filed against him. He currently has about a dozen civil suits pending against him. A common thought during the last election was that Donald Trump was running because if he didn’t get himself some of that sweet Presidential immuity he would basically be spending the rest of his life in jail. In his first term in office, where he was at least slightly more connected to reality than he is right now he told (according to the Washington Post fact checker) 30,573 lies. In his second term he seems on track to easily break that record but, no one is counting because the new fascination the media has is with his inherent TACOness (Trump Always Backs Down). Today, the President of the United States, when being called out for calling a ceasefire before either of the countries in the conflict agreed to it and were lobbing missiles at one another again within the hour said “Today we basically have two countries who have been fighting so hard and so long they don’t know what the fuck they are doing.” Diplomacy at it’s finest.

Some thoughts:

Malignant narcissists and bullies make terrible leaders. I would have thought this was a lesson we learned during our eras of monarchies and kingships when, basically, the biggest thug wore the crown and everyone paid taxes to him because being under the protection of the king was better than having him stomping on you. Inevitably, people this full of themselves become dictators.
He has always had a problem with reality. I’m not even talking about Buddhist reality here. I am talking about the agreed upon delusions that make up our modern world. He hasn’t even got a grasp on that. His inherent sense of priviledge and self tries to constantly rewire the world about him to suit his own interior maps. He surrounds himself with sycophants gaming him for their own end or people scared of his retribution and forces them to reinforce the delusion. Anyone who contradicts this becomes an enemy, dangerous, must be destroyed (silenced/disavowed).
He is not well. Seriously. Before his first term there was a fascinating book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. In it, 27 experts analysed all of his public pronouncements and behavioural patterns and wrote fascinating essays on their thoughts on the President. There is a rule, the Goldwater Rule, that forbids a public health professional from diagnosing a public official without actually interviewing them but these 27 felt their Duty to warn superceeded it. I am curious to see how that court case would go. At any rate, it is a fascinating read and clearly outlines Trump’s malignant narcissism and the cult like behaviors of his followers. And that was eight years ago before…
Dementia. I have had a little too much experience with this of late. I have pages of notes of things to look out for in the care of the elder folk in my world that are warning signs and/or symptoms and how to navigate your way through them. I think anyone who has ever spent any time looking after someone in their eighties recognizes a lot of what is happening with the president right now. The sundowning. The slurring. The inability to grasp the right words. That tilted stand. Grandpa is in trouble and he needs help. What he doesn’t need is the most stressful job in the known world and the ability to fire off nuclear weapons. He has become a fascinating example of what happens when a malignent narcissist begins to lose control of the only solid foundation his universe has even had; himself.
It would be easy, so easy, to just hate the guy. I really want to myself. He makes the world just so freaking noisy. Every single day we have to deal with five or six new bits of just-batshit-lunacy from the man with what once was the most important job in the world. Certainly the most dangerous. Every time he says 51st State in reference to the country I live in I almost immediately say Ah, fuck this guy and get a little ragey. This is not normal. He is making every single international relationship in the world worse. He is a firehose of gasoline turning little, diplomatically manageable brush fires into wildfires. His use of (the big beautiful word) Tariffs has torpedoed the stock markets and completely realigned the global economy (away from America). He is responsible for the single largest transfer of wealth (from the poorest to the richest) in a century. He has cut hundreds of billions from food assistance, hundreds of billions from medicaid and Amnesty International is saying that the recent cuts to US Foreign Aid will be directly responsible for the deaths of millions of the poorest in the world. Ununiformed, uncredentialed yahoos in masks are rounding up people, some legal, some in pre-greencard limbo but almost all hard working and trying damn hard to make a life for themselves and having them deported to some of the worst rentable prisons in the world. When mostly peaceful protests have sprung, noteably in Los Angeles, he federalized some National Guard troops and deployed Marines in an American City that he called a War Zone. There have been larger riots with more property damage after sporting events. After many championship sporting events come to think of it. While he had a scarcely attended military parade that cost (they say) 45 million dollars while five million people across the country marched to express their displeasure with the President. And it has been… four months? Five? It’s felt like a decade.
I guess this is how this works. Bombard with madness until most people just stop paying attention. Scream until people just put their heads down and walk away. Then, when people stop paying attention, implement the absolute worst parts of the plan. Or, rather, this is how it would work if you were trying to create an authoritarian state. I think Trump is playing a crucial part in it. He is the diversion. The slight of hand that draws the attention while the absolute really horrible things happen behind his back (read up on what Steven Miller has been up to over the last month if you need an example).
It would be really easy to focus hate on the guy and, honestly, he deserves it but I find I really can’t. He is a sick old man who is getting played by the machine that put him in that office. He is a cult leader wildly unqualified and nowhere near skilled enough to control the sycophants that slipped in the door on his coat tails. Trump is a distraction. Trump is the distraction. Honestly, if you want to really stick it to him AND protect what’s left of America’s grand experiement in (and now crumbling) democracy? Ignore Trump, and pay attention to the people behind him. Pay attention to the tech bros. Pay attention to RNC’s movers and shakers. Pay attention to absolutely everyone who had anything to do with Project 2025 because although it is no longer a News item… every single thing they talked about in it is now happening.
And remember, every single thing you do helps. Learn global. Pay attention. Look, and don’t get distracted by those that want to manipulate how you feel about a thing. Your feelings are your own. You create them. Don’t give that power to someone else. Learn global, but fight local and never, ever think your contribution doesn’t matter. Every single word. Every single thought. Every single action. Every stone in the pond causes every expanding ripples. So find what feels right in your heart, what helps and never hurts, what protects life no matter how small, what isn’t and doesn’t create a lie and do it. As much as possible. As much as you can.
The mad old man isn’t worth your time or energy. Ignore him while you resist. It’s the best way to beat a narcissist.
"Grin as you walk through the canon smoke; it drives the bad guys mad.”
James Lee Burke, “In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead”

Snake Eyes and Box Cars

I am not much of a gambler. I’ll play a 50/50 if the cause is good and I buy the odd lottery ticket on a Friday night where work is looking to be slow so I can be a bad buddhist and play “Wouldn’t it be great if…” while perusing real estate sites. I enjoy a casino for the noise and the people watching. The noise renders me effectively deaf with the my ears the way they are so it all becomes a visual play on mute and the play is usually full of fascinating looking characters having some of the best and worst nights of their lives.

I am not much of a mathematician and certainly not as wired into statistical probabilities, the illusion of luck and the delusions of “A System” as my older brother, a psychologist who teaches both statistics and advanced statistics for research courses, would be. I never ask the odds because, honestly, I know they are terrible and knowing them takes the magic of the impossible moment out of life. Things do not need to be that well defined.

To that end, I am somewhat aware of the odds of rolling Snake Eyes and Box Cars twice in a row. There is a reason why they pay out so large. I enjoy a mountain. I enjoy a hard thing. I enjoy the impossible.

Which is probably why I am a Buddhist, a socialist and a 21st century abolitionist.

I accept that we’ve ordered our society a certain way. I accept that the anarcho-socialist leanings of my early twenties (destroy the systems and start over with something better: socialism. An eqalitarian society that cares for those that need it for the betterment of all) is wildly impractical. Nature abhors a void. If you destroy the systems that are in place something will fill it. It is usually proper anarchy and chaos which benefits absolutely no one. The strong will replace the uber rich and we’ll be in the exact same kind of society with just a bully-with-the-guns instead of a bunch-of-billionaires-with-lawyers in charge. I accept that you can’t just abolish prisons and defund the police without a ground shift in sentiment amongst the majority of the population. If the majority of the people are willing to stand watch as we transition, it is possible to enact a drastic societal change. But without that shift; take away the cops and the threats of prison and the assholes will absolutely over run the good guys while the majority keep their heads down for fear.

But a boy can dream.

My home town, and most of the major population centers in Canada are currently having a pair of twin crises… a homelessness epidemic and a tainted drug epidemic. There are entire neighborhoods that are basically becoming no go zones for the majority of people in my town. When you ask them, they say that they no longer feel safe there. There feel that crime is out of control there. They feel that there is danger there. I walk through two of them daily and my shop is smack dab in a fast forming third one. You know what is there? Hurt people. Hungry people. Sad and angry and tired people. What is the one unchanging variable in all of those?

People.

I have no idea what happened to any of them. I have no idea of their stories. My mind is absolutely full of assumptions about them though, as are yours. Addicts bring about a certain reflective tug in my brain. Mental illness brings about a certain reflective tug in my brain. Poverty and desperation bring about a certain tug in my brain. Each of these things brings with them fears and assumptions that make us want to focus our eyes straight ahead and walk faster and pretend we don’t hear them calling out to us. We don’t want to be hit up for money that we ourselves really don’t have. We don’t want to be pulled in to whatever madness is currently cycling through their minds. We have enough madnesses of our own. And we certainly don’t want to consider that we are basically one missed pay period from joining them here on the corners. Assumptions and assumptions and feelings brought on by those assumptions: a whole forest of thoughts in our heads that have so very little to do with the reality of the situation. I cannot count the number of people I have seen walk past someone flat on their face on the sidewalk, or doing a zombie shamble, or perched in one of the weird spineless positions opioids seem to make people crumble in.

The place I aim for is to at, the very least, check on them. My thinking is simple. I would stop and help someone run over by a car. Why the hell wouldn’t I stop and check on someone run over by life? I am currently six feet tall and weight about two hundred and fifty pounds. It is a place of priviledge in situations like this; nine times out of ten I can check on someone without really putting myself in any sort of danger. I don’t think I have ever been attacked by a drug addict. Certainly not one currently unconscious. Hell, to my memory the only time I’ve ever really had the crap kicked out of me it was because I used to dress twinkish in neighborhoods or bars where that sort of thing wasn’t particularly appreciated.

We can not, and will not, solve any of the big problems we face without everyone working a little bit on their abilities of compassion and empathy. We are all human. It is there in the basic wiring packs. We have just been numbed out of using them.

I meant for this to be some thoughts on crime and prisons but I got derailed thinking about those we seem to collectively brand, if not criminals, than unworthy just because of where life has landed them. Despite the evolutionary benefits of having minds able to categorize things I find they are, at times, some of our greatest weaknesses. With categorizations, come biases. With biases come judgments. With judgments come actions that do not help and thus, are unhealthy. We do it constantly. We do it without thinking. We do it so fast and quietly that we trick ourselves into not even seeing what is in the world with us and shielding ourselves from ever possibly feeling something for them.

Here is a reality check:

You are, in this moment, a jewel in a web connected by a billion different influences in time and space. There is not a single thing on this planet that isn’t influencing you in some way just as you are influencing a hundred million other living things. You are, in this moment, a collection of somewhere between 75 and 200 trillion microbes riding around inside a ship made of a roughly 30 to a 100 trillion cells. Your consciousness is nothing more than a kind of scanning awareness taking note of things around you. Your thoughts are a nothing more than electrical impulses being fired along billions of neurons releasing neurochemicals and travelling complex networks that form up your thoughts, your memories, your feelings. Your story has no beginning and no ending; any one of a million trillion things could have happened just a little bit differently that would completely change what you cling to as yourself. Take every frame of the movie Back to The Future and shift one character an inch to the left or right and you’d have a completely different movie. Do that for every frame. Now predict what the hell happens to Marty. Multiply that by every single moment of your life. And your parents lives. And your grandparents. And the European royalty you have descended from (because according to all those history tests online we all come from some royal somewhere).

There is only this moment where you happen to be only this way. In the next moment, you are something completely different. And so is everything else. So in this moment roll snake eyes. In this moment roll train cars. Do the hard thing because it is the hard thing. Do the good thing because it is the good thing. Just recognize that in this moment everything is connected and everything matters.

Everyone matters.

The Interconnected World

This one is going to hurt. I do apologize. I really do.

But… it really needs to be said.

Yo, humans! Yes, you. The mostly hairless monkeys with the fancy body coverings!

Guess what?

You aren’t the fucking rulers of the Earth! Hell, you’re not even in the top ten of the most numerous species. Arguments can even be made that we aren’t even the smartest because although we have been better than most of the others at gathering the necessities of life and reproducing… we have abandoned one of the most rules of natural survival and that, basically, is this…

Nature very rarely tolerates, and evolution never accelerates, a species that defiles it’s own nest.

When I was a kid I sucked at physics and chemistry, although I did enjoy making colorful stains with one of those Kids Chemistry at Home kits that to this day still stain various kitchen and cellar floor tiles. But I adored biology and the grand historical concepts of anthropology. My father and my grandmother were very patient with me when I tooled about in their gardens, often upending flowers to look at all the little things that lived amongst them in the dirt. The interconnected universe of worms, and bugs, and bees, and ants and all the living things existing in the forest of pretty flowers that my dad and grandma grew was my first concept of a non-human universe.

The basic concept never left me. Even when I was a pro-capitalist right wing nutter in my twenties I always spent more time than I should have annoying my friends about the environmental consequences of business decisions. I’d grind my teeth, time and time again, when folks discounted the environmental effects of decisions made for the sake of profit, and industry, and jobs, and shareholders, and the future of the city/people/man.

We are not the rulers of Earth.

God didn’t put us in charge of husbandry of his creatures… or, if you believe he did, I would really, really be worried about my next performance evaluation with the big man because we are losing about 10,000 unique forms of life a year. I know, I know. It isn’t only us. Species die out and new species evolve all the time. That is the nature of life on the planet. But we are certainly accelerating the extinction.

The concept of an ecosystem imprinted on me pretty early. And ten years of Buddhism has basically only expanded the concept of the web of life for me. We are but one single species in an intensely threaded web, all interconnected, all dependent upon a thousand variables to grow and thrive. But long ago, we developed a kind of specious ego that fed us the idea that the natural world was there for us to exploit; that we were masters of the resources, kings of all.

And we are starting to pay for this arrogance.

If you were to look down upon the planet, like, say, God does (if that is your belief). He created a beautiful world. He filled it with a trillion species that all balanced on a delicate web that continuously grows, continuously evolves. Some things fade away as new things are born. Life takes hits, but grows back. For hundreds of thousands of years life tootled along just fine. Then, the planet peopled. One species, us, got our thinner skulls and thicker brains up our own backsides. We evolved quicker than the other species. We discovered that the use of tools, and stories, and learning new skills and sharing them from generation to generation led to an even faster growth. We spread out. We created civilizations. We learned maths and sciences. We started asking questions about fundamental things and created great art and music. And used up resources. Lots of resources. Lots of resources that other things needed. Our growth, brought death to other species. We started destroying entire branches of the web for our own advancedment. We started to disrupt vast swaths of the land, endless varied ecosystems to build minimalls and urban sprawl. We sped up the extinction side of the equation before the evolution side could even dream of catching up.

Nature abhors an inbalanced equation (I swear to whatever god you believe in my Grade 10 Math teacher Mr Vargas said that once).

Sounds a bit like cancer doesn’t it?

And then the fever sets in… heating the whole and threatening and even deeper extinction.

And for what?

We are burning the world for what exactly?

Convenience for some? We aren’t even torching the place for the good of all. We are doing it out of habit and luxury for some. Maybe twenty percent? Thirty if we are being generous, of the species?

Or, if you want a more feet on the ground practical take:

Let’s be clear.

The world will survive.

Some life will survive.

WE will survive. But not all of us. And none of what we call civilization.

Nature really does not abide a species that despoils it’s own nest.

We rule nothing.

We need to start living within, and with the world instead of just on it.

It has fed us, and housed us for millions of years.

It is only when we broke the balance, and tried to exploit it, that it became dangerous to us as a species.

We need to start living within, and with the world.

My Summer Reading Challenge

This summer’s reading challenge (and the fall’s) will be to get a shelf thinned out of my TBR Library. This summer (July 1st-September 2nd)… non-fiction, politics and history. Ten titles… 3956 Pages… about 67 a day. I read 100 a day fiction; I read Non-Fiction a LOT slower. So… this may be a challenge. Here are the contestants!

In the fall (from September 3rd til Christmas… a TON of Penguin classics like…The Moonstone, The Picture of Dorian Gray (re-read), The 120 Days of Sodom, The Monk, The Turn of the Screw, In Dubious Battle, The Secret Agent, Uncle Silas, A Dead Man’s Memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Frankenstein (re-read), Dracula (re-read).

Seriously Though…

Just Fuck This Guy.

Why yes, gentle reader. I have just watched the President of the United States try to give a speech. I would be a lot more sympathetic to the dottering old fool if I weren’t still a little riled up over yesterday’s “Tariff Letter” in the middle of a trade negotiation in which he decided to base tariff of 35% on all Canadian products is a completely rational and normal thing to do to a country that is guilty of allowing 43 pounds of opioids into your country (compared to the 21,000 pounds that came in through your southern border… wasn’t there supposed to be a wall there or something yea?). I might be a little more sympathetic to the decrepid old git if all of the current American media was celebrating the fact that he visited the Texas disaster zone without making too much of an arse out of himself (remember when he threw rolls of super helpful paper towels to the people of Puerto Rico days after their disasterous hurricane?). Sure, he called it a once in a 200 year storm event despite the fact that it happened in an area called the Flash Flood Alley and had similar events in 87, 98, 2015 and even a few weeks before this one. Even if you think he was referring to it as a statistical probablity, which he wasn’t, because he simple can’t, that isn’t even true any more. Climate change is here and he has overseen the gutting of the weather service and FEMA making emergency preparedness incredibly hard and recovery from disasters next to impossible. I might be a little more sympathetic to this meat sack of endless narcissism if he hadn’t surrounded himself with sociopaths using him as a distraction while they basically erode every damn institution in America and wasn’t instigating just about every dystopian government fantasy every portrayed in a movie in real life. The FBI is running polygraphs on White House employees to determine loyalty and track down leakers. Homeland Security’s new ICE detail just got a budget of around 27 Billion. You know, those guys who just let off tear gas gernades in a field where some people were working to provide the food Americans kind of need to eat. Those guys that tried to provoke riots in LA so that the Donald would be justified to federalize the National Guard and Marines so he could deploy them into an American city. Oh, wait. Justification? He did it anyway. That is a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA and ATF. The jackboots are getting some new toys… and new prisons like the Aligator Alcatraz (t-shirts now on sale at WHITEHOUSE.GOV!) The masked dickheads running around picking up basically anyone brown whether they are legal or not, criminal or not, a problem or not now have a budget greater than the GDP of something like 60 countries. Oh, and that money came from cutting such unnecessary expenses as Medicaid for seventeen million of their citizens, Unicef, rural health care networks, virtually all international aid money. People are going to die. Lots of people are going to die. Republican members of the house, instead of actually doing something to curtail this lunacy were busy drafting a letter to the Canadian Ambassador complaining, virulantly, that we were despicable because our poor forest management skills were wrecking the summer vacations of their constituents be allowing our forest fire smoke to drift over the border into their states. The US also sanctioned Francesa Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian States for supporting ICC investigations into Israeli officials… basically, she’s being sanctioned by America for reminding people that Genocide is Not Okay. Oh, and speaking of that missing wall on the Southern Border… the US Military just increased, dramatically, militarized zones along the Mexican border in defiance of Posse Commitatus. The army now guards the border under the benevolvent and Sober leadership of former B String Fox News weekend host Pete Hegeseth.

One week.

I am not exactly patriotic. I like where I live. All my friends and my stuff are here. I have never been much for waving a piece of cloth over my head out of worship to the bit of ground beneath my feet. I tend to rebel against these arbitrary divisions between people that are basically works of our agreed upon imaginations and have no real bearing on reality other than we choose to let them. But when the guy on the other side of the line keeps waving his fist and making stuff difficult for my friends and family and keeps joking about how great it would be if we worshipped him like his own people (bahahahahahahahahaha) do…

Seriously, and from the bottom of my heart, just fuck these guys.

A Quote from Gabriel Betteridge

One of the narrators of Wilkie Collins’ “The Moonstone”

Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life- the rock ahead of their own idleness. Their lives being, for the most part, passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see- especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual sort- how often they drift blindfolded into some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something- and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is, they are only making a mess out of the house.

I cannot say why this quote resonates so much with me today (he says as he, his chest freezer, his carpet, jeans, shirt, hand and face are covered in pastel dust).

Why “The Moment”

I get asked this a lot. There are a bunch of threads. Give me a moment while I pull on each and see what happens. First? I’m a secular Buddhist. To me, this means that after thirty years of living a faith filled god-fearing life I have decided to try something new. I have worked at depowering my capacity for “Faith”. I adore that some find happiness and solidity in that kind of belief. I do not. I don’t think I ever did. I adored the mythology of it and it was as good a way as any to teach a little kid of the dualities that most people find comforting: Good vs Evil, Light vs Dark, Hot vs Cold, Right vs Wrong, Us vs Them. I never “Lost” my faith. There was no catalyst moment where my brain broke on it. There was no hitting bottom or realizing that I was on my own in a cold heartless universe. Quite the opposite. As I grew older, my universe grew. I realized that most of those dualities were basically constructs of my own mind being used to justify behavior and judgments against things in the universe before me. Good vs Evil was a concept my brain came up with to justify love and hate, ignoring the more basic rule that one is a constant and the other is a emotional reaction, a choice. Light vs Dark is a poetic appropriation of a physical observation of the world. Hot vs Cold is a scientific observation, dumbed down, and used to describe emotional states by some people I used to know. Right and wrong are mental abstractions basically created by the society that we live in and the time we exist in. What is abhorent now was SOP in the past. Killing animals for food? Sport hunting? Prostitution? Karaoke? The normalacies of our day to day right now will inevitable be seen as barbaric in the future. The ephemeral nature of right and wrong takes a lot of time to work your head around; I now aim for skillful choices over unskilled choices: choosing to support all life over things that cost any life. Us vs Them? Neither exist in anything other than our imaginations and how we describe things in the universe. It is a division we create one hundred percent of the time, usually to justify judging someone and doing ill to them.

There is life. Just life. Not individual life. Just one big life. And we are it.

There is just what is.

To that end I dedicate my time and my energy to existing in the moment. Right now. This. This is the entire game. This is the moment. Everything that is exists in this breath. The cycles of birth and death. Of awareness coming and awareness going. The great interconnected web of all things exist right now. Everything that was is memory. Everything that will be is imagination. I am a collection of 30 trillion cells working in cooperation in this moment. I am a ship about 100 trillion micro- organisms are hitching a ride on. I am of the planet I am sitting on; a planet that peoples. I cannot exist without it. So I am a focal point of it’s existence too. I cannot exist without the sun. We are the universe playing at being a Me and a You; the same universe, the same life, interconnectedness of a trillion sells in a moment. In the next moment trillions of those cells will be gone, replaced by new ones. The consciousness that is fundamental Me is really not much more than a sophisticated scanning system; an attention to the ecosystem that makes me what I am and that I make what it is. Absolutely everything is interconnected. There is not a single thing in this universe that stands alone. Every thought, every breath, every action influences the world around me in a million, trillion ways. So I find it best to exist fully in this moment and act skillfully in this moment. I’ve caused enough damage in my life; time to work on repairs.

And like every other human being, I get up my own ass with thinking about a toothache, bills, rent, money, government, Trump, AI, a million things that we have Created and will into existence all of which reinforce this concept of me, this ego, this Chris-ness. The more I sink into myself the more I lose the moment to worries of the future and regrets of the past. Infinite energy spent on things I cannot change or attempts to influence (in the case of the future) things that, honestly, we simply cannot do. Sure, for the future, we can play to the field we are on. We can engage in these creations that we’ve made to solidify our position and our safety in future moments: go to school, get a job, savings, doctor’s appointments. We can act now to protect our future selves. And we created a word, irony, for when after doing all that work some random act of the universe knocks us to our knees. I think Alanis wrote a song about it when she was at this confusing stage of Buddhism herself.

The moment is about reaching out and feeling the interconnectedness of all things instead of losing myself in my past and worries about my future. Which is easy to do in this moment. Just act skillfully. RIGHT NOW. In the moment.

All of this is on my mind right now because I had a talk with a super successful friend. A childhood friend who went on to found a tech startup that he recently sold for more money than I can even conceive. He is set for the rest of his life and was outlining how he became an adherent to, and a fan of Effective Altruism.

Of course he did.

He’s a tech bro.

Basically, Effective Altruism is the desire to make more so you can give more. Making money so you can give money away. The most efficent way to use your dollars. Where can I can donate money where it will help the most people? On the face of it, I have no problem with this. I have done a fair amount of research into how I would spend lottery winnings in effectively altruistic ways. Honestly, if capitalism had a rule that said; congrats, you made ten million, you win capitalism! Here is your statue! Now you get to spend all the rest of your money making other people’s lives better! I would have gone to business school if that was the motivation. I would be able to talk to guys in suits without rolling my eyes if they taught an Effective Altruism philosophy class. It would be a good foundational stone for the way they live and the way I live. Effective Altruism is a lovely thing.

Except, like all lovely things, it went a little wonky.

It developed a bit of a cancer and, sadly, the biggest proponents of it (those with the most money, and the loudest voices) have all gotten into the cult of Longtermism. Longtermism is the idea that while doing your research and making your decisions on where best to put your money to save the most people that you can you cannot focus on the moment. Sure, you can feed a million people right now but, that is a drop in the bucket when you consider the billions and trillions of humans that may exist in the future. To that end you should really focus your giving on things that help mankind of the future because there will be a LOT MORE of them. It’s much more cost effective. To that end, the world’s richest man (who is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths this year because of his misadventures with DOGE), a man who could feed the world and still have enough money to raise his however-many kids in his weird Texas cult-town called Starship, is spending an insane amount of money rushing mankind to space, to Mars. By taking the first steps into making us an interstellar species he is taking the longtermist view of altruism. Bezos, as well, has an obsession with Space being fueled by running the most trash intensive company in human history. The mass millions being dumped into creating superintelligent AI that will solve our future woes (they say). The mad rush to the singularity: the moment when we can merge with machines (which started out as a science fiction idea a half century ago but now seems likely to occur in my lifetime).

When you change the algebra to include future potential life then, of course, it makes sense to put all of your money into technology. That techno utopianist dream that nanotech and biotech will solve all of our woes and that when we master space we can grow infinitely and forever.

Two thoughts: 1. All this fucking ego. Elon and Bezos in particular. They want to be the daddies that usher mankind into a space bearing future. It is really hard to separate their ideals from their need to be seen being idealistic. The whole thing reeks of legacy which goes against my one fundamental and unshakeable rule: DO GOOD. DON’T GET CAUGHT.

It is the only way to ensure you are acting skillfully and not acting to feed your own ego.

2. When your society is on a tipping point, as we seem to be when it comes to the climate crisis, it seems a little ridiculous to be making longtermist bets at the cost of the current moment. It’s like I mentioned above: Alanis wrote a song about irony and this would be a doozy of a line before that last bridge.

My friend is leaning to longtermism: specifically, nanotech medical research. I have no problem with nanotech medical research nor do I have any problem with a guy wanting to donate his excess wealth to help others. Hell, I spent most of the night wanting to kiss him (for his good heart, and because I already know he’s a great kisser). Our conversation has been lingering on my mind though.

I go back to the moment.

The longtermist POV is that advanced AI and nanotech will solve the climate crisis. They are almost sure of it.

Will it happen in time though? Who cares if you made a fancy ass rocket when our planet shakes the majority of us off because we soiled our nest? And when your fortunes, and your rocket tests come by accelerating climate damage?

Like everything else, if I had the money to spend, I would be working to alliviating the pains and ills in the moment. There are starving people here now. There are plagues here now. There is homelessness here now. There are brilliant potential minds who can’t afford school here now. There is a burning planet that needs help here and now.

Do good.

Don’t get caught.

In the moment.

What you do for life in the moment carries a greater legacy than anything you can imagine of the future. The moment is the only thing that exists. A legacy is your ego building an imaginary tower for a maybe worship of itself in a maybe future. Seems like a lot of wasted time/energy/brain power to feed a want that exists only in your head.

Go outside.

I bet you will find someone who needs help, a life you can change, in the moment within a minute or two.

We will get to space. We will evolve tech. We will build shit. It’s what we do. Why do you need your name on it.

Go outside.

Save the world.

Today.

Do Good. Don’t get caught.