Northshore Notes: I Am Anxious, Therefore I Am?

     We each take something different from every book, picture, experience, day. I think I'm going to hold onto the Kierkegaard line about anxiety from Northshore bureau chief Caren Jeskey's post today. Or try to. Lately I'm not sure how how well I hold onto things. It's like tucking a smooth stone into a pocket with a hole in it. Which might be a very Caren-like observation. I suppose I should embrace the hole — otherwise I'd end up with a pocket jammed with stones, and who wants that? Enjoy.

By Caren Jeskey 

     “Man is the supreme Talisman. Lack of a proper education hath, however, deprived him of that which he doth inherently possess. Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.”
                                                       — Baha'u'llah: Gleanings

     Per Albert Camus, following meaningful pursuits in life enables us to survive the pain of being human. “The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
     From the very little Soren Kierkegaard I’ve read, it seems he believed our best choice is to embrace the anxiety that’s inherent and unavoidable in all sentient beings. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” If we can tolerate, and better yet befriend, our often tender inner selves and also vulnerably connect with others, perhaps we’ll feel less alone and less afraid. We'll have the courage and humility to take ourselves less seriously. Kierkegaard suggests doing what we want in our short lifetimes, if we can. I wondered how hedonistic this guy thought we should be? The answer seems to be … not a lot. Rather, we’d best create an aesthetically pleasing life — whatever that means to us. Fully experience being a human who’s going to die, rather than pretending we are not going to die. 

     Speaking of absurdist philosophy, it seems strange to admit that I received a bit of twisted joy (and some sorrow) this week watching Fox News. When I was younger, Fox was the place to go for some of the best shows. The X-Files. House. The Simpsons. Why am I no longer welcomed there? Turns out I'm OK with it. Not a party I want to join. The bizarre reasoning coming out of plastic spray-tanned faces of many of Fox’s performers has given me a glimpse into some right wing (and all QAnon) fanatics who think that real news is fake, and vice versa. As I listened to their tragically hilarious uninformed malarky, I wondered if I were Jim Carey in The Truman Show. Surreality at its finest.
     Then I wondered if the broken people committing atrocities are actually horror-film actors. I wish they were. But no. Just a bunch of heathens with all of the mental horsepower of Hot Wheels. I’m glad I watched, since now I can see how naïve viewers might be conned into drinking the juice of the false American dream. They do a good job of acting like they know what they are talking about with facial expressions SNL worthy.
     I know this is serious stuff. It’s not lost on me that our new democracy is failing. But I am tired of being depressed.
     One’s chemical state affects everything. Philosophers of yore did not grapple with the same challenges we face today. I wonder what their brains looked like? If Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is real, which I believe it is, those who have lived in previous eras cannot fully inform the complexity of the human condition of the 21st Century. They did not face the realities of global warming, for example. Did they realize how precarious our blue marble really is?
     Well, it turns out that maybe they did. I found a book called Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet Goodness gracious. I have a lot to read.
     The end of 2022 brought many sentiments of gratitude from my therapy clients, the most I’ve ever received. After an often grueling year filled with unexpected uncertainties and sicknesses, I felt pleasantly surprised. It was an acknowledgement that therapy works. I didn’t take an undue amount of credit, for everything I offer has been taught to me. I am grateful to be safe enough to hold space for others. A friend has a Ukrainian flag hanging over her front windows. Each night she goes to sleep and makes sure to remember how fortunate she is. Why not enjoy freedom, when we can.
     A current Jeskey post would not be complete without mentioning treasures buried in the sand, given my new beach-combing addiction. On Thursday I set out for a long walk before starting the work day. As I approached the Baha’i temple I beheld it’s stark beauty. I found myself getting closer and closer. While I’d planned to head to the lake, going inside seemed like a better idea. I sat and meditated, and (mostly) resisted a strong urge to pick up my phone for an hour or so. I practiced box breathing and a simple mindfulness exercise. The pull of my phone that I'd tucked away and out of sight was almost scary, considering the exquisitely serene cavernous space. But I made it, mostly. (Well, ok. I looked at my phone three times in the last five minutes of my practice to see how much time I had left). Afterwards I headed to the beach and found some of the coolest things ever. I took some, left others behind, and by the time I got back home six hours after I'd left, I was OK.

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”
                          ― Robert Greene, Mastery

 

Tallying football’s human cost

Library of Congress

     Americans consider themselves innocents. Pure, noble, removed from the degraded world outside our borders, both physical and mental.
     True, that pose takes considerable effort to maintain: our own brutal history must be whitewashed, ignored or suppressed. Teachers squelched, books banned, libraries purged. Faith-fueled prudes, at least when it comes to the conduct of others, we simply banish entire realms of human behavior, and if those outside of our beloved norms are not guilty of crimes, then crimes are imagined for them.
     This leads to lives of constant surprises, as the white-hot fervor of our imagined purity hits the cold waters of reality. We are continually indignant, aghast, vibrating with shock when forced to confront the obvious.
     Take Monday night. As you no doubt know by now, during a game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals, 24-year-old Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after an ordinary tackle, nearly dead on the field, as medical technicians struggled to get his heart started.
     Fans wept, prayed. Pundits cogitated, then delivered the awful news.
     “Football is a violent sport,” revealed a headline in the Times of Northwest Indiana. “And we love it.”
     True enough. And sincere, like the prayers after mass shootings, the pious noise that masks our inability to change in any substantial way.
     Even concern about violence on the field misses the point. Football players don’t die on the field; they die off it. The average life expectancy of an American man is 79, if he’s white; 68, if he’s Black. If he played in the NFL, however, that falls to 59.6 years, according to a Harvard study of thousands of players over decades. Most of those ex-football players die from heart disease, at a rate 2.4 times that of Major League Baseball players, who as a group live seven years longer.

To continue reading, click here.

"No, I wanna hold the pitchfork!"

"And Congress Adjourned." (Library of Congress)

     I was certain that by now, the third day into the 118th Congress, the House of Representatives would already be hard at work, vigorously fighting drag story hours, investigating Hunter Biden's laptop and impeaching his dad for faking the moon landing.
     Instead it's paralyzed: six votes where the hapless erstwhile leader Kevin McCarthy fails to win his coveted speakership. That's like the Bears putting the ball on the one yard line and failing to get it over in six tries. A failure both shocking and characteristic. It's almost like he accepted a bar bet that he couldn't find a way to debase himself even lower than he had by rushing to Mar-a-Lago to roll like a puppy at the feet of Donald Trump.
     With no end in sight. Democrats are rightfully gleeful. Seeing the clown car MAGA faction — Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Paul Goser, really, it's like the rogue's gallery from a Dick Tracy comic — hold the party hostage is a delicious, lunatics-taking-over-the-asylum moment that seems to demand schadenfreude. (Oddly, Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't in that group, she's supporting McCarthy, a kind of meta betrayal of the betrayers). The situation generates so much exuberant analysis — "McCarthy is finding it impossible to stop a brakeless freight train driven by morons," Molly Jong-Fast writes in Vanity Fair — it almost seems a buzz-kill to remind ourselves that the reason the nutjobs don't want McCarthy is that the election-denying, Trump-butt-nuzzling former human being simply isn't extreme enough for them. You can squint and McCarthy seems almost like an adult person, or did at one point, and that just will not do. Besides, he has experience in Congress, and that's fatal. Though this isn't about policy, or government, or ideology. It's about unleashing the dogs of chaos, the legislative version of Jan. 6. They don't want Kevin McCarthy to lead them; they want Jack Napier.
     The childlike optimist in me wants to hope that somehow, half a dozen moderate Republicans, should they exist, could finally say "fuck it" and peel off and vote for Democratic speaker candidate Hakeem Jeffries, who has beaten McCarthy in every vote. But that would take a miracle and, as they say in "Casablanca," the Germans have outlawed miracles.
     I could offer up the reason I believe all this is happening, though I don't imagine it'll shed much light on the situation: it's because McCarthy moved his stuff into the speaker's office Tuesday morning. That's what my people call a kine hora — invoking the evil eye. Or as I tell my boys, in a rare lapse into sports lingo, "Don't spike the ball until you're in the end zone." (Charles Pierce, in Esquire, evoked another sports image: the Boston Red Sox trundling champagne into their locker room before the 1986 World Series was in fact won, offending the Great Karmic Wheel of Baseball and causing their downfall). McCarthy setting up shop in an office he hadn't quite achieved was so wrong it even evoked a rare moment of near wit from mouth-breathing Matt Gaetz, who dashed off a letter to the Capitol architect wondering why the move was permitted. "How long will he remain there before is considered a squatter?" Gaetz or, more likely, someone acting in his behalf, wondered.

     Premature celebration flips off the gods and demands retribution. Then again, so should lying and treason, so I guess you can pick your cosmos-crossing offense. Maybe it's just the zeitgeist. We are not the only country whose split electorate has amplified and empowered the fringe crazies – far right religious fundamentalists have grabbed the whip hand in Israel, and are in the process of alienating three-quarters of world Jewry, because that country doesn't have enough problems.

    In the United States, this has been coming for a long time, ever since Ronald Reagan convinced some people that the purpose of government is to destroy government. The problem is, nobody wants to live under a destroyed government. Well, most people don't. Some people think it's fun, and we're seeing them in their glory this week in the halls of Congress. But remember: the only thing worse than their failing to get their act together will be when they finally do.

Get your human-generated content here

   Actual photo of a real whale taken by me off the coast of Monterey, California, in 2009.

     Call me Neil. Some years ago — all right, about 40 — having little or no money in my pocket, and nothing particular to interest me in business, I thought I would write for newspapers a little and see the inky part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the ...
     OK, enough of that. If riffing on “Moby Dick” is an odd way to begin my first column of 2023, stick with me. We’ll circle back.
     No sooner had I polished my blog post for Tuesday when Facebook tossed up an ad for Jasper. “Write blog posts 10x faster using AI, without sacrificing quality,” it promised. “Create high quality articles in seconds.”
     “In seconds”?! And just as good? Well, sign me up! I clicked on the link, and came to the page for “an app that uses AI to create any kind of content you need” according to the explanatory video, where a jumpy woman — older, tired, — despairs at saying something fresh about socks until Jasper, personified into a little robot friend, offers up this line: “The perfect pair of socks is like a hug for your feet.”
     “Hot damn, that’s good!” she marvels.
     Is it? Hold that thought while I make sure those readers who still carry cash are following along.
     “AI” stands for “artificial intelligence.” It’s the same collection of circuits that makes a calculator work, but complicated enough to mimic human thought, supposedly.
     If you assume AI is a long way from affecting daily professional journalism, you weren’t looking closely at Friday’s column, about medical decisions. A full-service columnist, I write my headlines — unaided by tools like Sassbook AI Headline Generator — and try to pick my own art, to save my superiors’ time and perhaps delay the day when I’m ushered out into the pasture of the tragically defunct.
     The find-a-photo process went like this: First I searched Merlin, our Sun-Times photo database, looking for some retro black-and-white 1950s Marcus Welby MD image of a doctor in a white jacket. Finding nothing close, I looked at my own photos of hospitals. Busy and grim. I tried the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art banks of public domain images. Nothing. Twenty minutes of fruitless searching. Then I sighed, jumped onto Dall-E, the graphic AI provider, and created a free, useable image in about 10 seconds.

To continue reading, click here.

Death and the maiden

"Death And The Maiden," By Marianne Stokes (Musee D'Orsay)

     What I want to do today more than anything else is amplify, in my small way, Nicholas Confessore's front page article in the New York Times yesterday, "The invention of Elise Stefanik."

     Yes, the Times doesn't need me to promote their stuff. But I'm not doing it for their benefit; I'm doing it for yours. The Trump enormity is so, umm, enormous, and so ongoing — nearly seven years in its current phase and no end in sight — that we can forget just how awful he is, how he really does kill everything he touches. I've certainly been vigorously ignoring it, hoping the national firestorm won't surge back to life. But this in-depth story of the moral death of an undistinguished congresswoman is a valuable cautionary tale, a reminder of the poison we as a nation are struggling to metabolize. Sure, I could pull up an old photo and spool something about it. But nothing I have to say is as important as this article. Read it. It's long, but it has a really good kicker, and I encourage you to soldier on to the end. It's also a good example of journalism finally, finally flexing to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. The tone of utter moral revulsion is appropriate. This is still an impartial story, but also one that burns Stefanik to the waterline. I don't know how she could ever show her face in public after this. But then again, if she had a functional sense of shame, she couldn't behave the way she does. None of them would.

The thing with feathers

 

T-shirt, "Out of the Darkness Walk," Dallas, Oct. 29, 2022

     My wife asked me about my hopes for 2023, and I began to unspool the usual litany: a new book, get in better shape, fix up the house more. I don't know if those really count as "hopes" — "goals" might be more accurate. What's the difference? "Hope" seems more passive, scanning the sky, waiting for the arrival of something out of your control. While a "goal" is the mountaintop you set your sites on while climbing. Goals are better, more active. 
     Then again, I'm down on "hope" lately, set against it by an aphorism of all things. 

     I was going over an old post about hope — Hope is the thumb you suck waiting for things to get worse — and one saying, that seems to have slipped past in 2014, stung now: ""Hope makes a good breakfast but a poor dinner," offered by a reader, Tom, quoting Francis Bacon.
     Aphorisms are dubious currency. Easy to spend — I sure fling them around — often overly familiar, worn smooth,or directly contradictory. If "Time is money" and "Love of money is the root of all evil," then is time the root of all evil? I sure hope not. (Although, on second thought...)

     Aphorisms sound good. That doesn't make them actually valuable. 
     As frequently happens quoting such truisms, Tom got the wording slightly wrong. Bacon, a scholar, scientist, politician, contemporary of Shakespeare (who sometimes is credited with writing some of the Bard's plays) was famous for coining phrases. His death in 1621 did not stem his publications, and the second edition of his 1661 Resuscitatio contains numbered vignettes, "Apophthegms New and Old."
     In No. 36, Bacon meets fishermen casting at a river and offers to buy their catch. They ask for 30 shillings; Bacon offers them 10. They refuse, so he settles down to watch them (the tale smacks more of a set-up for the line than reporting). After they catch nothing, Bacon chides them: "Are you not mad fellows now, that might have had an angel in your purse, to have made merry withal, and to have warmed you thoroughly, and now you must go home with nothing."
     "Ay but," reply the fisherman, "we had hope then to make a better gain of it."

     "Well, my masters," says Bacon. "Then I'll tell you, hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
     Meaning that hope has value early in the day, but curdles as evening falls. Which every ambitious person has to keep in mind as the years slip past, and whatever you'd thought might have been, dances away, unachieved, forever out of reach, a will-o-the-wisp.
     That's the problem with hope, its contains its own parasitic twin, disappointment. Hope is writing a check to yourself. Sometimes it get cashed. Usually it doesn't. After a while, the overdrafts pile up. Thus late-in-the-day hope takes on a delusional quality. 

     What to do? Abandoning hope — for a certain level of success, say — sounds like surrender. It clashes with a favorite aphorism from Dr. Johnson, "I will be conquered; I will not capitulate." So the hell with Francis Bacon, throwing shade on the adored blankie that's carried by so many over the years. It may not be much, threadbare and tattered and stained. But it got us this far. No getting rid of it now.

Seize the day.

   "The Pillars of Creation," Eagle Nebula (NASA James Webb Space Telescope)

             

     Thirteen point eight billion years ago all the matter in the universe was condensed into a space far smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
     As to how that is possible — it seems a very tight fit — well, that is above my ability to understand, never mind explain, beyond observing that the known universe, like American politics, is mostly empty space. The physicists making the claim seem very confident about it, and they ought to know.
     Whatever the true size — c'mon guys, a grapefruit, a basketball, give us something we can work with, intellectually — the gathered stuff exploded in the "Big Bang" setting all existence in motion, sending matter hurtling in all directions (that's why astronomers can figure this complicated situation down to a specific if enormous span of time, assuming that rounding to the nearest 100 million years can be called "specific" — they see where celestial stuff is, how fast it's all moving, and work backward).
     Leading us to today, you and me on Jan. 1, 2023. The holidays behind us. Entering the dead of winter. Heading toward the third anniversary, later this month, of the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, an epochal explosion in its own right, killing millions of people on our little planet in a little solar system in a remote corner of the galaxy, jarring societies into all manner of contortions. I don't want to project my own situation onto humanity as a whole, to be one of those people who, to use Thoreau's delicious phrase, "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere." But entering 2023, reality does not really seem to be expanding. On the contrary, quite contracted. The horizons narrower. Less public. Less promising. I once put on a suit and tie as a matter of routine, went downtown to a crowded office where I might interact with dozens of people, head to the East Bank Club for lunch to play racquetball with the editor of the paper, then slide by a meeting to chat with some mover and shaker.
     Now, well, nothing like that. Nothing close. Ever. Maybe it isn't COVID. Maybe it's the general etiolation of journalism, denied the healthful rays of fresh advertising and new readership, coupled with my own steady decay, a man entering in his mid-60s, as physical and mental systems gather entropy. Set against the backdrop of COVID. A triple whammy.
     What to do about it? This is where the vast, unfathomable amount of time since the creation of the universe comes in. Because really, whether you are 2 or 6 or 62, the amount of time you've had, the amount of time you've got, on a geological, never mind universal scale, is the briefest span. The single splat of one warm raindrop in a monsoon covering a continent and lasting a century. Not even that.
     Given how little our portion, the only strategy is to flip that around and declare it a bounty. Because it's all we're going to get. So enjoy the splat. Don't spend more of our brief span unhappy than we absolutely have to. There's enough of that without you contributing more. Experience our tiny, fleeting realm as fully as possible. As a person who, as an infant was nicknamed "the professor," given to introspection, to cerebral dourness, it might be late to change now. But wasting these precious days and years seems both ungrateful and unwise. There will be a near eternity to not be bothered by ... anything. Meanwhile, glories glitter above, and below, and among us.  Look at these photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. Look what a beautiful place we find ourselves in. How fortunate we are not only here, but are creatures who are able to perceive it, mostly. As opposed to rocks or worms or cobalt. Lucky us. Or as Hemingway said, "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for"

       So wake up in the morning, stoke your internal fires best you can, and resolve to try to wring something of benefit out of the day. Then go to it. That's what I try to do, plan to continue doing, and hope you will too. It is incredibly gratifying to me that thousands of people visit this blog every day. Three days a week I serve up near professional grade newspaper journalism that goes in the Sun-Times. One day the spiritual wake-up call of Caren Jeskey. And the other three days, a combination of old chestnuts hauled out of the vaults, hopefully dangling from a thread of relevancy, along with original essays like this one. 

     I think I've taken enough of your precious time today, which beginning-to-end, is only a few eyeblinks compared to the massive scale nature plays out its still-boundless mysteries. (Speaking of which, I've always thought that matter, having exploded from the Big Bang, flies out in all directions, then, billions of years hence, will return upon itself, in some curved space quality we don't understand yet, and so maybe in another 13 billion years it'll all start hurtling back toward each other to reunite in another spot smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. There to linger for another unmeasurable span there until some unknowable force cries out "One more time," or meaning to that effect, and it all starts up again. That makes sense to me, a promises a sort of immortality).

     Until then, thank you for your attention. Happy New Year. We get another one, let's not waste it. Welcome 2023. But since even a year, short as it is, is too much for humans to grasp in totality, let's start with a more manageable unit: one day. This day. Jan. 1, 2023. Today. Carpe diem, as the Romans said. Seize the day.

Taken by the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. Used with permission.