The Problem With Nuanced Arguments

Intent and integrity don't hold a candle to marketing and self-gain -- either you believe that and take advantage of it or you don't and you get taken advantage of -- oh the beauty. 👈 This sort of reasoning is old style "y'all can't all be wrong" and I don't like to dabble in it. But, I can and do promise you the future-positive so we can deviate for a post or two (it's discretionary man!*) . In consideration of this post's title, the problem with nuanced arguments is that:

#1) I don't like it.
#1.33̅: I fucking hate it, but...
#1.66̅: I'm not allowed to swear.

#2) If you have 4 minutes (which you don't) Emo Philips long ago proved this and yet the most aluminated* of the Illuminati win their social media wars with stuff I can't even begin to understand*: the pontification drools everywhere and the thumbs go up. Could the puke go out?

#3) Number 3 is withheld in nuanced consideration.

* Or woman.
* Probably want to look this one up.
* The irony of y'all can't all be wrong's content is not lost on me but there's valor in bashing you over the head versus daintily trying to prove that you are different than me and that I am smarter than you. In other words it's Heineken v Pabst -- you get to decide who's who.

If that 4 minutes still eludes you, just fast forward to the last minute of this song:

Transcendence Lasts As Long As Until You Get Hungry Again

I ❤️ writing about transcendence. It's a big word that sounds so mystical and it can really vault your status into rarefied air: so fancy! In college, I had no car, no job, no money, no plan, so, as a suitor, I'd just throw that word out there and hope for the best. One can always hope, or so I have been told.

I once found transcendence:

• At the bottom of a bottle of red wine.

• On the first day after all my breakups.

• Understanding that when somebody else does it, it's skill and when you do it, it's luck.

• Realizing that black olives are Top 40 and green olives are punk.

• On page 179 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (*possibly other pages).

• Inside a home in Tempane, Ghana, where the words written on the wall: "in times of difficulty, lovers are few," couldn't have spoken anymore loudly.

• After listening to the similar drum fill intros on songs 1 and 2 of Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes. 

• At the top of the west side of Retzer Nature Center.

• Losing a shit (and possibly metric) ton of money.

• On the point of Stevens Point, WI, specifically pizza from long gone Aldo's, doughnuts & whole milk from the long gone bakery, and occasionally from the Elbow Room, which occasionally led to meta-transcendence, like winter post-midnight brat-fry indulgences.

• Listening to Cliff Burton's Orion.

• Being mesmerized, circa age 2, by the street lamps of Plymouth, WI

• Once having a handful of blog readers, which is better than none -- it's 2019, wtf is a blog anyway, I guess?  🤦‍♂️

• Watching Wyatt go for help in Easy Rider and/or watching part 1 of the Deer Hunter.

• Finally acquiring health care.

• After writing "champagne everywhere" in a letter, which possibly burst the dam of everything me -- I only wanted the object of that letter and the universe gave me everything else instead.

• After writing about its consequences: "I'm Lost In Transcendence, That's Why I Never Get Laid"

But seriously, and -- discounting anything and everything previously written as serious (except for what is in the list) -- transcendence! It enjoys being elusive. You find it; it moves. You tell your friends about it and it's gone. You pick a number and someone else picks a bigger number. You see certain things and then you can never go back. You can be faulted if you're wrong or exalted if you're right, but you never get to go back.

This is track #3 but you can get over it:

Nobody Faults a Woodpecker

1) [digression]: Pileated should stand on its own as word, not just as an adornment to woodpecker. And, as much as I'd like to respect pileated's Latin roots, if you are truly pileated, it's not something you are likely writing home about -- think a bad night of bowling on a good night of drinking, or, whichever sort of dialectal defilement fits your discretion.

2) [the point]: Nobody faults a woodpecker for slamming its head against a wall for most of its life. It is what it is, this is this, raison d'être! Gotta quote Hesse here, not for intellectual prowess or any sort of proving by disproving, just simply for the sake that sometimes the details simply get away: The painter puts it in the picture but we just see what we want to see.

"Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal – that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one – and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself."

We read the Hesse and we think, "yes, yes, poet, prophet, these are good things, the brass ring is mere steps away." Sure, perhaps criminal and madman are unfairly too great of counter examples, but at 7.5 billion, the width of the bell curve is pretty goddamn big. And sure, doing the resolute thing sounds wonderfully boy/girl-scoutish, but there's loneliness in the middle of that curve. How far do you go? How long before the wavering trashes the foundation?

At one point in this post I wrote "hubric myopia" and "consideration of consequence." Due to vanity I'm including them here, just so you know.

All I Need Is Steppenwolf; Don't Read Steppenwolf

First you type, then you hit the backspace key a few times, then you type some more, then rearrange a few things, then select-all, delete. If it's bad you hate it now and it it's good you'll hate it in 5 years. I used to be proud of surviving but after you survive you realize that survive is a dirty word, a denigrated state. Hey, I'm an optimist, I'm an abyss starer, but I can't beat power and economics and what's the point really? There's a personal stone at the end of the road, or a pile of stones, or perhaps a mushroom suit if you are gard-de-avant. I just rearrange things until they feel good. I can't make this stuff up: I once wrote Police lyrics on my physics quiz and actually got credit for it. I once had enough hubris to cram an entire quarter of Fortran learning into one night prior to the final. It didn't work out*. But it did work out! I turned software into a career! A river always reaches its goal. That's the beauty and criminality of it, but it's hubris to think you are value-add. Where do you go from here? You certainly can't put Steppenwolf on your resumé and even if you did, that'd be silly and likely fraudulent. We've all got courage and moxy until we don't and Hesse won't be there to save you.

*I did write Police lyrics on a desk at the University of Minnesota's Nicholson Hall

Equalizers

"When there is suffering, we look for a reason. That reason is easiest found within oneself." - Clare Vanderpool

Doesn't matter how low I get, doesn't matter how high. The Band's Chest Fever always brings me down -- or up, depending on the direction I need to go. Things like these are the great equalizers of life. I don't mind coming in first but I think there's romance playing the sweep: picking up the pieces, ensuring everyone got to his/her destination safely, writing the memos bound for no one's eyes, long after the party has gone. Life is great because as soon you realize you can no longer be surprised, weird stuff happens. Then you ponder because enlightenment is almost there. Then tomorrow arrives, then the day after. Then you forget. What was it you were waiting for? If I were you I'd find my medicine in Chest Fever because if you are too far out, you at least have a path back down.

When The Glitter Wears Off, The Patina Better Rock Your World

There's a reason pyramids have the fat part on the bottom. You can certainly enlighten yourself, rise up, look eye to eye with the Eye of Providence, but when you're there, be sure to take notice of the cigarette machines and discarded Coke bottles. Take beats give. Always. You can guru yourself this and guru yourself that (and maybe with a little marketing you can scrape some cash out of that deal) but there's only one game in town and it's tough. Enlightenment is just a fantasy of those who have neither power nor money while the rest of us bicker and blame and turn the crank for those who really really want that crank turned. You can be loud and someone else can just be louder. Immer Lauter!

Reductio Ad Absurdum

It's a challenge to reach into a bag of words and not line them up pretty darn close, if not exactly the same way as before, all under the sun. Oh the fear of banality transcription. It's hard to write about writing about it. I mean recursion will kill you but then you come back and do it again. I mean, if you go looking, you are likely to find an abyss hiding in some life-corner somewhere, and this is where the excitement starts -- meditation upon the abyss! Meditation is the wrong word -- it's staring, as in staring it down. Just gotta stare it down, hours to years, and avoidance is certainly the wrong strategy. Avoidance is just a nasty reset button that gets you back to that aforementioned recursion thing. Stuck in a loop. I mean Bob Mould laid out some heavy stuff in Black Sheets of Rain and while that is all well and good, stoning the abyss is more complete, more self-edifying.

The words of this post were written to:
The Byrds' Set You Free This Time (on repeat):