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Uncomfortable

Note to self Friday:  Reflect on the Uncomfortable.  Not sure why.  But I’ve been uncomfortable these past few minutes.  As it happens I walked up Montgomery with the idea of executing a “walking photo tour” assignment I gave myself today, as a way to get back in touch, get grounded between projects.  Guess I have lots of getting in touch to do as the walk is uncomfortable.  Why?  The discomfort seems to be from lack of psychic force:  I’d done a presentation this morning, made cold calls, and confronted my marketing department in trying to solve a long-term problem in my brokerage work.  The discomfort was partly from distrusting the psychic strain of all this would produce a good result, partly just from exhaustion.  Empty, and without hope of being filled.  Uncomfortable.

It’s cold in the City today, so I walked uphill until I got to the Ritz, then stood on the sunny sidewalk out front.  Thought of going in but that would be more psychic strain.  What if going into a place like the Ritz-Carleton is simply a use of psychic force, not about money?  What if everything around me is about psychic force?  This morning I arrived at work before 8AM and by the time my cube-next-door neighbor arrived I was nearly into my second hour.  Oh the space in an empty office!  He started talking up a storm, telling me about his grandfather who’d had a stroke years ago.  Had to put up a virtual psychic shield to stay focused.  What did it cost?  Feels like I’ve burned through reserves and am now depleted.  What recharges me?

Pushed through that psychic resistance and went inside the Ritz.  Dressed in a stylish suit who’s to question me?  There are others standing around the lobby on devices too.  Within the outer perimeter it’s easier, so I don’t have to stay out with the grandmoms walking their grandchildren across the top of the hill.  But there’s a different psychic challenge inside.  The barrier is replaced by a demand.  I don’t want a drink or a snack and don’t feel properly demanding, so the implicit demand of the space itself that I act like I belong steadily grows.  Funny, if I were more rested I could handle loitering in the lobby longer sipping their lemon water.  If I were more demanding of food, shelter, drink also long time in lobby.  Too bad, I want to demand.  With nothing to push for I’m soon back out on the street.  The result of another layer of psychic defenses in that place?  Yes.  What is the agreement amongst people there?  I could’ve taken out my laptop and worked at the bar or in the nearly empty restaurant beside it.  Ordered something minor.  A cup of tea.  What pushed me out was feeling not quite in-sync with those around me.  It was a pensive place, gray and empty except for these guests wandering around looking at their phones.  It only now occurs that the guests with their sidelong glances, not the staff, are the enforcers of who belongs.

The place I went next had everyone working, good music, even a co-working use fee.  Pushed out of the free Ritz-Carleton in favor of a place that charges by the hour.  Plus I purchased coffee and a snack (having escaped from the dismal Ritz I was hungry again).  Could’ve had coffee at the hotel, but that place is dead–if  I’d been staying there I’d have gone upstairs for a nap.  At the co-working cafe I slowly begin to gather my forces.  I remember sitting at an open air cafe on September 11, 2001, in the warm sun, gathering force.  How many hundreds of times, both notable and not, have I been reflecting at a cafe?  Now I’m focused on recovering from the efforts of the day, sipping coffee, nibbling on the coconut pudding, letting the music wash over me.  Let them charge me $2 an hour, it’s cheaper than paying for parking if I had brought a car…

Managed by psychic forces, I tend to feel discomfortably buffeted, as though by a rock in a river, a sudden turn in the rapids.  A drop.  A swirl.  Don’t necessarily hit the rock, just feel queasy rushing past, changing direction, washing up to a high place (the Ritz) and back down to the co-working cafe.  I could sit and look at roses all day, but don’t, I mean can’t.  I’m embedded in a psychic milieu that permits me to do this and that, but not all.  The best I can do is look at a photo I took with my new phone of some roses on a tabletop, glancing at it while I’m carried towards the next thing.  It would be uncomfortable to stop.  Would it even be possible?

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Late

Am I late?  I know the feeling so well.  Today I board BART  at 8:03 AM.  My goal to be at my desk making calls at 8 AM.  That makes me late…Or do I make myself late?  Walked down to the station rather than taking an Uber, that pretty much made the difference.  Talked with my wife about plans for the coming week.  That made the difference.  Played mini-basketball with my son.  Of course you can add up each little thing or you can pick them out one by one.  Each one makes the difference.  What’s the net product?  I’d rather be late like this than on time missing any one of these things.

Maybe the real feeling of being late that rankles is the feeling of being out of control.  If I’m late by choice it’s OK.  If I pretend it’s not by choice, my whining causes damage to my self.  The train sits at the sunny BART terminal at MacArthur and I see an attractive woman with slumped shoulders.  I have to say she doesn’t appear attractive. Maybe just for an instant before the slumped shoulders registered.  It’s like being late: if you think you’re late and you slump sadly then you’re the essence of late, you’re the self-condemning late person rather than the cheerful late person, and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

Now I’m on time, at this moment, because I’m doing the one thing I’ve agreed to do right now.  Write.  Even though not everything went as planned today, I said I’d call the Uber at 4:45PM and start writing for 45 minutes at that time.  Even if I haven’t written for every second of the time, I have done it.  Even pulled a picture of a tree taken against the sky and placed it onto this post.  Why?  Because we all know the tree is not late.  And I’m supposed to switch to going for a run at 5:30 PM, and no, I’m not required to do that while in the Uber as long as it gets me home within another 15 minutes.  So I could be on time for that too.

Here’s the real challenge.  As I was stepped into the elevator to go down to the Uber I could feel it.  The resistance.  Inchoate.  Resistance to actually sitting in an Uber and doing my writing the whole way.  And that is the failure, not the reading of emails, the quick playing a round of a video game.  The failure would be in that tired moment at the elevator.  So I said to myself, at that moment, look at your reflection in the elevator doors, face the resistance because this is it, here.

So, am I late?  Only when not present.  One thing we do that trees probably don’t do:  pretend this isn’t really happening.  I’m thankful for all the things I can do that aren’t getting to work on time.  I’d still like to set a time and be there.  More important to me, to set a goal and reach it.  More important still, to have a clear intention and stand with that.  So my various intentions are to follow through with some core goals, and deliverables in service to these goals.  Such as spending time with my kids, making creative contributions to the world, as for example building applications and writing on subjects that others actually read.  Things I’m excited to be present for.

There comes the tricky part.  I know in principle, what I want to do.  Yet in practice it’s easier to oscillate between two states: reacting to what’s at hand and recuperating from that.  Do you notice those two things can describe a life?  Technically I’m outside the iron trap now to the extent I’m not either reacting to the command to write nor escaping from my life through writing complete crap.  But guess what lies outside the trap?  A wasteland.  Yes, you step out for a second and there you are in a beautiful, terrible and bare place where it’s cold (or unbearably hot), you have no apparent sustenance, and no one to help you.  That’s how I feel, anyway.  The iron trap:  answer emails, then, after an hour or two, go to the cafe and try to forget.  The wilderness: instead of playing a video game, checking email, jumping on the Web while I sip my coffee, I write.  And the most wildernessy thing about the Wilderness is stepping into it.  That’s when the resistance reaches such a peak that to submit to the desire to not move forward seems very pleasurable: “What, you dare to set aside email responsibilities (pleasure of checking, of addressing, of deleting) to create something new?”  Surely not now.  And the pleasure of just a momentary diversion–can’t I do that first?  Or, wait, what about just writing now.  Well, it’s either now or else I’ll be late for life.

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I Am Eating Salami

The perfect segue into the Election of 2016.  If Donald Trump wins we’ll all be eating salami.  If Hillary Clinton wins we’ll go on eating whatever we were eating before.  I think the Trump supporters just want us to all join them at the table and stop putting on airs.  OK, I admit it, I’m having two different kinds of salami (they call it salumi here), by choice.  And smoked gouda with some pretty good Zinfandel.  Yeah.  I seem to be the bad guy?  I don’t know…I care about women.  Wait, that’s what Trump says… OK, how about this, I’m open to criticism?  So, how well do I score on the Fact Checker with that one?  Because Trump has shown us that you can say anything…  Here’s how I check out:  I’m open to criticism as long as you put it into terms I can support (my logical structure), and you present it in a diplomatic way (stroke my ego while shattering it).  Is that too much to ask?  Frankly, or salamilily, I do think that I’m worlds different from Trump, as I push my way through paperwork and sales calls to try and grow my own real estate empire.  Um, I’m not a politician.  Wait, he says he’s not either.  He probably says he’s not a liar.  What am I supposed to do, say that I am?

My active, always-on spellcheck tried to make “salamilily” into “Salami Lily.”  I bet Trump called somebody that sometime.  Sigh.  Truth has a hard time in an environment where people are being regularly abused.  Or maybe it’s humor that has a hard time.  Or maybe…what if people have been being abused for a long time and we’re all just trying to figure out how we make our way out of this smoky room into the sunlight?  I think so.  In that case Truth is really about something called integrity.  And I have a question about that.

Just now I’m sitting at a bar in a tapas restaurant with a whole bunch of other people from Berkeley who have lot’s of apparent character.  They aren’t looking around trying to figure out whether to pick up on someone, no, in the afternoon glow at 4:35pm I’m with the Berkeley geriatric crowd.  These people are charging into their older years full force and full of purposeful talk.  It’s almost a 1960’s Madmen feeling of camaraderie in which I don’t participate.  Or maybe I do.  I predict in 15 years my kids will be out of the house, my mom and my wife’s mom will be in a stable place, and I’ll have quit my job and so will my best friend.  So me and him and my wife and his wife can come here in the afternoon and have chitty chatty about the new condominium towers in Berkeley, the fall of the Russian and Chinese empires, the virtual worlds that have consumed all the have-nots, and maybe, if I’m allowed to temper the mood, the diminishing world of ours in this tapas bar, in the late afternoon, in the fall sunshine, at 4:35.

Maybe.  I hate to be a harbinger of things that no one will hear, but one of us will have suffered a change of life that will throw off the others.  Even if it’s just an unremitting sadness of heart.  And another one of us will be looking far beyond the confines of this little bar.  The other two will be trying to figure out what the f*ck is going on.  And the Trump supporters won’t actually be gone, they’ll be in the virtual worlds doing stuff.  And I hate to pop your bubble (if I am, which I’m not, because you either already agree with me or won’t listen…unless you are that odd person who actually keeps an ear to the wind and a foot across the threshhold) but that stuff will actually matter in proportion to the amount of passion and luck those people have, not their presence in the virtual world.

The virtual world will be so blended with this one in fifteen years that we’ll wonder how the two were considered separately.  So, I’m all wrong about the have-nots because they’ll be marginalized in all Worlds, even if they elect a president to try and represent themselves.  The best they can hope for is to try and change the dialogue.  And that matters…  OK, sorry, it’s not that I lied, just that I got carried away, made an assumption that just because someone goes into a virtual world, and just because the virtual world is where the power resides, that someone who goes there becomes powerful.  Nope.  But give me one shred of Hope to hold out to those of us who don’t want to see other humans lose every last part of dignity: of those who disappear into a virtual world some will prevail there when they failed here in the bricks and mortar, de-industrializing, AI-got-my-job real world.  After all, the AI lives in the virtual world so at least you’re taking the battle to it on its home turf.  At least you’re meeting the adversary unblinking.  There is something to that, you know.  Let me whisper it to you: it’s called Meaningful Work.  Because all work, in a world where less than 1% produce food, is make-work.  So, make work that means something to you.  Why?  Because then you have many advantages: you’re moving, you’re engaging, you’re building and you’re giving.  The worst possible thing, in America, is to be prevented from doing those things (otherwise known as pursuit of happiness).  So go go.

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Avalon

I’ve been in Puerto Vallarta seven times or more.  I fold and unfold peso bills to pay the restaurant at the beach where I’ve already been three times this trip.  Folding and unfolding is different than at home.  That’s the point.  We’re in a condo here for the first time, far above the beach.  A lot that’s different about Mexico is different whether we’re here in PV or elsewhere, so I take out my pesos and inquire about the water taxi in my fragmented Spanish and it’s a coastal Mexican experience, new because I’ve traveled less in recent years.  Has it really been since 2008 that I came here, or 2010?  Alaska Airlines informed me today my frequent flyer account expired years ago as I haven’t flown Alaska since 2006.  Ten years.  God.

Avalon is pristine. Clean lines everywhere. The hot water heater erratic but the pool warm and not filled with territorial condo owners.  Seems the tourists don’t come up this high, or the wealthy Mexican owners don’t bother to rent out their units to tourists, or both.  It’s quiet.  They use reposado tequila and Grey Goose vodka at the pool bar.  I think it’s the bar guy who says it’s ok for my daughter to shout at the top of her lungs…kids are kids, he says.  Really?  That’s surprisingly nice.

Mexico is nearly as I remember except it seems to be happening in the background while I’m distracted by email and kids, thinking about returning to Berkeley, setting up a dolphin swim.  It’s like I’m separated from everything by a bubble. My auto-correct tried to fill in “Bible.”  I hope I’m not separated from the world by a Bible.  My son and I stopped briefly at the cathedral on our way to get playing cards, on our way to the cafe to play two computer games.  Reminds me of a trip to Hawaii with my parents as a teenager.  Now we’re getting a handmade bracelet for my daughter’s friend while I approve several games my daughter requests from her iPad up at the Avalon pool.  We order after deciding the water taxi would be too bumpy to take us to the dolphins tomorrow, and too slow.  My son plays two games while I play one.

The sun comes out but I feel as though I’m going crazy because as the afternoon wears on  and I try to write my son keeps tapping me a certain way, trying to get me to play Ron Beasley in a Harry Potter game.  But it’s bright now and a relief after a day of clouds.  Writing for the first time in a while.  I’ve been reading this three-book Magicians series, so easy to fall into.  They’re books about mirrors and losing oneself in books.  I could lose myself in a book about losing myself in the details of Puerto Vallarta.  Didn’t I read somewhere that authors have to write and that is the only reason they can bring themselves to do it?  Makes the usual sort of paradox out of free will because if I’m writing it’s only because I have to.  Like actually noticing clouds appearing out of thin air rather than rolling across the horizon.  Free will is like seeing the sun come out and thinking, “What a good job I did!”

There’s something more important than free will, though it’s related, and as we close the glass doors for the evening and hear the  fireworks across the water the darkness amidst the shush of air-conditioning I see it’s personal development:  free will or no, you either develop or you are already dead.  Develop haltingly and you’re haltingly alive.  Tell me about it.  I’m back in Mexico after how many years and the fried Lima beans taste good.  And what have I learned except that it’s much harder to manage four psyches than even the impossible task of managing one. My wife reads and my kids are supposed to be reading too. Mischief managed?  More like mischief overlooked.  It’s too quiet out there so I go to check:  one reads, one doesn’t.

Just like that it’s nine PM.  Different when I’m not lost in a book. More happens. I’m more willing to let go of the day in delicious anticipation of tomorrow.  King Arthur was supposed to return from Avalon someday, wasn’t he?  When I return from my stay will it merge with my other travels into a montage of cobblestone streets and beachside restaurants?  After my conveyance here to the Avalon par avion what is next that isn’t a retreat from the pain of missing this repeated retreat?  Children, challenges, the spirit to say Yes I’ll write.  The courage not to live to please to earn rewards?  The rewards are never enough; only the earning is worthy.  Unless Arthur wakes up and gets some work done Avalon is a quiet place.  As quiet as a tomb.

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