reductio ad pussycat

The irrefutable shame-based ontology of Josie McCoy, as applied to the question of burps and invisible dogs:

Fig. 1: Burps are invisible.
Fig. 2: Burps exist.
Fig. 3: Visual evidence is not the sole criteria for determining the existence of a given phenomena.
Fig. 4: Therefore, invisible dogs must exist.
New Order - Denial (from Movement, 1981) - Where subjectivity fails.

hate myself today

I have no problems with the idea of growing older.

A certain sense of fatalism and pronounced lack of ambition have made it easy for me to accept, rather than rail against, the immutable fact that this trip through the timestream is one-way only. It is far better to negotiate the rapids on one's own terms than to be worn down and swept away in a futile fight against the current.

Besides, the concept of "youth" so many attempt to cling onto tends to be little more than a fixation on superficial trappings and cluelessness cloaked in an aura of false simplicity. The longer one attempts to hold on, the more absurd the situation becomes, and harder it becomes to let go of things that aren't really that important at all.

That said, I could do without those little reminders of mortality that my body springs on me at inopportune moments. I can live with the cosmetic stuff like gray hairs and whatnot; it's the random flare-ups of pain in my kneecaps (reminders of a 1985 scooter accident), the recurring lower back issues, and, most recently, the painful spasms in my neck and shoulders. Granted, most of these are self-inflicted wounds -- legacies of misadventures past or my flagrant disregard for all things ergonomic -- but the passing of years has only sharpened their lingering impacts.

The Modern Lovers - Dignified and Old (from The Modern Lovers, 1976) - "Dignified" is a relative term where I'm concerned.

the stars are brighter

A certain degree of flexibility is required to negotiate life's twists and turns. A stone obvious statement, yes, but one whose message isn't heeded nearly as often as it ought to be.

In my younger years, I knew a surprising number of people between the ages of 16 and 21 who were convinced that they had sorted out the rules of the game. I'm not talking about the standard adolescent delusions of grandeur ("I'm going walk into Paramount's offices and show them my alterna-soundtracked off-brand Catcher in the Rye and become an Oscar-winning screenwriter!") or the methodically plotted ambitions of the Type A set ("AP Biology, then an undergrad degree from Tufts, then med school, then a vacation home in Tahoe."). Nor am I talking about those enviable individuals (such as my college buddy Southie Dave or Kevin Church) with a knack for navigating life's various currents so as to best reach their stated objectives, large or small.

The folks I'm referring to are the ones who have codified their (inherently myopic) worldviews right down to most minute details. More often than not, they've given their creed a cute nickname ("Jessie's Theory" or "Jack's Manifesto") and make frequent use of jargonistic terms like "axiomatic" when expounding their philosophies to their peers. And expound they do, evangelizing with a zeal born of absolute certitude and casting a jaundiced eye upon those who aren't convinced by their obvious wisdom.

The details of the platform vary from person to person, but it tends to be a mix of received pop philosophy and pat assumptions made in the safety of a sheltered environment and lacking in real world empiricism. Favorite subjects include relationships and career aspirations, which provide opportunities to stress off-the-rack individualist views in opposition to the unenlightened lumpenmundane herd. Marriage and cubicle life can be problematic? The devil, you say!

Back then, the utter confidence of these people gave me pause, especially in light of my own adolescent lack of clarity, which was roundly criticized...

"Fine. Enroll at UMass Boston [I did], stay at your grandmother's house [again, yes], and live in Woburn for the rest of your life [my current plan] -- I'm going to join an artists' commune in Prague and reject the bourgeoisie lifestyle."

It might have stung at the time, but I eventually ran into this individual at the Burlington Mall a few years later. She was the assistant manager at a shoe store. There were no lofty speeches about French poetry or free love, only a litany of workplace gossip delivered to the tune of the Overpriced Shoe Company's employee handbook. "None of my co-workers appreciate the seriousness of our vocation," she told me, sans irony, at one point of the painful conversation.

I've seen the same scenario repeat itself over and over again in the time since. Last I heard, Little Miss Career and Relationship Advice was single and busing tables at an Olive Garden in Burbank. Our brief reunion via email ended abruptly when she asked if I was still dating Maura and I responded that we were married and had bought a house...in Woburn. The gay aspiring psychic ended up repudiating himself and joining the Catholic priesthood. The Queen of the Soapbox, who had made many public pronouncements against 9-to-5 work and marriage, engaged in all sorts of semantic contortions in order to explain her engagement and taking a white collar office job. A veritable feast of schadenfreude, if I was a more petty-minded soul.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. The problem with rigid systems, political or personal, is that they assume that vagaries of life can be definitively quantified when even the slightest empirical experience shows that chaos is an endemic aspect of day-to-day living. Water pumps fail, cavities rot through to the nerve, pink slips are handed out -- shit happens, in other words, and half-assed philosophies forged in the callowness of youth are a poor substitute for being able to think on one's feet and come to grips with the inevitable crises life is going to blindside you with.

This line of reasoning often gets lumped in with the "you'll understand when you're older" argument, but there are clear differences. It's not about defensive post-facto excuses or justifications (or begrudging the younger generation its idealism). It is possible to maintain one's core principles over a span of years, but creating, then attempting to adhere to a comprehensive worldview based on shallow assumptions with no basis in reality simply establishes the groundwork for an inevitable crisis of faith, in which hotswapping one self-serving ideology for another becomes a tempting solution.

The Auteurs - How Could I Be Wrong (from New Wave, 1993) - What you could have been listening to back in '93, but were too busy trying fool yourself into thinking that Stone Temple Pilots were a decent band. Do you feel ashamed now? You ought to.

the shadows still remain

Today is All Saints' Day (and before anyone asks, NO FUCKING WAY) which is as good a time as any to rediscover religion. I went looking for mine this morning, and it turned out to be up in the attic, packed in with a collection of failed hard drives and obsolete video cards in a box marked "unneeded junk."

Back when I used to work weekends at the college library, the portion of my shift that didn't involve playing "roust-a-pervert" or explaining to patrons that "no, this is not Boston University" was spent reading books and journal articles on whatever subject had captured my fancy at the moment. It's amazing how much one can learn from books when one knows there isn't a term paper or final exam at the end of the tunnel, and in terms of my educational development, I certainly came away from the experience with far more than I ended up getting from my actual college curriculum.

As I said, my choice of reading material was entirely whim-based, which led to some places that I would never have gotten to on my own. For example, I spent a couple shifts delving into St. Augustine's City of God, which despite my aggressive atheism turned out to be quite an engrossing read. It was written in the wake of the Visigoths' sack of Rome and is laden with spiritual-versus-earthly dualism (reflecting Augstine's own personal demons more than it does Christ's teachings). I was drawn to City of God by its apocalypticism, but in the end I found myself to be more fascinated by the implications of Augustine's detailed demolition of Roman pantheism, implications which the author himself could not bring himself to acknowledge.

A good-sized portion of the treatise is given over to an extended, almost god by god, refutation of the pagan and animist religious traditions practiced in the Empire at the time. Augustine strikes an almost mocking tone in these passages as he highlights the absurdities of having, for instance, separate deities for doors, frames, and lintels. It's as thorough an argument against irrational superstition as one can find, even if it doesn't entirely jibe with Augustine's intent, which was to posit the superiority of Judeo-Christian monotheism. The problem is that core elements of his arguments against pantheism -- the silliness, the contradictions, the twisted logic underpinning the system of belief -- can just as easily be applied to Augustine's own religious convictions, whose superiority in his mind is that God is more benevolent (which is a matter of practice, in truth), "real," and offers cool perks to His followers in the afterlife.

It's a common enough phenomenon whenever analytical philosophy collides with religious convictions. The same thing occurs in Descartes's Discourse on the Method, where, even when all other criteria for determining "self" are called into question, the existence of God is taken as an unassailable truth. It is as if having walked down to the shoreline of existentialism, Augustine, Descartes, and their philosophical and theological descendents cannot bring themselves to dip their toes in the water.

The Skids - The Saints Are Coming (from Scared to Dance, 1979) - It's a rare accomplishment for a song to survive being transformed into benefit porn by the likes of U2 and Green Day. Fortunately this bit of Scottish punk (co-written by the late Stuart Adamson, a member of The Skids before he went on to form Big Country) has bucked the odds and retained its ability to inspire awe in the listener despite having been used as a post-Katrina anthem and in an embarassingly preachy video.

What amuses me the most about that turn of events is that back in the old days, I used to describe The Skids to people by saying "they're kind of like U2...if U2 didn't suck."

The Saints - This Perfect Day (from Eternally Yours, 1978) - Long-haired Aussies who crashed the 70's British punk party with a ferocious Pop-inspired (Iggy Pop, that is) sound.

Big Sleep - Saints & Scholars (from a 1985 flexi) - DIY indie rock out of scenic paradise that was 80's Belfast. (Correction: The band actually hailed from Newtownards, ten miles east of Belfast.) It's a bit like a John McGahern story boiled down into a two-minute pop song: "This land of saints and scholars/is a land of fools and clowns."