Row, Row, Row your Desk!

 I have the privilege today to be taking part in what I expect will soon become the hottest new trend in remote work and a bold new path in the search for true work life balance, the Canoebicle.

As work itself has become more and more absurd, with the very latest trends of the corporate landscape^ on the one hand beginning to mimic the trappings of the educational system that many of the trendier employees have so recently left behind, while at the same time seeking to fulfil a kind of performative community of woke third space, the need arises to find creative and restorative outlets for working in your own context.

I have been a long time advocate for the Work-From-Canoe lifestyle as an option, to allow people a better work / canoe balance.  I am glad that, at last, Leinenkugel's has decided to recognize this important demographic.

Having been a pioneer in Work-From-Beach, Work-From-Motor-Boat-With-Questionable-Fuel-Line, Work-From-In-Laws'-Driveway, and Work-From-Bar lifestyles long before it was made all the rage by the COVID-19 Pandemic, I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this bold new experiment. 

^ I know I know what you're all thinking is that, "Joel, you don't really have a real job anymore do you?  And haven't had for a few years now?  Who are you to critique working conditions in America?"  And while this may be technically true, in the overeducated white middle class sense that I have not been invited back into the corporate life after my untimely demise, I am still an observer of the lifestyle (that is, having jobs), and I feel connected to the current moment of work

Characterization of the New Generation^

^Ordinarily, I would hide this footnote away at the bottom of the post in tiny print, but in this case, I think we need a bit of opening throat clearing for this post... I came across this brief fragment by Walter Benjamin as I continue my way through volume 2 of his collected writings, and thought, here is a bite-sized (aka RNJ-sized post) work of his that was unpublished during his life that probably hasn't received too much attention over the years, so maybe I'll re-create it, postulate for postulate and sentence for sentence for a modern audience.  He was on the verge of 40 looking at the new generation of writers coming up, and I am starting out on the back 40 seeing what's next for us, but instead of rephrasing his comments, I found as I started to re-read them that they were in fact quite on point, albeit a little out of context, so instead of rephrasing, just a little reframing was what was called for (my comments).

1.  These people (that's seriously how his starts!) make not the slightest attempt to base their activities on any theoretical foundations whatsoever. (OK, yes, I would say this remains true today, although I'm not sure our contemporary sensibilities know quite what this means.  But I will say it seems a common thread that youth tend to assert, and perhaps, act, without taking much time to consider the underlying basis for all activity that came before).  They are not only deaf to the so-called great questions (YES, this feels even more apt than that last), those of politics or world views (young people - and this is probably Millennials or maybe even starting with my generation, which is the youngest of the Gen Xers, LOVE to say how not in to politics they are, although this is probably a result of our recent conflation of the political with practical politics); they are equally innocent of any fundamental reflection on questions of art (yes, again, although what we mean by this today probably resembles something more like, "they don't even like to watch whole movies anymore, just YouTube clips!").
2. They are uneducated. (Well, no, or yes, depending on what we think education is.  They certainly have a whole hell of a lot more degrees than any previous generations have had, but they are for the most part in specific applied fields - I know a guy, for example, who is a professor in Healthcare Communications, which it seems there is a whole degree in.  Anyway, they are certainly uneducated in the sense of having an accurate understanding of the larger world around them.)  Not just in the sense that their (general) knowledge is very limited, but above all because they are incapable of extending their diminishing knowledge in a systematic manner (again, I think this is exactly right, but is a little hard to parse in a modern context.  I would say this is something like being outraged by all the over-woke causes like personal pronouns and land acknowledgements {which are overall good and decent things}, but failing to bank any outrage whatever at current exploitation of the developing world or the underclass by capitalism).  Never has a generation of writers been so oblivious to the need to understand the techniques of scholarly work as this one (I guess so..?).
3. Although these writers stride blithely on from one work to the next (Tik-Tok), it is impossible to discern any sort of development--and above all any consistency--in their work (also Tik-Tok), except at the level of technique (still Tik-Tok).  Their efforts and their ambition seem to exhaust themselves in the acquisition of a new subject or a grateful theme, and this is enough for them (I think Benjamin wrote #3 all about Tik-Tok somehow).
4. Popular literature has always existed--that is to say, a literature that acknowledges no obligations to the age and the ideas that move it, except perhaps the desirability of presenting such ideas in an agreeable, fashionably packaged form for immediate consumption (is all of the rest of this thing about Tik-Tok?).  Such consumer literature of course has the right to exist; in bourgeois society at least, it has its place and its justification.  But never before, in bourgeois or any other society, has this literature of pure consumption and enjoyment ever been identical with the avant-garde at its technically and artistically most advanced.  This is precisely the pass to which the latest school (i.e. Influencer Culture) has now brought us.
5. Give respect to economic necessity where it is due: it may well force the writer to produce much inferior work (click bait is oh so much more profitable than those good, nuanced Tik-Toks).  The nuances of his writing will then show what stuff he is made of.  However dubious much literary journalism may be, there is hardly anything so bad that it cannot be salvaged from the worst excesses by certain aspects of its content and especially its style.  Where a writer succeeds, he owes it to his grasp of technique; where he fails, it is the moral or substantive foundation that is lacking (yeah, this all may seem a bit out of date and out to lunch...).  What is astonishing is how completely alien to members of the new school the salutary, protecting reservations are--not just the moral ones, but even the linguistic ones too (but THIS is definitely a reference to safe spaces, right?).  And how these new writers absolutely take for granted their right to display an infinitely pampered, narcissistic, unscrupulous--in short, journalistic--ego (this feels definitely on point, the world has gotten these last few years to feel a lot more personal).  And how their writing is imbued to the very last detail with the arriviste (arriviste: a pushy upstart - and isn't that what is good about youth culture in the end, is that no matter how exasperating it may be, it does push us forward, we take the good, and eventually {hopefully} cast off the silly fads, and are better--improved--for it) spirit!

the Radical Grace of Dolly Parton

 As you may have noticed, I've been on a bit of a Dolly kick lately.  We re-orchestrated a road trip to Georgia to include an evening and a night in Pigeon Forge, TN in order to experience the Dinner Theater Insanity that is Dolly Parton's Stampede!  

En route to Pigeon Forge, we listened to Dolly Parton's America, a WNYC podcast that asks the question "Just what is the deal with Dolly Parton?" (or, "why is it that everyone {and by everyone we mean every constituency of the American populace} is pro-Dolly?")

At one point in the podcast ("Dollitics") they are talking about Dolly's refusal to talk about politics, but digs in to the political bent of her music, and they come to a moment during an awards show (CMAs, I think) in recent years when there was the first reunion of the 9 to 5 trio of stars, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly.  The host talks about a moment when first Fonda and then Tomlin lay in to a newly elected Donald Trump, and when Dolly's moment to speak comes she makes what could be read as a painfully banal statement about "why don't we just pray for President Trump [and all of our political leaders] rather than defaming them?"

It makes me think a little about those yard signs you see around that espouse a hate-free space (a space with grace, in other words).  I like those signs (we've talked about getting one, but haven't as of yet), but they make me think about the real level of commitment to such an ideology.  Not hating is easy when it's object is something you're aligned with (refusing to hate based on race or religion or because of who someone loves, etc.), but I would be curious to have genuine conversations with the raisers of those signs about being anti-hate when it comes to Donald Trump or white nationalists or other people who are committing acts of hate in our world.  That is where Dolly's brand of radical grace comes in: it's meeting and accepting people where they are.  It doesn't mean accepting the bigotry and violence perpetrated in its name, because grace isn't about thoughts and feelings (or even actions), grace is about the humans that do all of those things (and also do all the good bits, too).

Radical Grace, in the form that Dolly seems to embody it, is about being willing to meet people where they are, and engaging with them, and understanding with them that just being in the world is a fairly hard damn thing to do.  Hate isn't created in a vacuum - it is fed by flames of inequality and resentment, but also by avarice and isolation and spite.

I think that the reason that we feel so on the brink (of a hate-pocalypse, of a neo-fascist era, of a cold civil war) is largely due to the fact that we have forgotten how to talk about politics (or economics or history or anything really).  Saying Dolly Parton is a-political is a complete misunderstanding of politics.  We have come to think of the word "political" as meaning only 'practical politics' (or electoral politics, featuring party politics), when in fact the political is just about anything that has to do with people.  Dolly Parton is one of the greatest political songwriters of all time (having inspired not just humans, but oppressed, down-trodden civilizations across the galaxy!) In the same way that politics is not just the biennial tradition of casting a ballot for (and usually against) someone or another - in fact that's the worst part of it, so too we have come to think of the economy in an equally toxic way - as if it is only the financial sector that is "the economy" and not all of the activities of our daily lives. 

It hurts us to think only in terms of practical politics or practical economics, because then, when our efforts don't show up on the scoreboards (our bank accounts or the outcomes of specific elections rather than the outcomes enacted for us in the world by our elected leaders) we are each of us diminished.  I found it interesting, when I was looking for links for some of my various Dolly Parton, and first exploring the term 'radical grace' I found a lot more out there about radical self acceptance than I did about radical acceptance of others, and I think that's also telling given the era of mental health crisis that we also find ourselves in.

So let's all be hyper-political like Dolly in our daily work and lives.  Like Dolly would have said, "Be Excellent to Each Other..."

Here's What Happened...

 For the past 45 years (or so - no reason to take a specific measurement on it all...), we in America (and, because of the US's soft imperialism of the latter-20th Century, to a lesser extent, the world) have been in a state of civilizational decline.  It's easy to see now, looking back, that this has happened - and I think it's easy to look around our world today and see modern technologies and say "It's Tik-Tok / FaceBook / CRT" or "It's cancel culture / hyper - wokeness / Trump" and these are all, of course, symptoms of the decline, but to think that the symptom is the root cause and the thing to be treated is - well, is essentially modern American medicine under late capitalism, really.

And - i know i know - virtually anyone reading this is now saying, "wait a minute, you can't lump ______ in there with _______", and that's sort of also the point (see my point about writing things from a few weeks ago), but I would say in response that if you find yourself within a civilization in decline, all aspects of it are symptoms of it, not just 'the good ones' or 'the bad ones'.  Decline isn't necessarily a negative thing (I mean, for the civilization or whatever thing it is that is in decline, sure, it's probably not great, but), rather it is always also making space for whatever might simultaneously be arising or entering the emptying space...

But this, here, post is a look back rather than a look forward.

I finished Dan Carlin's book, The End is Always Near, "a couple months ago", and while Carlin's scope is (as always) much grander than my smaller [self]sample here, his take is that our current run as Western Civilization could be coming to a close here any day now...

We've had a pretty good run... whether you start to measure from, say, 1066, and we've been on a roll now for the last 960 or so years, or maybe 1776 and we're about to host our 'quarter of a millennium' party - or maybe the much more closely relevant to me, 1978, and it's halfway to 90!  And don't get me wrong, it's not over (hopefully) for all or most of us, but that word "Near" in Carlin's title has always been a bit squishy.  Nothing seems close, historically, except for the recent past.  A future shift always looks further away than it is.

That "our" moment of historical pre-eminence is at an end or in jeopardy or at least at a crucial moment has been widely accepted (or bemoaned or lauded depending on the perspective) for many and many a now.  From 'the end of the American Century' or the coming (stroke current) Chinese Century to Strauss-Howe's assurance that we're due for a Fourth Turning, there seems some agreement that 'we're due' for something.

It's often tempting, I think, to try reading history as 'tea'leaves' - learning from prior collapses just what might happen next.  We have a shorthand for this in the clichéd aphorism "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."  But I tend to think it's a lot more complicated than that - (more of a "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does often rhyme" or Marx's "first as tragedy, then as farce" situation).  

I just finished Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (ikr!?), a book written during our last great Crisis Turning, and while I find Hayek's conclusions quite mystical, I think his read on the structures that are coming to an end and what they might look like coming out of World War II.  It's the difference between predicting 'what is going to happen' (which I don't think tends to turn out very well) and guessing 'what it might be like'.  

I've lived all of my life within an Unraveling and a Crisis Turning - starting with Watergate and Reaganomics and continuing through to 9/11, the Great Recession, Trump and then who knows what's next in the back half of this decade or so... If nothing else, I suspect the next 6 years won't be boring...

We have this narrative narrative desire to make history into something where decisions are made about 'what comes next', and to be sure I think the end of this next Crisis (if it isn't the end of all of it) will be a kind of tipping point - where history might lead us to one of several sorts of underlying superstructures: a new oligarchic royalty; or a next-gen AI authoritarianism (this one seems more likely if quantum computing gets discovered and then owned by one company) or perhaps a new new deal... (so, basically we're looking at Dune, or Terminator, or Star Trek... You Choose!)

Sometimes it seems like all sorts of pseudo-intellectuals are constantly bemoaning the imminent fall to come if ________________ is allowed to occur, but really it's only been that way for the last 45 years or so :(.  A real retrospective perspective will see that it's all just part of a cycle.  The end of this cycle might just end up being quite a bit bigger than the ones we've seen somewhat recently.

This is COVID-2 of COVID-19, not COVID-1...

 I have once again contracted the hottest not so new infection, COVID-19, and similar to my last encounter with the biological assault, I am finding the social ramifications amongst the most noteworthy. 

But first, at the strictly physical level, man this version that I had this time is so much worse than the 2020 model.  I'm feeling okay now (thanks), but these new strains really kick your butt - even your vaxxed and boosted butt...

The confirmation process of "having COVID" has changed a lot - In November 2020, I drove to Miller Park, and sat in my car in in hundreds - of - cars - long line, and had an armored (in PPE, as if for a minor nuclear disaster) health care professional stick a seemingly far - too - long swab up my nose, and collect a sample that would eventually confirm my diagnosis (which was, pre-vaccine, to be sure, a very very minor case).

This time around, when my wife suggested I take a test because I was coughing and sneezing on Friday afternoon, I walked upstairs and grabbed the little box - read through the instructions (this was just the second time I'd taken an at - home test), and set all the bits and bobs out to be ready to take it.

And so I took my test downstairs in the kitchen whilst Brooke was working in our upstairs "home office"* and I stuck a short-ish swab up my nose and rooted around a bit (quite a bit, as the instructions encourage).  And then I was standing there downstairs and I had (one line, two lines? a dot and and a line?) a positive result... And I was like, "oh fuck" [not, to be clear, because I was any longer worried about getting COVID having been vaxxed and boosted^), "I am going to be in trouble with my wife" because her work had specific protocols for close contacts testing positive.

So I thought - I have a choice here... Obviously, I had COVID, but that knowledge was now entirely in my own control.  I didn't report my positive test to the State or Federal government (and didn't have any sense of how to do that if i had wanted to), and it was entirely up to me to whom or whether at all I report this latest contraction...

See, as we enter the post-pandemic phase (and I think the US government is planning to make it official in a couple month's time) and the disease itself is no longer a terrifying and life threatening affair in most cases (at least for those properly vaxxed and boosted) the disease has become a socio-economic one.  Because I am presently working health care adjacent, a positive test necessitates missing work (unpaid) until I secure a negative test.  Similarly, the day I tested positive preceded a week for my wife's work where she was meant to be heading out to several in person events (and not the fun, celebratory kind, but the work your ass off for whomever happens to be in charge of this one kind).

As an earnest and conformist person, I followed the rules, and missed out on a week of work (and also forced my wife to renege on her work obligations... but it easily could have been different had I made a different choice.  I think this has become a common theme for me here, but we seem to be building a culture that is primarily driven by resentment and shame.  When I was back at work a couple weeks later, and telling people why I had been absent, the most common question I heard was "where did you get it!?" (even from people who had had it several times!) as if it were a social shortcoming to have gotten it once again.  As long as this is our collective response to COVID (to ills of all sort, really be they medical, cultural, economic, etc.) those people who 'just have allergies' are going to creep back in to workplaces all over, and we're going to continue to get unhealthier in all sorts of ways... 

a books report

 Writing fiction is a thankless endeavor - I think - really any writing at all,,, putting words out there in the world for others to read and think about and judge.  To be a "best-selling" author, with hundreds and thousands of people buying (as Kai was told, "nicht geraucht, sonder gekauft!") and then judging your stuff... 

I recently have been reading fictional essais by a couple of former clients of mine (two who I genuinely enjoyed as humans and who I felt might actually have some insight and understanding as to what at least part of the human condition was all about^), while also reading a few parallel novels by more established writers (or at least more universally accepted books in the book and adaptation world...)

I have long been a student of literature (and I guess humanity?) - but my interest I think was always really about understanding the disparity between 1) Human Experience, which is (I think) an idiosyncratic, personal, and (possibly) unshareable experience [and a small aside here, but I think this is quite fundamental - I'm not saying that we as humans can't share our experience, but that the overall total version of our worldview may be different for each and every one of us {kind of like the what if when I see blue, other people are seeing red...} and this separation may in fact be the source of our larger inability to cohabitate on earth.] and that of 2) Human Expression, I'll admit, my initial bias here has always been through the written (and sorta spoken) word, but this is everyone's expression of musical, conversational, comedic, artistic(al?), filmic, poetical, historical, sociological, personal...

This may shock you, but I am a very judgmental reader - I think of things pretty harshly as very well written, not very well written, horribly written, etc..  I am simultaneously a voraciously omnivorous reader, willing to read not only across almost any genre, but also any quality.  I love bad writing almost as much as I like good writing - certainly I have learned a lot more from bad writing than good.  It's a lot easier to identify what exactly is bad in bad writing (and thereby try to excise it from your own writing) than it is to identify what exactly makes good writing good - it's all good or great, but what is it, exactly, that they just did there?  

In conversation with my wife about "needing a new book", I have tried to have her parse out a bit what it is she is looking for in a great reading experience, and she framed it this way:

"I don't like it when writers are writing obscurely, just for the sake of being obscure.  Neither do I like it, though (this isn't really how she talks), when writers just come out and say what they mean, like Stephen King (she's not a fan), he has a thought, and then he just writes it right out there for everyone to see.  I want a writer to couch (clearly, this is me, but I am summarizing her) their point within their prose a bit, but not to be too obscure."

A couple of recent examples of books that fit this bill that she (and subsequently I) both really enjoyed are Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.  Clearly she likes a little bit of magical realism too, and it certainly helps for a book to be about books, too...  In both of these example books, the reader feels a bit adrift in the early going, wondering just what is going on, and how the disparate chapters &* characters might fit together with one another, and what it all amounts to.   

Another book that we both recently read (this one my choice, rather than hers) was The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (which I have just learned is also alternately titled The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which is exceedingly strange to me).  This book, though not about books, was largely satisfactory to Brooke's books* criteria up until the very end, when the author, one Stuart Turton, comes out and tells us just precisely what's been going on here.  I still quite liked the book, and highly recommend it, although it did feel a bit M. Night Shylaman-y there at the end.

Another book I read recently that purports to be about a strange, scary phenomenon happening in the sewers (among other places) of a fictional small town near the coast was Phantoms, by Dean Koontz, and man-oh-man does he shit the bed whilst fully explaining the phenomenon that has been haunting the town with a "scientifically viable" (he assures us in the author's note afterward) account of what the characters discover.  And this is not remotely the worst part of this book.  While the similarly summarizable* novel, It, has seven kids at the center of it who we get to know and care about, there is exactly nobody in Koontz' novel to care about and so the story has no stakes.  I think this is because the characters, rather than acting like (or being) thinking, feeling humans, are more akin to walking talking resumes of humans (or maybe they're more like LinkedIn profiles).  So too in those novels by my clients, never, anywhere in them, do I get a sense that anyone remotely real is nearby the narratives.  

It Happens in the Hamptons is a (sometimes shockingly) tawdry novel of manners set within the Old Money / New Money / No Money world of the Hamptons, but despite the constant crashing together of characters from widely differing backgrounds nothing ever really feels at stake, I think because all of the characters really feel more like summaries of backgrounds, rather than anyone who resembles

anyone who might be real.  Contrast it with the similarly set Fleishman is in Trouble or even Diary, by Chuck Palahniuk.  In that last, none of the characters feel at all real, both because the novel is written all from one perspective - one voice, but mostly because we're in the midst of a nightmare fairy tale, but the stakes for everyone involved are such that we care about the characters in those books. 

The Last Ember is a (sometimes shockingly)* Jewish clone of The Da Vinci Code where every character who enters any scene is literally handing everyone else in the room their resume^^.

And, even after all that effort of putting words to page, you find my surely-soon-to-be-defunct blog that is drawing more attention to your prosal* efforts, never quite coming out and saying anything, just commenting on it all, generally negatively.

*sigh*^^^

^After several occasions meeting both of them it became eminently clear that neither of them in fact did, but it was also obvious that it was very important to both of their senses of self that I thought that they did (even though it was also obvious that in their account of the world what I thought mattered not at all).  In fact in all of my decade plus at MPS I only ever encountered one single client who seemed to have any insight into this at all).
* Then there's me, who uses an Ampersand just because the "ch" sounds in two neighboring words are different, and that's fun to draw them a bit closer, or uses unnecessary words in sentences to make fun rhymes (both literal and thematic) happen, or creating words that should be (but probably aren't).
^^No, they aren't.
^^^These asterisk brackets are unrelated to the previous footnote usage of the asterisks earlier in this post, and any similarities are incidental^^. 

The Games; a foot!?!

What do semicolons do, really? (That being said, it seems a real missed opportunity in modern American prose {modern poets use semicolons constantly - I assume, I haven't read a "new" book of poetry since around 2004, but I'd guess it's rife with them - because it's a way of "splitscreening" a sentence and can be liberating for poets because you can avoid a bit further fully saying what you're saying with a half a contradictory sentence} what with all this postmodernity going around...

Anyway...

Sports!  or; more properly; Sport!

That's why I was coming here today - to celebrate the official start of the 2023 SeegerOlympics with our Event Selection "show" on February 1st.

So far, only two events are "live" and they're the two (new!) Musical events: 1) a Music League event with 5 Rounds to work themselves out over the next 10 months and 2) a Christmas Song-Writing Competition, where pairs of Seegers (Reese/Claire, Davin/Jen, Brooke/Andy, Joel/Tim) will compete by composing and recording a Christmas song to be judged by a panel (to include Shane {sorry/thanks Shane} and others to hopefully be determined soon!) of judges who've earned the respect of (at least most of) the competitors in Christmas Song Appreciation...

This year's Competition will include an Exhibition Event - "Clinton Scotland Yard" (CSY), where one team is Mr. X and goes and parks a car somewhere in Clinton and walk from there and has to text their location every so often to all the other players and stay "hidden" for a certain amount of time.  CSY is one of seven (7!: CSY, "Trivial Pursuit Glory", Basketball One-Shot Challenge, Farkle, 8-Person War, Croquet, & Casino Night!) total synchronous events being declared, where all 8 competitors have to be together to play, whereas there was only one last year, which was the final event to be played on the penultimate day of the year, so we will randomly determine the order of those events, and see how many we can get in.

Familiar (but slightly changed) events from last year include a Strategy Board Game Tournament, an Arcade Console Tournament, a FIFA Women's World Cup Pick-'Em and a Sorry! Tournament with the competition being rounded out by Throwing Cheeseballs and Catching Them in Your Mouth, Mini-Golf, Tennis TieBreakers & Competitive Wordle!

It promises to be quite a year, with up to 16 points available!