A LETTER TO A YOUNGER SELF

18 July 2022
Hey man.

You don’t know me, and I bet I don’t know you as well as I think. My friends and I started a little writing club, and the topic for the week was to send you a message in a bottle of sorts. The obvious route would be to offer you advice, maybe gift you some wisdom gained from fifteen or twenty extra years of life experience. After mulling it over, I have decided against taking that path and instead just vent a little to you to help myself. Because the one thing I’m relatively confident we share in common is the hatred of people’s unsolicited advice; the ramblings of boring adults telling us to turn back and take their preferred shortcuts, even though it is evident that all the good juice in life is found in fruits that grow in miles-deep canyon bottoms thick with scrub oak. So tired of those strangers pointing up at the well-maintained trails as if we didn’t fucking see them, as if we didn’t purposefully make up our minds to avoid them at all costs. To them, we are a strange creature obsessed with pursuing pointless endeavors. To us, they are… well, we don’t really care what they are, do we? I think we understand them even less than they understand us. 

The difference between us and them is we don’t interject. We don’t vocalize to these people what we really think of them or their habits. We try to be enthusiastic about them getting off their asses and doing something at all. “Wow, amazing, you did a great job. I’m really stoked for you. You must have had a blast! What’s next?”  For some reason, despite the endless discouragement from some of our peers, we still feel obligated to be the whole goddamn world’s cheerleader. Maybe our kindness is viewed as a sort of rolling over, an admission of our inferiority. Maybe we took the Golden Rule to heart too heartily. There should be a warning tagged to the end of that one. Here’s my suggested revision:

Treat others as you would like to be treated, but don’t get your hopes up that they will return the favor.

I hope it’s not disappointing for you to learn that this is just as annoying today in the future as it is for you in your present, and I do apologize for the selfish thrusting of my feelings upon you. This is not an attempt to try and nudge you onto another road, but if it does, that’s cool too, because the last thing I would ever do is to try and persuade you to do it all the same as I did. Afterall, that’s the same old shit everyone always does to us. I cannot possibly put myself in your shoes, no matter how hard I try. Those Vans of yours have so much room to expand and learn; honestly, I am jealous. We always loved the feeling of being an amateur. We also know we can never go back, and the only way to stay that special kind of dumb is to keep on learning. The joy of blissful idiocy is maintained by trudging forward through the unknown, and I refuse to rob you of that by offering you explicit directions to my honey holes. You would prefer to find those on your own, I am sure.

ANYWHO, I hope all your pet projects are running smoothly, and I hope you’ve got your nose deep in a good book. Hold onto that woman, keep learning, and as the Toasters say, “Don’t let the bastards drag ya down!”

Love,

Future Bryan

P.S. I played with the Toasters last month. Twice, actually. It was sick.

P.S.S. I play the drums now. Highly recommend picking that up sooner. But you know… do whatever you want.

A Meadow Full of Birds

Most days I wander around through a thick fog, aimless, just trying to feel my way across the landscape without stepping off some unforeseen cliff or into the clutches of invisible man-eating beasts. It is borderline impossible to get a simple task completed due to the constant interruption from the environment; rain douses my fires and wind demolishes my shelters. A constant shrieking howl of wind through the burned-up beetle killed pines make it unfeasible to even hold a thought long enough to follow the thread to its delicate ends. Even if I can, its spiderweb-thin tips flap crazily and shred in the storm, and it is useless to try and grasp them, for they always break within the clutches of my calloused and clumsy, freezing cold sausage fingers. Long-term goals are a long-forgotten dream; all the years of failure make it seem pointless to form them at all. No, the goal is to just get through the day without dying, and maybe be lucky enough to do the same again tomorrow.

Every once in a while, though, I stumble upon an aspen lined meadow. The sun shines bright but not too much so, the grass is green and full and soft to lay in, loamy and squishy but never soaking my clothes. There is a slithering stream full of cool, clean water. It is lousy with giant brook trout that never stop rising. The mosquitos don’t bite, and all the standing trees are bursting with life, reaching up and stretching out toward our great star in their selfish arbitrary race to be the tallest in the grove. Any dead trees lay bone dry on the ground and their wood burns long and smokeless in my campfires. All this is enough to bring tears of joy and relief, but the best of all are the birds. These birds make me weep with happiness. 

Birds of every color and body plan fly freely and with gusto. Years of photographing them have left me with a sneaking suspicion that they enjoy flying, but here I know they do because they tell me so. They speak English and have the most amazing things to say. I am astonished by the thoughts they share; funny, philosophical, heart-wrenching, inspirational. Every bird with a unique point of view, distinct from the others. Every bird happy to share, enthusiastic to listen. I love these birds.

When I try to communicate with them, the strangest thing happens. Although they speak my language, when I open my mouth to vocalize, it’s all squawks and chips and chick-a-dee-dee-dee’s! I know what I want to say, but no matter how well I plan it out, it always comes out different than I had imagined. But I tweet on anyway — I can tell from their faces they understand, and they encourage me, tell me to keep going. The longer we converse the more confident I become, even though my words never sound quite right to me. We spend the evening doing this, the birds speaking in English and myself in Birdish, and I stay up as long as possible, knowing tomorrow the hazy hell will settle back on the land, and I will be adrift in hardship again. I don’t know where the birds go when the weather turns to shit, and when I see them next, I won’t ask. Because time is too short, and we have more important things to jaw. While most people interrogate each other with “what do you do?”, me and my birds prefer to talk about anything else. We want to know how each other feels, what we spend our time thinking about, our greatest adventures and deepest regrets. These are the things we discuss until our eyes sneakily shut against our will while the fire smolders and cracks and the elk scream and mew in the distance. In the last seconds of consciousness, one of us whispers a word, and we all meditate on it until we meet again.

I awake in the heart of the storm, but with renewed energy to keep trudging on. Hopefully, maybe in another week or so, I’ll find that meadow and my birds will come out to play, and that is enough to keep me grinning like the psycho that I am in the face of an infinity of bad weather.

WHY I AM ALSO NOT A CHRISTIAN

“Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”

- Bertrand Russell in “Why I am Not a Christian”

Anyone who spends even a short amount of time looking into the history of philosophical thought will quickly realize how much philosophy revolves around the concept of the Good Life. What is it? How can a human find it? Is there a way to formalize a prescription for learning how to live a good life so that all humans can potentially attain it? These are some of the main questions that have propelled philosophers over millennia. While we have not found one system that will fit everyone, there are many ideas put forward by multiple philosophers and religious icons that will ring true with different groups of people based on their personal tastes.

 While I agree in some ways with a variety of philosophers on the topic, in particular the sweetheart above, in my own experience, I have found that the Good Life is a concept best described by what it is not rather than what it is. Some days I need to enjoy nature, others I need pointless play, and others hard work on art projects. Trying to use just one of these as a definition of the Good Life would exclude the others, which would be unacceptable. What I never need, however, is whatever causes me to feel anxiety, malice, hatred, a desire to control others, or greed. More than anything, I do not want to feel like I am a helpless, powerless critter that requires rescuing. I desire freedom and self-sufficiency, and to help people find these for themselves, too. This is the number one reason I am not a Christian and why I believe that Christianity is one of those things that can be placed into the box that holds all the other things that the Good Life is not. To further explain the reasons behind my distaste for Christianity, allow me to retell a short story from my past.

Seven years ago, at my sister-in-law’s wedding, I had a short interaction with some family members. While sitting with my wife’s cousins, who are devout Christians that are painfully aware of my disbelief, one of them decided, no doubt propelled by a few bottles of liquid courage, to start questioning me about my atheism. It was all the usual, predictable discourse that happens when I step into these conversations: so how do you explain creation? Where do morals come from? To which I respond… I can’t, and people make them up. I love how flat these responses land on believers; they expect a raging atheist with citations and receive nothing more than a clueless idiot. Honestly, when confronted by believers, throwing out “I dunno” is all I really do anymore. The conversation then naturally fizzles out, and we can move on to more interesting subjects, human stuff about adventures and kids and hobbies, things we can both understand and relate to.

On this occasion, though, things went a little bit differently. I got a NEW QUESTION. The question: but Bryan… do you feel saved? Egad! Do I feel saved? I had no idea, and I am sure they relished how I wore it on my dumbfounded face. My response must have been terrible, although I do not remember what it was. Inside my brain, things were going nuts, and my first reaction was to think from what? But of course, I knew exactly what I was supposed to feel saved from. Satan. Hell. Eternal punishment that can only be avoided by promising Jesus Christ that I would have faith that his words were the truth no matter how immoral or downright idiotic they were. Like a time machine, this question transported me back to when I believed in such things, and I relived the terror that tortured poor ten-year-old Bryan when grown adults told him to repent or die. It had been so long since I thought about this shit seriously, since I decided I didn’t need saving. So long that I had started the path to recovery from the child abuse incurred from a Christian upbringing and started to understand what the Good Life was. New Bryan was caught off guard, and old Bryan was awakened and felt whatever the opposite of nostalgia is, recognizing the initial new question for what it was: just another attempt to scare me into submission.

Christianity teaches us that life is just a bad movie to get through and that we have no control over whether it will be our dad or a serial killer picking us up outside the theater when it’s over. Actually, we do have a teeny tiny little slice of control: choosing to fawn over dad, assure him over and over that he is the only thing that matters to us, doing every dumb thing he tells us to do, never questioning a word from him or his creepy group of friends. Dad controls all the rest, including the killer, who just so happens to be his estranged friend that oddly still takes orders from him. Dad does not mind sending this monster to the theater to snatch us up if we falter in our endless groveling. This is the message of the Bible, the Good Word: either love dad or his buddy will kill you. Dad is our savior because if we are obedient little children, he will choose not to destroy us.

 To be honest, I do feel saved. Now that I have thought about it, I feel saved from dad. He robbed me of my agency, made me believe that I was born disgusting into an evil world, and only by his grace can I be redeemed into something worthy of escaping his eternal punishment. Free of him, I am free to live for today and seek the Good Life in this body, the only one I can be sure I will ever have. I believe Simone de Beauvoir was correct when she said the kinds of freedoms we should seek are those that increase overall freedom to its maximum for all humans, and Christianity is the antithesis of this. A good Christian is a shackled mind charged with running around convincing others cage up their own minds, too. Fuck that shit.

Like I said earlier, I cannot define the Good Life because I think it is different for everyone, even myself from day to day. What I can say, however, is that it surely is not being a Christian, and that is why, as my boy Bertrand, I am not one, either.

PRACTICE WITH WORDS

In the interest of not having my writing practice for the day be another fucking cover letter, I will sit here at the computer for a little while and write about some things that have been on my mind. Sometimes tiny ideas pop into my head, and I write them down in the Notes app on my phone. I often don't remember what I even meant when I wrote it, and it takes me a little time to recall what I thought was so important about this idea. It doesn't help that usually, the note is in the form of a one-liner; it makes the whole thing feel like an out-of-context joke that really makes no sense unless the circumstances it arose from are available to me. 

Below are a couple recent ones, along with an attempt to expand a bit on them:

“A good background might be even more special than a good bird.”

When I read this the other day, I was surprised it was in my phone, to begin with. Not only did I not remember what I meant by it, but I had not even remembered writing it. When I noticed it, it was like walking into my living room at 2AM to get a drink of water and finding Bertrand Russell sitting at my kitchen table playing solitaire and smoking a pipe. It was a strong feeling that this does not belong, almost enough to throw me into a youtube rabbit hole researching the Mandella Effect and the possibilities of a human jumping between alternate universes. 

But then it all came back to me, as quickly as the fleeting thought came and left me while I was out photographing birds. Once I remembered where I was when I made this note, its meaning became glaringly obvious: birds are everywhere, good backgrounds are hard to come by. There are plenty of cool birds around to take pictures of most days, but those birds are rarely in a position relative to me that gives the photographs I'm taking of them an excellent background. Telephone wires, tree branches, roads, a dumb, dull blue sky… these things all tend to ruin my pictures. A common bird, however, has never ruined a picture on its own. The most memorable days for me as a bird photographer are when everything looks perfect in the viewfinder there in the field. And that is almost entirely dependent on a glorious background, which I have found in the last couple of years is hands down the most challenging thing to come by out there. Birds will always be beautiful, but backgrounds, unfortunately, will not.

“Funding is based on strong use; the goal was always to move toward a weaker definition where all are included."

This one took me a minute. Funding of what? Ah yes, wildlife and habitat conservation/restoration. That thing I always talk about and the one subject that returns more blank stares than any other.

Strong use and weak use refer to the use of wildlife resources and include trampling caused by hiking, taking fish and game from the woods via angling and hunting, off-roading, plinking, camping, etc. Strong users would be those who use a lot, especially in a way that they can be charged more and more for their use. Weak users don't do much out in the woods and rarely participate in anything that would result in income generation for natural resource managers. Income is generated for wildlife and habitat protection primarily through fishing licenses, hunting licenses, State Park and National Park passes, and campgrounds. Additionally, there are taxes on hunting equipment that go directly to the cause. Outside of this, there is not a hell of a lot of passive income to fund the protection of our lands and animals. At the end of the day, strong users can be thought of as hunters and anglers, while weak users are those once-a-year hikers that hit the free trail closest as the crow flies to their couch.

Wildlife management has focused almost entirely on increasing strong users. More people hunting and fishing and visiting state parks translates into more money to fund hunting and fishing and state parks. While I am all for more people going outside in theory, I worry that Aldo Leopold was right in that this system builds a relationship between people and the woods that mirrors that of Lenny and that poor rabbit. Aldo says that this kind of funding system that depends on people taking from nature will end in humans fondling the woods to death; selling tickets to the show to try and save it is self-defeating and ignores a couple of essential facts. 

Fact 1: We are all users even if we do not go outside and recreate in the mountains. Being alive inherently means that your existence is causing resources to be pulled out of the earth to sustain that existence. For this reason, we have to widen the definition of a strong user in a way that basically includes everyone so that everyone gets charged to keep the ecosystems we depend on functioning and providing the services we need to survive. I’m pretty sure we already do this with all kinds of shit and that this is just called a “general tax."

Fact 2: All living organisms have an intrinsic right to go on existing. When we only use money from strong users to protect ecosystems, biases creep in. We get organizations who lobby for MORE DEER, MORE ELK instead of just the healthier, diverse ecosystems we really need for the long-term survival of these species and thousands of others. We get hunters protesting the reintroduction of carnivores because it would, in theory, decrease the number of huntable animals on the landscape. We farm fish and dump them into rivers and lakes instead of working out why our bodies of water cannot produce fish in abundance anymore. If we had a more general-purpose way of funding ecosystem management (maybe the previously mentioned “tax” idea), then all living organisms from Steller’s Jays to morel mushrooms would have an equal right to protection. 

When only one group is funding public resources, we run the risk of a short-sighted management policy resulting from catering to a blinkered interest group. I would love to see a wider net be cast to collect money for habitat restoration and wildlife protection. But that would require that people appreciate nature even if they don’t drive out there to experience it themselves. This is a hard pill to swallow. The possibility of getting it done depends entirely on the moral, aesthetic, and scientific education of a group of primates who would preferably not learn. 

 Like Aldo, I am pessimistic.

 “Planets as golf balls”

 What the fuck. No clue. Ok, the last one:

 “I'm just glad I stopped and took the time to understand the length and depth of our almost infinite ignorance."

This was the most obvious one and was one of those "fuck, I shoulda said X” things. I made this note while walking away from another conversation where someone was probing me on what I planned to use my degree for. My response is always that the learning was the point, and I honestly have not given enough thought to how I will monetize my degree. The conversation kind of flopped from there, probably because I was embarrassed and somehow felt irresponsible for not thinking too deeply about the job prospects for a philosophy major in 2022. This question always makes me feel childish about my desire to learn for its own sake. It depresses me that the single goal of gaining new knowledge and grasping what humans have learned since they started writing stuff down and saving it for the future is not the reason most people get a degree.

The history of humans itself is infinitely fascinating. There is no word for how interesting the history of the whole fucking universe is. Our knowledge is flimsy and consistently incorrect. Our world changes as we find new ways to think and talk about it. Being exposed to dozens of theories every semester, comparing and contrasting them, siding with one, and then the next week siding with its critics is what is beneficial about philosophy. No, there are not a lot of jobs that pay for someone to be able to deconstruct and explain Hemple or Quine. But there is so much value in taking on and then rejecting so many viewpoints over a few short years that I don’t really care. I can go fix appliances if I have to. I can be happy doing anything from here on out, and I have philosophic exposure to the infinite amount of ways there are to be human to thank for that. 

This leads to a decent conclusion about why I am wasting time fleshing out these baby ideas when I know no one will read them. It is helpful to me, the only person that really matters around here. These thoughts come and go so quickly, and I barely understand them at the moment they strike me, let alone a couple weeks later when I am scanning my phone for essay ideas. The fact that I could crank out 1500 words in a couple of short, enjoyable hours is proof to the only person I really give a shit about that this is something I enjoy doing for its own sake. And those, I have found, are the kinds of things that are always worth doing.

Sometimes I wonder if I am lying to myself when I tell people that the degree was an end in itself and doesn't need to be a means to career advancement. It's days like today when it becomes wonderfully apparent that I am telling the truth.

LESSONS FROM WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY, HUNTING, AND RANDY

"We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity." – E.O. Wilson.

I was out drinking with my brother this Monday at the Lakewood Grill, chain-smoking and ordering new beers even before the last ones were entirely devoured. While this kind of activity was more regular for me five or six years back, this last Monday was a celebration of my finally graduating from MSU with a degree in philosophy. As we sat and jabber-jawed, a stranger named Randy came over and interjected himself into our conversation. He, like us, obviously had also spent the past hour working on getting thoroughly tuned up. On paper, he was the classic example of the type of person you try to avoid at a bar when you are not in the mood for an argument. An anti-vax, young-earth Biblical literalist who believes that Ron Wyat found the Ark of the Covenant somewhere on mount Arafat and has been suppressed ever since. However, Randy broke the mold by being totally uncaring about whether or not we believed him. He would say, "the earth is six thousand years old," to which my brother and I would cry, "Randy, no! That's such bullshit!" Every time he would just shrug and move on to more fertile conversational territory, and that was that. Soon he would be back on some other insane horse, like how mRNA vaccines change your DNA, but every time the idea lasted no longer than a couple of lively back-and-forths. Both sides would drop it without admitting defeat. Randy was anything but awful and proved that the best lessons are not ones learned in school. They can be found bursting out of every subject, from every angle we look at the world, from the bird park to the Lakewood Grill. Truth is not argued about. It is agreed upon.

Because I am interested in and take the life lessons of 60-year-old organisms seriously, I asked Randy what he has learned about life in all his years living it. His answer also happened to be the three most essential things outdoor hobbies have taught me. These are:

1. Be patient.

2. Don't get too excited.

3. Work is overrated.

My jaw dropped. What excellent advice, and how thoughtful to boil it down so perfectly to three separable subjects that make it easy for a philosophy guy like myself to write about it. Below you will find the best advice I have learned while birding and hunting. Whatever anyone else thinks, my boy Randy totally agrees with me, and that’s all I need.

1. BE PATIENT

Aristotle once said that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. In outdoor pursuits, this is an understatement on both sides. Waiting for your object can be total torture, but the joy felt when it works is pure ecstasy. 

Whether hunting, fishing, or taking pictures of birds, the idea that we should JUST SIT THERE UNTIL AN ANIMAL HAPPENS TO STUMBLE UPON US can be too big a pill to swallow. One glance at a map shows us how much there is to explore. After five minutes of waiting in a meadow, at the side of a creek, or at a blind on the lake, our brains start to kick us in the heart and beg for us to go explore more territory. Any justifications we make to ourselves to wait come off as lazy excuses to not climb the mountain or hike a few more miles off-trail. Nine times out of ten, it does not take long for me to abandon all the advice I have ever heard to the contrary and start hoofing it for greener pastures. Waiting can be just as painful as hiking, and the only pain reliever is covering more ground.

As we become more experienced, there is another medication one can self-administer when the bug to move starts to make our skin crawl with impatience: past successes gained through waiting. Once you have sat in the cold for a few hours, expecting to get skunked and go home empty-handed, only to experience precisely what you wanted to happen at last light, it becomes easier to convince yourself to do it again. In a sense, it hammers into us the truth that we are not in charge of these encounters, and we are just lucky to be around when they do. And it is far better when looking for animals to be a fly on the wall of the room they happen to walk into. No matter how quiet or stealthy we think we are while moving through the woods, most of us might as well be god-fucking-zilla as far wildlife are concerned. You stink, and you're loud, and yes, everyone knows you're there. You aren't fooling anyone.

Sitting still is a skill that needs to be practiced, and the rewards come later as we slowly collect new places to wait and watch. The rewards of having an animal unknowingly walk into your zone instead of the other way around are myriad. So, we should never forget Randy's number one life lesson, straight from his Camel cigarette smoking mouth: Be patient.

2. DON'T GET TOO EXCITED

Nothing can ruin the reward of patience more than blowing it when it happens because of nerves. The buzz we feel when our furry or feathered friends finally walk out into that clearing or fly out onto that perch is indescribable, but that has not stopped outdoors people from endlessly trying to describe it anyway. Whether we are taking pictures or hoping to fill a freezer, that internal earthquake can cause us to forget that there is still a goal to accomplish and very often can be the root of why we fail even when everything else happens perfectly. The deafening roar of my heartbeat can be disorienting, and my adrenaline-fueled movements become clunky and lose all their finesse. I would never say that getting excited in general is a bad idea; I am one of the most excitable dudes on the planet and love to daydream and regularly propose partnership on grand projects with people I barely know. But there is a point, when you are trying to accomplish a goal, that it is something we have to learn to manage so we can complete it and not hurt ourselves. Days when I should have had a perfect shot ended in disappointment when I found out I was not watching the in-camera light meter and overexposed or the death grip on my camera caused the shot to turn out blurry. I've never shot a deer because in the two times I had an opportunity, I became overcome with option paralysis, and they ended up walking away from me before I got the nerve to pull the trigger. Adrenaline and my inability to manage it was the cause of these particular failures, and this is the kind of excitement that we need to keep our eye on.

Early excitement can also cause us to hope too much for a particular ending to the story and makes us believe that if we get skunked while fishing or birding, the whole endeavor is a failure. We cannot control the feelings that bubble up, but we can control how we act somewhat when they happen. Every time we head out into the woods, there are any number of outcomes that could manifest, including but not limited to physical death or becoming permanently mangled by a cougar. Not taking an animal or a good photo home is far from the worst possible things that could happen. Getting excited too early often means that the outcome we prefer is the only one we can think about. We can have blinders to the dangers that could harm us, the auxiliary lessons we can learn, and the joys we can experience that have nothing to do with the primary objective. A closed-off favorite trail is an opportunity to take a new one. Some other asshole glassing from your knob just means you get to go find a better spot and stave off the boringness of glassing for a couple more hours. There's a lot more to being out in the woods besides what you went out there to do. We should always be looking for something new to learn from that great teacher named The Wild.

3. WORK IS OVERRATED

Goddamn straight, Randy. Next rounds on me for that one, bud. Work is the chain we willingly wear, hoping that the one who owns it is merciful and ethical enough to know that he is required to feed us and water us every day. Usually, our new masters are only interested in taking care of us from the reference point of the bare minimum of what is required by the state. The employed run calculus on how much freedom they are willing to sacrifice for stability, while the employer's mathematics are constantly trying to find ways to minimize the stability they are expected to offer per hour of work. It is a fundamentally one-sided system here in America, and the only referee involved has been entirely captured by people of a particular team. I'm sure anyone can guess which team that is.

Planning a hunting trip makes it depressingly obvious how fucked up our lives have become because of the work system here in the US. A two-week trip, the length of a proper elk hunting expedition, and is in most cases all anyone has time for throughout the year. Never mind the almost infinite amount of shit worth experiencing on planet Earth and the fact that we've only got one go-around to pack it in. Never mind the horrid worldviews that fester when people are not encouraged to travel outside their hometown and meet new people from different parts of the world. Our benevolent employers have graciously offered us 14 days off to do whatever we like as long as the other 350 are spent following their orders, and we are supposed to be grateful. 

The saddest thing about all of this is that anyone that reads this will know it's all bullshit. We all know it sucks, yet we perpetuate it every day. I wish we could develop a healthier relationship with our vocations and understand that we are not just the things that help us make money. It's nice that some of us have skills that are marketable (I sure wish I had one), but it is a mistake to identify ourselves with these things. Not that I believe there is someone underneath your physical self you need to uncover to "discover" who you are. No, that illusion is total horse shit, and if you believe that I suggest you give up that wild goose chase today while you still can. Change is what we should be looking for and exposing ourselves to new experiences morphs us into creatures we never thought possible. It is surprising how quickly we go from struggling to understand a new concept to being somewhat proficient in it if we do not give up. I wish more people had the time and ability to spend months out of the year just experiencing some new things, to have the chance to pick up some new toys and figure out how to use 'em. I know that's what Randy would want from us. Randy knows that you are not alone in hating your job and that you should not take it so seriously.

To conclude, let's just suffice to say that EO Wilson's quote at the top of this essay applies to us people as we look at animals and us people as we look at people. At first blush, I would not have guessed I would learn anything from Randy or that our particular conversation would be all that enjoyable. I'm sure Randy felt the same about my brother and me with our screaming and visible revulsion to many of his ideas. But we let the conversation go wherever it wanted, kept an open mind, tried to really embrace diversity in all forms, including those of the creationist anti-vaxxer or loud-mouth libtard. In other words: sit and wait, don't get too excited, and good things happen. 

Also, fuck work.

HOW I LOST MY NIHILISM

There is a common misconception about those people like me who love to read and discuss philosophy. Many people seem to have an image of the philosopher-type as Socrates at his worst, running around challenging people on their closely held beliefs. An army of nay-sayers showing people why they are wrong by using reasoning they don’t care about or understand, without offering up a new framework to adopt so that they can be right moving forward. The only thing philosophers believe is that beliefs are childish, and like all childish things can be easily pulled apart and shown to be something other than what the believer initially thought it was — instead of safety and security, belief offers false hopes and dreams that at their worst can become dangerous to the believer and those around them. Normal, sane, non-philosophically inclined humans who believe the world has meaning see the philosophical project at large as an intruder kicking in doors at bath time and throwing out everyone’s bath water with their babies along with it. Philosophers hold nothing sacred, hold no real beliefs of their own, and think the world would be better off if we all understood that nothing matters.

 The above misunderstanding of philosophy is a fair one, and I am not so entrenched in the dogma of critical thinking and rationality that I cannot fathom a good explanation for where it comes from. Out of context quotes from many wonderful philosophers give people the impression that philosophers are sad, damaged individuals who wake up every morning and ask themselves “should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” This line from Camus does a great job demarcating where the conflict between philosophers and non-philosophers arises: all one needs to do is read one sentence further, listen for a few more seconds, and the point of the setup is revealed, that “one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” All of us who go on living instead of putting a bullet in our brains are courageous just for making this choice. The misunderstanding is between how much a philosopher believes people want to read, and how much patience most people have to give to the philosopher’s words. 

So, who is to blame here? Either the problem is that the philosopher cannot seem to get to the point, or the reader cannot sit still long enough to watch the whole argument unfold. It should be rather unsurprising that I lean toward the latter explanation, but there is more work to be done here before anything definitive can be said. For it is here that we are presented with a brand-new mental Necker cube that is ripe to be plucked and endlessly dissected by philosophers: what came first, the soundbite or the type of impatience that has propelled it into being normal humanity’s favorite way to consume information? Or are both of these insufficient to explain the other?

The title of this essay is misleading, and I feel like I must apologize for that. I don’t think I ever lost my nihilism, because for the most part I never became a nihilist. This essay was a product of a conversation during philosophy club which prompted me to write this down as a good title for an essay. So here I am writing it, when I should be working on any one of a hundred other things at the end of my final semester at philosophy school. Worse, I’m doing the one thing I feel like I have been trained to never do at all: giving my unsupported opinion about life its meaning. 

If we take the time to read the words of the people who we take to be nihilists (not those who actually SAY THEY ARE, who are essentially unsalvageable), as in the whole damn book the small bite came from, it becomes almost impossible to believe that they thought the universe is meaningless. Even in a world where meaning must be created by the observer for itself, there ends up being all kinds of meanings everywhere, at least as many as there are human observers. I spent a little bit of time occupying this particular stance, and that was the closest I got to being a true-blue nihilist. But even that is an extremely anthropocentric, self-serving view that just seems laughable after a cursory glance at the history of the universe. All these amazing incidents over the past 13.7 bn years were meaningless until I showed up and bestowed it with meaning. A world where nothing means shit until a human assigns it with purpose looks rather grand indeed; an insignificant creature who is ignorant of everything that brought it into existence required a little change of attitude before the universe could have meaning. How lucky the universe is to have stumbled up us, H. sapiens, givers of significance to all of existence! My current stance today is much different, and I believe meaning existed long before humans. The universe would have meaning even in the absence of humans to say it did. So, just to be clear, I never once believed that the universe is meaningless, and after reading real nihilists realize I was never even close to being one of them.

My lucky, middle class, aging, white ass never had a chance to become a real nihilist because of two things. First, the opportunities I was afforded just from the circumstances of my birth mentioned in the previous sentence. A largely happy person surrounded, largely, with happy people, who knows rent money is just an awkward phone call away if he ever needed it, is not likely to fall into despair over how miserable and uncaring the world is. Second, I always had the time to sit and read my way through an existential crisis. This is also a result of my privilege as stated, which bought me the time to be able to read, in context, the original texts that many philosophical snippets are pulled from. I simply am lucky enough to have the spare time to investigate the truth of things, where many people simply are not.

Another fortunate thing can happen when a privileged human becomes interested in reading philosophy: they find new friends who are also interested in reading philosophy. Philosophy fills people up with questions and ideas that spill out endlessly when they find a similar soul who is also topped to the brim with philosophical thoughts. My philosophy friends and I have conversations whose length is limited only by how long we can stay awake and how pissed our SO’s will be if we stay out any later. There is never enough time to touch on everything, but we try to anyway. The way we debate might lead people to believe we were trying to win, but as people who are used to criticism, a defeat in argument is just a new way to remove bad ideology from our box of thinking tools. I personally value any opportunity to change my mind, and I am fortunate to know people who give me ample opportunity to do so. These opportunities would be much fewer and far between if it weren’t for the people I have met who are also hopelessly doomed to love philosophy like I do.

In fact, the whole course of this essay has changed just from texting portions of it to philosophical friends. They keep me in check, show me there are other ways to view the world besides through my own eyes, and what really needs advocating for is more free time for all people. Freedom, no matter how much some snooty philosophers would like to think, is not inherent within us, but is something we help build for each other. A single person alone in the woods — ignoring the fact that this idea of how humanity started is a total fabrication — is not free at all; they are committed to focusing on the problems of the moment, which include building shelter, finding food and water, and making sure there are enough supplies tucked away to make it through the cold, low-resource winter months. Groups of people can share these duties so that individuals can specialize in a way that makes each individual highly efficient in their assigned task, which gives the group the superpower of abundance creation. Suddenly, there is more than is needed for today, maybe for the next year, and everyone can sit and share ideas, fictional or otherwise, to help pass the time in a way no organism has ever been able to do before. We make songs and sculptures, play games. We do philosophy. Together.

Seeds are best planted into soil that has already been turned, and its best that the one doing the planting understands the soil it is working with. How much greater would people’s understanding of the benefits of philosophy be if instead of encountering lone quotes on the internet, they were spoken to them by a trusted friend? How much more inspired would people be to read more closely the source of the soundbite if they knew they had the whole weekend, maybe even more, to explore the literature without falling behind on their daily humdrum duties? How much more variety and diversity of philosophical texts would be available if it were valued by the general public as something fun and worthwhile to do with each other? It is an unavoidable fact of history that most Western modern philosophy got written because of Western wealthy donors, either private or through the university, supporting the thinking and writing habits of those lucky Western few who could secure this for their Western selves. Modern philosophy has been a rich white man’s business, and because of how remote the existence of these philosophers of old seems to the average working human, the only option for having new philosophical seeds planted in one’s mental soil is through a stranger, many times a foreign one to both one’s century and culture. Of course these strangers seem nihilistic; usually they are with respect to everything the new reader cares about. 

Philosophy, as my good friend Leah says, is best done as a group activity, and thus it is a tragedy that one is usually introduced to it alone through lonely, naked, marooned snippets. Thus, the problem sketched in the beginning of this essay, where philosophers write more than people have the attention span to absorb properly, has an obvious source in the inequality of time the two groups have to devote to philosophy. Philosophers have all the time in the world to write and read, and normal people only have a few minutes out of their day to even try to tackle some of it if they wanted to. There are really only two options within this system to solve the problem, but neither sounds satisfactory: either we dumb down philosophy (keep it to 250 short words please!) or ask people to shirk their daily commitments in order to take it seriously. 

The only thing left my feeble mind can think of is a completely new society-wide incentive structure, where we count GDP in time available for people to waste, and the more of it, the better. What a fucking amazing world it would be if we all had as much time as we needed to find answers to our questions, to slow down and smoke a joint and stare at the world long enough to come up with questions of our own. We all might want to learn some big new words and abstract concepts, so we can be lazier when we talk about them with one another. Now THAT would be a world bursting with meaning, and I only wish I could read the philosophy that would be birthed by such a culture.

FORGETTING SHIT I HATE

A year ago, I thought I was just taking a semester off to watch our new son. Jasper was six months old. I took an online public speaking course so that I didn't feel like I was losing all of my steam towards finishing my Wildlife Biology degree. My inner monologue ran something like this:

This time I won't let parental duties get in the way of my goals. I will finish this degree, and I will be so proud of myself once it's over. I will make a great biologist, and this little bump in the road is just putting another feather in my cap to prove what a great dad I am. 

For once, I had a completable goal, respect from my peers, actual feedback that showed what I was doing might actually work out. I believed I would pick up exactly where I had left off. 

At this point, I am starting to forget the timeline of how it all went to shit. Was it COVID first, or did it dawn on us beforehand that we wouldn't be able to afford daycare in the fall, rendering me unable to drive up to CSU every day for one last year to complete my degree? Did I know for sure that I wouldn't be able to take classes in person, or did I preemptively transfer to MSU based on a belief that things would somehow go that way anyhow? Was I actually considering teaching high school at some point? Did I fucking quit Trigonometry halfway through retaking it? What dumb mother fucker tried to force me to do that in the first place, and would they feel sorry if they understood how much emotional turmoil it put me through?

This year was spent wishing so badly I could have the same goals and beliefs I had a year and a few months ago. Back when I had beliefs and goals at all, back when beliefs and goals mattered. Today it seems like those two glorious attributes of being human are childish wants, like candy and Santa. We cannot have beliefs and goals in the COVID world; those kinds of things are just torn away from us the second we start to form them. Best to "live in the now," soaked a little in whiskey and lounging in pajamas. Jeans and water were for the other world when there were places to go and shit to get done. Jeans and water are for people with beliefs and goals, somewhere to be and someone to become. 

In the interest of journalistic documentation of the crumbling of my hopes and dreams, I feel inclined to write down the details so that I can look back later and remember it all. On the other hand, it's hard to identify anything that I really see as worth remembering about anything that happened in this last year. Wiping down food with sanitizers, losing my superhuman ability to smoke pot while regaining a portion of my old drinking habit and the weight gain that comes with it. The doom-scrolling of the news after spending years of not even giving a single fuck about current cultural information. The self-hatred for backsliding somewhat into a state of existence that is really just the normal operating mode of most American male humans. The pathetic heaps of pity I felt for me, poor me, the privileged middle-class white guy who can't do whatever he wants whenever he wants to do it. Why me? Why the fuck not?

No, I don't think any of this is worth remembering. If Morpheus kicked my study door down with his giant ass boots and offered me a pill that allowed me to forget all of this and head back to my blissful skateboard, biology, and pot-smoked-filled world, I'd do it so fast. Hook me up to the tubes, submerse me in the goo. Get my brain envatted! Stimulate it in whatever way is necessary to force me to forget any of this ever happened and believe that I am applying for wildlife jobs or grad school. I am not interested in having this be a part of my history, or anyone's, for that matter. 

And for this reason, I refuse to try to write down the timeline in detail. Let the record show that I am purposefully neglecting the record, hoping that the chain of causation will become as tangled as the old box of XLR and ¼ inch cables sitting in my closet. If I can't take a pill to make it all go away, at least I can decide to not give a shit about whether or not I remember this whole fiasco accurately. Let it all become a disordered maximum entropy mess that I can sweep into a box and label it: 

SHIT I HATE. 

Henceforth, I am going to remember pre-COVID me and refocus on my old priorities. I will try my best to pretend that none of this ever happened and just hope that the slow recovery of society will meet me halfway somewhere in supporting this illusion. These priorities are:

1.         My family

2.         My education about the world for knowledge's sake

3.         The outdoors

4.         My artwork

These are the things that make me happy. I still have them and must remove the doubts and bad habits that got in the way of their ability to work their magic. Whiskey for weed was a fair trade, I think, and I will monitor my intake. But in general, it’s time to stop letting the shit I hate infect all of the other things that I still love.

I am still me. The world exists, and it is full of garbage, but I can shape my perceptions and focus my attention however I see fit. I am the shit. Hail Satan.

the big idea

Social media, while useful, has gone too far and has overstepped its bounds. Most people only use it to consume content others have created, without creating anything original themselves. I have been free of Facebook and Instagram for quite a while now, and it has been both good and bad. Good because, as an artist, it gives me more time to write words and sing notes and shoot shots. Some of my most exciting songs and photos would likely never have been made had I not deleted those infernal apps off of my phone. Staring at grip-n-grins of dudes catching big trout on Instagram is much more comfortable than getting up early enough to get to the good stream in time to cast a fly at the good fishes. 

The only real negative side is isolation and the lack of feedback on whatever I am doing at the moment. Finishing a song isn't the same when you cannot post it on your social media for people to hear. It just sits there as a .mp3 or .wav on my desktop, begging me to put it somewhere. Selectively sending things to specific individuals is weird; I over-think it and end up not getting as much useful feedback because I'm too nervous to even explain what I'm trying to do correctly. I have also found that it seems like most people are usually lying to you, even when you specifically ask them to be honest, further muddying the waters. Maybe this is how things always were, and I am just rusty with this kind of "human interaction" from using social media through my twenties, but staring someone in the eyes and asking them to listen to my band is something I have not had to do in a long time and it takes some getting used to it. Additionally, losing the constant background noise that is news media makes the times I am forced to watch talking head soundbites and clips utter torture, and my heart breaks as I witness the drawn-out death of long format conversations and ideas that take more than one paragraph to flesh out.

I want to share my work and thoughts, but I do not want to force them into someone else's feed. I want to share photos but don't give a fuck about reading comments on them (unless you know more than me and can show me where I can improve, of course). I want to give myself the time to think through an issue before making an opinion, and I want to connect with people who are doing the same. I do not want to share everything.

So I'm starting a blog.

Subjects here will vary from wildlife conservation to photography, audio engineering to free will to fly fishing. Enjoy it or not, let me know or don't. I have to get to school, so that's all I have to say about that.